This semester, I had the pleasure of working on the Missourian Outreach Team. The team was comprised of about 15 students and our fearless leaders, Kelly Moffitt and Joy Mayer, both who have pioneered ideas of ways to interact with the community. I learned many things while on this team including some exploration into analytics, learning the importance and ways to create relationships, and even things about newspapers that I did not know even existed in my broadcast mind. However, my experience on the team did allow me to apply my skill set of editing video with the class focus of outreach.
First off, the videos were not a traditional news story despite being a newspaper. They were more feature like and our intent was to get people involved, not necessarily just inform. When you think about creating something like this, it is important to think of the motivation for the community. What can I possibly include in this video that would make someone want to help out team of reporters? What can I do with this video for people to watch the whole thing? This is where a lot of thought and planning into questions. When you are interviewing someone about a topic they have expertise in, you want to try to ask them questions that have an intent of invoking some sort of community response.
The videos take a considerable amount of time. A lot of the time is thought and coordinating other things with people. When are more people involved in the interview process, it will take longer to film and find time for everyone. And always plan for some error as each video I did this semester had some set backs. The first one I did, I had trouble figuring out some of the Missourian's format for video. You will have to chase down some the multi-media editors to get access to the corrects bumpers and information for creating videos. Also, with the second video, I had some problems checking out a camera. They were out of camera's one day and were closed another. That is a small thing to keep in mind as you do not want to be left without a camera after coordinating with other people. The cameras here will also require a bigger personal memory card as a 1GB SD card will not hold very much video.
The evaluation process can also take time. If you want to allow anyone involved in the video to view it for accuracy and feedback, you may have to go back and redo and edit things. I would recommend this as some people just have an eye for things that you don't.
To measure my success with these videos, I began starting with Google Analytics. When you log on, you particularly want to pay attention to the time people spend on the article. Do people sit through the whole video or just part of it? Of course, you want to pay attention to the number of people that viewed it and where they found it. I would almost recommend sharing links to stake holders, keeping track of how you shared it, and compare those numbers to the analytics.
A good video is one that is informative and useful to the community. Something that I wish I had time to try was different ways to keep the community engaged Length is important and if you want to keep it long, have a definite reason. But are there mini-activities that can be included in the video to keep people entertained? This is something I have not tried.
In terms of good topics, I really think retrying an outreach team video would be beneficial to the Missourian. I also think news beats and new enterprise stories are good places to start.
I had a lot of fun with the Missourian outreach team and hope people can carry out my work in future semesters.
