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Guardian video turns new page THE NEW BROADCASTERS: UK newspaper The Guardian is increasingly looking to its contributors and commentators to help distinguish its online video content. Director of digital content Emily Bell talks to Adam Benzine. "Comment is free, but facts are sacred," goes the Guardian mantra, stated most famously by the newspaper's former editor CP Scott. But for the UK-based news organisation – whose ever-improving web figures belie an uneasy decline in print sales – the opposite is apparently becoming the case in the realm of online video. With video news clips becoming readily available from a variety of portals, The Guardian is increasingly looking to its commentators and personalities to provide it with the unique differentiators it needs to stand out online.  The paper's online video content falls into a number of distinct categories. On the news front, it relies on mainly illustrative video content, which it sources as a raw feed from news agency Reuters. "When we first started taking Reuters content about two and a half years ago, we were the first newspaper organisation in the UK – and I think one of only two in Western Europe – that took a completely raw feed from Reuters," says Guardian News and Media's director of digital content, Emily Bell (left)."At the time the vogue was really for doing deals with other broadcasters who would give you packaged news, but we thought that the future was really about embedding and illustrating, rather than saying, 'We want a man in a suit reading an autocue.'" Beyond the Reuters clips, the Guardian site frequently hosts third-party content – such as YouTube clips – online. "We were one of the first people to use the video sharing option with the BBC," explains Bell, "because our view is very much about enriching user experiences and our journalistic presentation, so actually it doesn't really matter where the video comes from. We aggregate a lot of video across the site, and do things like viral video charts." However, it is the third area of video that the organisation involves itself in that Bell says offers the biggest area of opportunity. "We have the middle bit – the really developmental stuff – which is our own in-house video producers, shooters, journalists, and so on," she says. "We have a small production team that work with journalists here, and the idea is that eventually we get to a point where most journalists are completely comfortable with some form of video, even if it's really simple things like VideoBoo and Flip cameras – tools that anybody can now use from their desktop and self-film, upload and cut into a piece or page, or even just publish straight to the web." This "middle bit," as Bell describes it, is "potentially the most problematic, but also potentially is where we could be most ambitious or most successful." Unlike many of the companies featured in the New Broadcasters season, the hypothetical question of whether The Guardian might move into the TV world is irrelevant, since the publisher already has its own production arm making factual content for TV broadcasters.  GuardianFilms was set up in 2003, and is run by Maggie O'Kane. Its perhaps most notable success to date has been the 2007 documentary Baghdad: A Doctor's Story (left), which aired on BBC2 in the UK and went on to win an International Emmy. While GuardianFilms will continue to make documentaries for broadcast, Bell says the group is exploring how the production company's output might develop "a separate life" on the site, such as with shorter edits of films or dedicated online shortform content. However, she also sees potential commercial value in original video content – the aforementioned "middle bit" – that the organisation's journalists produce, and can envisage a scenario in which it would be licensed to a third party in some form. "There are a whole string of AV commissioners now at the BBC who are looking for interesting partnerships or commissions around projects that are not traditionally broadcast TV," says Bell. "There's no reason why, in future, we shouldn't be able to license stuff that we do or find a niche and a particular tone to our journalism that other people might want to take." She cites a series of videos on the fall of the Berlin Wall and a series of shorts that commentator John Harris filmed at each of the recent UK political party conferences (entitled Harris's Fringe) as good examples of recent lo-fi projects. "Opinionated discussion is something we do really well, and there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't work brilliantly on video," says Bell. "That's where the opportunity and the challenge lies for us, which is to take a really great web brand, such as (Guardian comment page) Comment Is Free, and see how we can make that work."  She draws particular attention to Michael Tomasky, The Guardian's American editor-at-large, who ran a series of to-camera vlogs, entitled Tomasky Talk (left), during the 2008 US primaries and general election. "It was hugely successful in the run-up to the election," Bell says. "Again the challenge is to get more of that across the site more regularly, as opposed to really raising the bar for a set event. It's always easier to plan set events than it is day-to-day. And budgeting is a factor – a lot of budget resides around events for any news organisation. It's a lot harder with day-to-day coverage." Like many news sites, The Guardian is powered by Brightcove and relies on pre-roll advertising as its primary source of video income. The organisation has dipped its toe into advertiser-funded programming in the past, and Bell says the company wouldn't rule out doing more in future. "We have done a bit of brand-funded video in the past, and we've done sponsorships around various bits of video," she says. "There's no reason why we wouldn't, in exactly the same way that we do sponsored supplements. You just have to be sure that it is right for the brand and right for your audience." One area the organisation is keen to explore further is live streaming, although Bell is non-committal as to what form that might take. However, she cites Facebook's partnership with CNN for the presidential inauguration as an initiative that really impressed her. "I thought what CNN did with Facebook during the inauguration was really smart," says Bell. "You can see how that kind of experience means that having some kind of live streaming or some ability to contribute to live streaming is really important." And although resources are, as with all UK papers, major issues at present, Bell says the promise of higher revenue makes it a worthwhile investment. "You have to back a number of modest bets that you think are going to be important in the future, and I don't think anybody thinks video is not going to be important," she says. "It's not a big department, we're not spending huge amounts of money on it, but we're making steady investment in it and we're dedicating steady time and space to experiment and come up with stuff that works. You have to do that, especially with quite a complex format. "Video's still quite an expensive, complex format. Audio is much easier, cheaper and simpler for print organisations to understand, but it has a less promising revenue line against it. So you've got to play the odds on these things." Adam Benzine 14 Jan 2010 © C21 Media 2010 
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