The Local Wars

All news is local…..

In 2004, on the heels of 5 years with the BBC, we started on a second project.

Hyperlocal news.

The test base was Birmingham, England, and we built 5 ‘hyperlocal news pods” in 5 Birmingham regions.

Each was staffed with 6 videojournalists. The idea was that they would produce extremely local stories, of extremely local interest. A bit like BBC’s very successful local radio. Interestingly, 25% of the content was garnered from local ‘Citizen journalists” with video cameras.

The pilot project ran for two years.

Here in the US, we migrated the model to Verizon, where we are now in our second year in the pilot project in Washington DC. So far, so good.

In Britain, they are now ready to move to roll out a national model: 65 Hyperlocal pods with 65 separate websites.  And why not? The Pods are inexpensive to build and run and websites cost next to nothing.  It’s a good idea.

It’s so good an idea that local newspapers are feeling the heat and bringing pressure on Ofcom – the UK’s equivalent of the FCC, to kill the project before it can get started.

BBC Trust Chairman Michael Lyons said:

Lyons said the “rising noise and anxiety” from the BBC’s commercial rivals about the corporation’s video plans was understandable given the economic pressures they faced, but warned that calls to “bring the BBC down to size” risked causing “fundamental damage”.

“There’s nobody who can be satisfied with the quality of local news in most parts of the United Kingdom,” Lyons told a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch in London this afternoon.

“The local press has nothing like the strength that it once had. It’s not the same proposition that it was 15 years ago. Will the BBC make it better or worse? That’s exactly the issue to be explored.”

It’s a good idea. It’s extremely cost effective.  We found that the Birmingham model can produce high quality local video news at about $2000 per half hour.  And this is not public access. This is BBC standards of quality and excellence, both journalistically and technically.

This is TV news done at the price point of a newspaper. So it is no wonder that newspapers are worried. And they should be – or they should embrace the same technology to go head to head with the beeb.

A decision will be announced November 27th.

Here’s the whole story

And a tip o’ the hat to reader Alan Morrison in NZ, to clued me into the story. Thanks Alan.

Verizon is 1 Year Old

Our partnership with Verizon to build and run a VJ-driven hyperlocal tv station is now one year old, and The Wall Street Journal has written a very nice piece about us:

Kids, Thugs, Dogs, Cats
Drafted Into TV Battle

By DIONNE SEARCEY
March 20, 2008; Page B1

In the fight between phone and cable companies for TV subscribers, things are getting a bit more personal.

A scene from Comcast’s pet-adoption show

In the suburbs of northern Virginia, the everyday activities of a blind mechanic are central to an episode of “Push-Pause,” a show on Verizon Communications Inc.’s FiOS1 channel. In Washington, D.C., Duke, a 6-year-old Doberman mix, stars in an episode of a pet-adoption program aired by Comcast Corp. In a Los Angeles suburb, children and their families along the sidelines of a local league’s soccer match are featured in an episode of a new on-demand show on Time Warner Cable Inc.

The new shows mark a subtle, important shift in strategy by major telecommunications companies, who have fought for years over everything from price to high-definition-channel offerings to picture quality.

Verizon, which is planning to spend roughly $18 billion to roll out its fiber-optic network to deliver TV and fast Internet service to customers, is betting that its strategy of developing its own original, hyper-local, human-interest TV programming will help set it apart. The company, which offers FiOS TV in 13 states, started a 24-hour TV channel in the Washington, D.C., area called FiOS1 about a year ago.

“If you smell fire and don’t know where the fire engine is going, you can look at News 12 or NY1,” says Terry Denson, who oversees the local content effort for Verizon, referring to two of the pioneering local news channels started by cable companies. “What we accomplish is more positive, uplifting and community central.”

“Push-Pause” is produced by Michael Rosenblum, who about 15 years ago was part of a team that started Time Warner’s New York City news channel NY1. Mr. Rosenblum sends five videographers out each day with hand-held cameras and laptops to record and write episodes.

The shows have featured a blind mechanic, Gene Thompson, of Oak Hill, Va., whose adventures included skydiving and inventing ways to trim trees using a harness and his hands to feel his way around branches. The camera tracked him mowing his lawn using a rope that he tied to himself and a fixed object. Another episode focused on a local painter in the D.C. area and his creations.

“We’re not dealing with anything controversial,” said Mr. Rosenblum, president of Rosenblum Associates Inc., which is under contract with Verizon. He adds, “As one would expect, they are entering into this with a great deal of caution and care. But at least it’s a toe in the water.”

Verizon said it has received hundreds of emails from viewers who follow “Push-Pause” and other FiOS1 programs. “The community actually knows who we are,” said Mr. Rosenblum. “People call us up.”

The idea is to feature “super-local” stories on people who probably wouldn’t be seen on more-typical shows. After all, local content has long been used by cable companies to defend their turf from satellite-TV operators, whose ability to offer local programming is limited by their national reach and capacity on their satellites.

For years, Cablevision Systems Corp. and the other big cable companies have operated channels that serve up local news, weather, sports and traffic reports. Cablevision’s internal surveys show that many customers cite the company’s News 12 channels on Long Island, N.Y., where Verizon is aggressively marketing its FiOS TV service, as the reason they refuse to switch to FiOS. Cablevision touts it in TV ads with the tagline, “News 12 traffic and weather, not on phone company TV.”

Now, cable operators are also beefing up their focus on hyper-local features. This past spring Cablevision began airing the features as part of its “Local on Demand,” which offers an array of community parades, street fairs and high-school sports. One show, “Meet the Leaders,” features 30-minute interviews with local elected officials. “Neighborhood Journal” is similar to Verizon’s Push-Pause, with slice-of-life community features.

Comcast, the nation’s biggest cable operator by subscribers, has formed a “Get Local” team of six employees solely responsible for producing localized content. They have delivered a raft of new on-demand offerings in certain markets, including the pet-adoption show “Pets ON DEMAND” in the Washington and Baltimore markets, and a sort of localized version of “America’s Most Wanted” called “Police Blotter” in Delaware.

“Satellite can’t do this,” said Michael Doyle, who is president of Comcast Cable’s Eastern Division and the founder of CN8, Comcast’s regional cable network. “Verizon is just getting started. They’ll be working for a long time to even just catch up with us.”

Verizon declined to respond, specifically, but said it expects to have more high-definition channels than Comcast by the end of the year.

Write to Dionne Searcey at dionne.searcey@wsj.com

More from Verizon – Colby Hartburg

Colby Hartburg – Verizon Hyperlocal VJ

All pieces shot, written, produced, edited, voiced, researched and reported by Colby in one day.

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behind the scenes as Mount Vernon restores a historic building
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a look at an artist and his robotic art
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interview with author (and great great grandson of Charles Darwin) Matthew Chapman about his book on the intelligent design/evolution debate.

- an inside look at one of Northern VA’s biggest horse race events.

More From Verizon Hyperlocal

All of these shot, written, edited, tracked and produced in 1-day turns by VJ Aaron Rocket.  More to come from the team…

Verizon Hyperlocal – 1 year later

We are coming up on the One Year Anniversary of our experimental hyper-local news project with Verizon’s FIOS network.

By any measure, the project has been a massive success and we expect it to continue and expand.

Here’s a look at some of the VJs and some of their work.

The team of 6 produces a half hour of original television a day!

Every day.

And they have for a year.

If you think that quality suffers with the VJ format, just take a look at what these folks are turning out daily….

Stuck In Vermont

The Revolution pops up in lots of unexpected places.

Network newsrooms and local TV stations are really the last places where this will happen.

Particularly networks.

But as with the web, small start ups, out in the sticks are the places where change will come first.

Vermont is a pretty good definition of ‘out in the sticks’, but there, far from the psychological pressures of ‘real’ TV makers, Eva Sollberger has started generating some pretty compelling video – all on her own.

She is associated with indy Seven Days, a Vermont based local paper/website.

Here’s a sample of her work.

Take a look:

Meet Andre Zalbertus

He was also the Moscow correspondent for German television….

Andre Zalbertus is someone you should get to know.

The Future of Local TV News?

is this the future of tv news?

Like a Rocket(t)

I think you’re going to like this picture…..

Aaron Rockett.

What kind of person takes off for Afghanistan on his own with a video camera and a laptop and spends a year shooting their own stories?

Hyperlocal News

Yesterday, we held a press conference in Washington, DC to announce the launch of FiOS1, Verizon’s first local TV news and community information channel. We are fortunate to be partners with Verizon in this very exciting project, and now we can talk about it.