We hired three videographers – one who was geared more towards advertising and filming “premercials” (Not fond of that word), one for the evening shift who could really get some great sports video and another during the day to cover news. We produced quality stuff, and everyone pitched in to help. I got a crash course in producing, running the switcher for our three-cam setup in the studio, and editing the final project. I’m grateful for that.

But two years later and we have stopped doing our twice-daily news show because no one had time to script and anchor it, and we weren’t growing viewership. We had to lay off a videographer. We still have our advertiser videographer, whose job has evolved into online banner creation on top of producing a weekly cooking show. And the videographer that’s left is run ragged from having to shoot/produce/edit news AND sports.

I’m looking at our stats. A large majority of our videos are getting maybe 30 or 40 views, whereas a not-very-good 40 second clip I shot outside my front door last week showing the season’s first snow got over 200 views. (I know these numbers aren’t metro paper numbers, but for our market, 200 views is pretty good.) A rather dry press conference video regarding the Nebraska State Fair move to Grand Island has nearly 300 views – because it is a hot-button issue here. (I am discounting any Husker video we do because I think we could put up video of Coach Pelini reading the phone book and Husker fans would watch it.)

Part of our problem is that we don’t embed the video often enough within it’s accompanying story (Thank you @gmarkham for bringing this up to me on Twitter last night. I wasn’t even thinking about that when all this came up.) This is something I’m hoping will change when we switch to new software for the website. It’s a bit of a process to embed YouTube code in our stories presently, and so we rely on latest video showing up in the list on the front page and only embed if it’s a big story.

But we often take the time to shoot and put up video that’s unrelated, or too big to embed. We filmed a recent senatorial debate and had to break it up into about 7 or 8 videos, uploaded over the course of a week. And no one has really watched any of them. It seems like wasted effort to me.

Here is my dream plan:

1. Donate our expensive handhelds that no one is using to area schools with the stipulation that they use it to film videos we can put on our site. This was an idea of our presentation editor and I like it a lot.

2. Buy inexpensive FlipVideo cams for the reporters and show them it’s as easy to download/upload video as it is to pull audio from their recorders. (This is contingent on them actually using the things. It’s a nice idea, but sometimes they are too busy, you know, doing the reporter thing to have time to shoot video as well. At least this is the argument I hear the most.)

3. Study our view stats and try to discover and predict what it is our readers actually want to see. Just looking at the first page of stats, I can already tell they prefer football highlight reels to pressers, and breaking news/hot topic videos to debates.

4. Focus on what the readers want and not what we think they want. I realize this goes against the advice of Rob Curley and Mindy McAdams, who are emphasizing giving the readers what they want alongside the stuff we think they should want – but we aren’t a metro. We’re small potatoes compared to the news sites I constantly see advice like this geared towards. We’re small and regional and are very very lucky to even have a videographer, much less two of them. I just think we sometimes waste their talents on videos that aren’t watched.

5. Get better at embedding video within the stories instead of leaving them as standalone.

6. Stop videoing grip and grins.

We have the ability to produce good stuff but we lack the time and people-power. This dream plan of mine means finding ways to eliminate video we don’t need to be shooting to free up our people to shoot the good stuff.

I don’t know that anyone has the magic formula for newspapers and video, or indeed if there even is one. I’m very much a fan of trying anything and everything and seeing what sticks. We’ve tried daily news shows and they failed. We’ve tried shooting what we think the readers want, and sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. Now we need to take what we’ve learned these past two years and figure out what works for us.