The newsonomics of WSJ Live

Ken Doctor writes for the Nieman Lab about the growing use of video by The Wall Street Journal through its WSJ Live operation.

Doctor writes, “It leverages the tablet-sized screen well. It mixes on-the-hour scheduled programming with on-demand access. It balances the talking heads of its global reporting workforce, via Skype, with anchor-hosted programs (News Hub), photo stills, and graphics. It is faster-paced than most news video, with some of the print-reporter geekiness at least acceptable and often enjoyable compared to the slick, no-surprise, Wolf Blitzer-me-to-sleep monotony of cable news. Within the business news world, it sits somewhere between the casualness of American Public Media’s Marketplace and CNBC’s button-down coverage.

“Much of the action is set in the combined Journal/Fox/News Corp. building on the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown. The merging print/video setups there are found in few other newsrooms in the world, one of which would have to be El Tiempo, a largely unheralded multimedia leader in Bogota. WSJ Live is touchable in navigation, using the increasingly familiar ribbon (NPR, Pulse, HuffPo Glider) for navigation.

“It acts on two of three parts of what I’ve called the Tablet Trifecta — mobile, video, and social. Those three phenomenon, each too often considered separately as audience or revenue categories by news business people, are what makes the tablet a truly phenomenal product. We watch video wherever we are, comfortably, and then with a touch share video with friends and associates. The tablet is a product that is natively viral.”

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