Caroline O’Donovan of The Nieman Journalism Lab writes Thursday about a proprietary application developed for Wall Street Journal reporters that allows them to shoot videos for the business newspaper’s website using their phones.
O’Donovan writes, “The Wall Street Journal approached Downing with the idea for a proprietary app that reporters could use as a news gathering tool. With the addition of some analytics tools and a centralized management function that allows editors to quickly vet clips before they’re published, that became WorldStream, which we wrote about in August.
“‘Consumer behavior has become much more accustomed to consuming the news they want as it happens,’ says Downing. ‘The WSJ was trying to be much more in line with real-time news and real-time publishing.’
“More than half a year later, how’s WorldStream working out? The Journal seems pretty happy. On the business side, WorldStream point man and WSJ deputy editor of video Mark Scheffler describes the project as a ‘destination but also a clearinghouse.’ While all of the WSJ’s mobile videos are first published to the feed, many go on to live second lives across a wide variety of platforms. Some clips follow reporters to live broadcast appearances, while others are embedded into article pages and blogs. Andy Regal, the Journal’s head of video production, said that they don’t break out WorldStream views from the newspaper’s overall video numbers, which he said total between 30 and 35 million streams per month.
“That kind of traffic across platforms draws the attention of advertisers. The WSJ says video ads generate ‘premium’ rates, meaning somewhere around $40 to $60 CPM. Says Tim Ware, WSJ director of mobile sales, of the Journal’s broader video strategy: ‘We’re very bullish on the growth of WSJ Live this fiscal year, and thus the growth in video ad revenue. We’re also starting to contemplate some one-off sponsorships within our overarching video coverage of select events and stories.’ (After spending about a total of about an hour on WorldStream, however, I only saw one ad — for a ‘smart document solutions’ company — repeated about a half dozen times.)”
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