ISOJ 2017 - Video everywhere - Live, VR, and 360 - Micah Gelman

Today I'm going to talk specifically about what we're doing with live and the lessons we've learned for a year of Facebook Live. Not that we started doing live with Facebook, that's really kind of changed our approach and the reasons why we do live. So first, a little bit of a recap of what we've been doing on the video team. Video is always better now. There's a stun grenade right there, that's a stun grenade thrown right into a group of people from Pyongyang, North Korea. I'm Anna Fifield. So we're here to really walk you through this remarkable presidential debate. We're really at the center of the action here. Hi, I'm Libby Casey with the Washington Post on Capitol Hill with reporter Mike Tavannes who's covering Congress and specifically watching the fate of the health care bill. And you look out that window, you can see the monuments and memorials. And actually, this is a major storm affecting the entire Interstate 95 corridor from DC to Boston. Right from the get-go, you knew this was going to be a different kind of debate because they didn't shake hands, they barely made eye contact. I'm Libby Casey with the Washington Post. I'm with Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post and Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia. Jose del Rio at the Trump party. There I see the red hats around. Make America Great Again. The voters have spoken. He has been elected president of the United States. We are going to check in with our colleague Abby Phillip who's standing by at the White House. Also heard him say earlier today that Maddis was straight out of central casting. Been a large group of black bloc protesters that were marching. These folks running. We'll look into what that is. Our art part there we go. There's a life behind heal. Some kind of looks like there was something there in Franklin Square Park. Interesting. We got a fire burning in our country. So on behalf of Abby Phillip, Jose del Rio, the entire political reporting staff for the Washington Post, Ed O'Keefe, and I'm Elise Viebeck. Thanks for joining us. Good night. Good night. So I do recommend that if you're going to do a live inauguration coverage, you have a riot break out right outside of your studios because it's very convenient. So why do we do live? Well, we do it for the immediacy. As good as fast as you will be with video, you can't be as fast as live. So this was Libby Casey, who is one of our political reporters on Capitol Hill during the health care debate just a few weeks ago. This is Congressman Meadows coming out to talk. We could turn that around quickly, but we won't be able to turn it around as fast as you could watch it live. There's impact. When you go to someone like Senator Franken and talk to him, the opportunity to do it live and to have that audience not just on Facebook but we do on our site as well is really an attractive thing for the audience. And then it really gives us an opportunity to do deep dives. David Fahrenthold and Ginsburg could talk frequently during the whole reporting that David was doing about why they were pursuing a certain line of interest. This is the opportunity for reporters to get into the weeds a little bit, and they actually respond to it and they like that opportunity. So a few lessons of what we learned over the last year of doing this: real news does real well. Also, go there. So we have very nice studios at the Post. We're very lucky to have that. I get really mad when we do a lot of that because we should be out on the scene showing you something. Some of our top most watched live events this year were obviously the inauguration, but the Women's March the day after. When you're on the scene of news, you have much more impact. It's not a broadcast. We're not trying to be TV. Some of the things we do have those conventions, but it's not a one-way communication in the way that a broadcast is. We want reader feedback. We want the comments. We want to be able to respond to that in real time. At the same time, you have to have an adult in that room. Show the commenters on Facebook that you are there and you're responding and you're keeping the trolls to a minimum, and then everybody has a much better experience. I also want to say inside a broadcast, we've had really good cases where you've had someone like Dana Milbank, who was a political opinion writer for us, actually changed the direction of the story he was going to write based on questions that came from viewers. Know your audience. Don't try to put things that your audience may not be responsive to down the funnel. We had a celebrity we thought would be great. Terrell Owens was doing something crazy. But maybe you see level, that's what our audience wanted. So you have to really make sure that you are programming to the people who come to you. And as I said, live is a sweetener. Al Franken was much more willing to come to us because he had the opportunity to be unfiltered and to be live. And it's a sweetener for the reporters who are also able to get the instant feedback on their work. Real quick, some of the tools that we use for live. We want to make sure that we're using the right tool for the right platform. The LiveU or Dejero or a TVU is a really great bonded cell phone package for more broadcasts. The DJI Osmo works very well with a cell phone camera. The Mevo is good in some situations, although you have to be very careful with the Mevo. If everyone saw the Breitbart Sean Spicer interview on Facebook Live from a few weeks ago, nobody was looking at the camera and it was very painful. That was done with the Mevo. So what's next for us? After a year of Facebook Live, we're going to do less moving forward, but we're going to be more focused and we're going to take the lessons that we've learned from there to more platforms. We are doing live today on Apple TV, on Roku, on Fire TV, on YouTube. It's given us a real opportunity to show our users that once they come to us, we're going to have it live. They don't need to necessarily turn on CNN or MSNBC. And we're creating the expectation for our users that when something important is happening, we'll have it. And then real quickly, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what else we're doing this year. We're very lucky. The video team started this year at 40 people. The Washington Post will end this year at 70. So we're adding much more folks to do breaking news, enterprise storytelling, motion graphics, immersive 360 video storytelling, personalities, some scripted content, which will be a little bit of a departure for the Washington Post. Possibilities of a lot of excitement. Also has the possibility of getting me fired. And we're going to be adding to our opinions. So thanks.