Local music: It’s a logical avenue into reaching a younger audience. It helps reflect what’s really going on in the community you’re sworn to cover. It ads depth of coverage to your newspaper.com.
And who doesn’t love a good music video? I’ve long suspected that the reason many reporters get excited about shooting video is they’ve watched a lot of MTV.
But you don’t see many music videos on newspaper sites.
The reason is simple, really. To do music video well takes time, and lots of it, good equipment, and costs can add up quickly, as well as real talent.
What you’re really looking at is significant expense and time away from doing the core business of covering news.
Yeah, but wouldn’t it be fun to make a music video?
The Canton Repository (a GateHouse Media paper) found a great lo-fi approach. During the photo shoot for its upcoming Battle of the Bands (a competition open only to bands comprised of high school students), the Rep filmed band members milling about the newspaper building, and in the photo studio.
The results are simple, elegant and engaging. The keys to success are good editing and well-composed shots of kids aspiring to the spotlight. All the videos are a reminiscent of Hard Day’s Night.
Some of the music ain’t bad, either.
Here’s my favorite:
Ya Dig? by PJ & The Whistlers
The videos were created from about 10 to 20 minutes of raw footage of each band. The videos took about 45 minutes to 1 hour of production time per band. It was a lot of fun working with these guys, and some of the videos made themselves because of the quality of content.
Planning is important. We’re going to start a little earlier next year. We went down to the wire getting this project up and interlinked on two sites.
Also, these guys had the videos embedded on their myspace pages before we had them embedded on our site. Showing, we (media folk) have a lot to learn from younger users about the speed at which information travels.