Ole Werring, TV manager of Dabladet of Oslo, Norway, described to Ifra‘s annual Beyond the Printed Word online publishing conference how his newspaper has integrated video into its traditionally text news site.
Dagbladet initially began offering video on its site in 1999 but found its unpopular because not many Norwegians had broadband connections then, but it relaunched its about video efforts in 2006. Dagbladet employs four peole full-time to produce about 60 videos per week for Dagbladet. That number includes videos they create plus editing videos received from Reuters and the Associated Press. Each video is integrated into the text news page about that story. Each video includes a commercial that rolls before the video plays.
Each video is also offered to Dagbladet’s mobile phone service users.
Promotional trailers for cinema features are also offered (Werring was formerly with the Norwegian Film Institute).
Dagbladet has begun using user-generated videos to illustrate secondary stories. Werring mentioned that it’s often impossible to illustrate these with video except by using videos shot by users on the scene.
Dagbladet has also launched a YouTube-type site on which users can upload their own videos. He said the newspaper realizes that they will still upload videos onto YouTube.com, but believes that Dagbladet.no has enough usership and obviously enough Norwegian focus to attract users’ videos. Dagbladet.no and its associated websites currently receive about 3.9 million unique users per month, which isn’t too bad in a country of only 4 million people. (Nonetheless, Dagbladet has two even larger competitors.)
Dagbladet’s abilities to create video news reports has allowed it to begin working with Norwegian television organizations to produce news stories about crime, politics, recipes, and other topics.