More Times Video

Another decent video effort by the St. Petersburg Times in conjunction with its special report on Scientology. The narration is weak, especially considering it was not read by either of the reporters who collaborated to write the print version or by the woman who produced the video. (Need professional narration? I know a guy.) But it held my attention for its nearly seven minute duration.



You'll notice that it uses music in ways you don't typically hear it in broadcast journalism. You could debate that using music to create moods in a news story introduces an editorial slant.

Another difference between this piece and television stories is the credits at the end that list the contributors as well as the sources of video and photographs. On TV news magazine programs such as "60 Minutes" or NBC's "Dateline," the story's producer, who does most of its research and writing, is sometimes credited with a graphic superimposed over the story for a few seconds but there aren't end credits for each piece.

An end credit is something you can do for an individual web story when you don't have to worry about the pace and flow of a show that needs to keep an audience around for the next segment or, more importantly, the commercial messages that follow.