Kathleen Phillips
Communications Specialist

Scott Janish
Communications Specialist

Blair Fannin
Communications Specialist

Dave Mayes
Associate Department Head
Texas A&M University

Background

The Texas A&M University Agriculture Communications news team has been a leader in computer assisted reporting since 1994. That year, the team conducted the first Internet survey of Texas dailies and weeklies and used those results to launch into Internet news dissemination, journalist training, and web design - all prior to the large-scale adoption of these Internet practices by the state's media clientele. That leadership enabled the news team to advance information about Texas A&M's Agriculture Program as never before.

But in as much as the Internet enabled the news team to quickly adopt new communications techniques and train journalists, it just as quickly and continually changed. New computer technology and the widespread acceptance of Internet usage both by the traditional media clientele and by non-media consumers meant not only keeping pace but once again jumping ahead of the technology to retain the leadership role.

An example of such technolog y is Internet visuals. A followup Internet survey of Texas newspapers in 1999 found that 80 newspapers (of more than 500 questioned) expressed an interest in more digital photos and videos. Though that seems like an insignificant amount of interest, the news team believed that response paralleled the 1995 survey in which few expressed knowledge of or interest in e-mail. Therefore, exploration of this technology was merited.

Method

Prior to beginning any work on the AgNews Web site (http://agnews.tamu.edu) redesign, 45 of the 80 newspapers that had expressed an interest in visuals in the December 1999 survey were contacted in the Spring of 2000 to find out how many were already using video on their Web sites. (It was obvious from looking at Texas newspaper Web sites, that more were using digital photos. Less obvious was the use of or desire for video).

About 75 percent (33 Texas papers) said "not yet," "yes," or "interested." The news team saw these answers collectively as positives and an indication that the team should prepare to offer this service. In brief phone surveys of the 45 papers, most newspaper spokespeople said they wanted to stream from the AgNews site rather than download to local disk; there was a split vote on what type of video player software to use (RealPlayer or QuickTime); most said once a week would be the best frequency for delivering a vi de o; and, more than half said they would like to be notified by e-mail that a video is available with a story.

Although the news team had been considering an update for more than a year, the concerted effort began with a casual mention of interest between colleagues followed by a meeting between members of news team and video team. The news team felt capable of adding digital photos to the Web site but knew that involvement from the video team would be vital to incorporating digital videos.

A proposed Web site outline was written in July 2000 and revised in August 2000. At this point, open meetings were called to allow anyone interested to attend the planning sessions. These meetings had from 7-12 people. The proposal linked visuals to stories and allowed users to select stories by medium, in addition to date and topic which had been available on the Web site since 1994. The proposal also offered better interaction between users and the news staff. Redesign su ggestions originally was done by a graduate-level student worker with Web experience, under the direction of our computer specialist. When the student left, the computer specialist took full responsibility for the design and technical operation of the new site.

Work continued through Autumn 2000 with the goal of launching the site after the November elections. However, since the November elections continued through December, the news team decided to wait until after the 2000 Holiday break.

Prior to the full launch, a pilot group of journalists were asked to look at the site and complete an online form with their comments. The old site continued as normal, but a version of the new site was available as a different URL for review. The online critique asked for a 3-minute evaluation because we knew it would need to be quick and easy for journalist participation. This request was e-mailed on Jan. 5, 2001 to 500 subscribers of AGNMORE (the team's e-mail news di st ribution service), 49 additional newspaper reporters or editors who had expressed interest in videos in our 1999 survey, 34 broadcasters with whom our video team worked, and 120 members of North American Agriculture Journalists.

The pilot site had five stories each with some sort of visual: drought, wildlife, fireants impact, pearls and wildfire. The team picked a variety of stories by topic to demonstrate the vast range of expertise that would be of interest across any given newsroom.

Comments from that survey included "... a good source of agricultural information to the news media and agribusiness ... Overall it's pretty good ... I especially like links from current subjects such as drought to other sites and to experts who can answer questions ... Format is very easy to use and responds quickly ... very aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly ... a great web site, well designed, easy to navigate, lots of information ... I will continue to visit in t he future to find anything I can tie into Illinois agricultural issues ... I liked your web site ... it is very colorful and full of interesting issues and topics."

Suggestions for improvement included having a link to Agriculture Program directory, having links to places outside of TAMU like Texas Department of Agriculture and the futures markets. We already had a link to the Ag Program directory on the site, but we declined to have links to other agencies and markets because we want to maintain our credibility and didn't want to risk linking with political/controversial issues beyond our own.

We got no response from the radio or television stations.

As a news team, with this positive feedback, we as a team considered how to meet the expectations. Two campus-based news writers learned to use a video camera and all writers on campus learned to use a digital camera. Two digital video cameras and two digital photo cameras are available to the fou r campus-based news writers.

Through June 2001, we had regular video and audio contributions from the video news person. With the hire of a new person in that position, we hope that this will pick back up to supplement what the writers are doing. Several of the nine field team members also have digital video cameras and are in the process of learning how to use them and how best to send the files via e-mail. One field team member is very skilled and able to provide links to his videos on the Web.

At the end of December 2001, we began a promotion to all the state's journalists, with a list of some 2,000 writers and editors mostly at the state's dailies and weeklies. Sturdy laminated placards were printed with a view and brief explanation of the Web site on one side and contact information for all the on-campus and field writers on the reverse side. About 1,400 were mailed and 400 were distributed regionally by the field staff. The cost of this promotional pie ce was $600 for the four-color printing. Mailing was handled through penalty mail at no cost to the news team.

Results

Since March 8, 2001 when the new Web site was fully launched, we have posted digital photos with 52 stories. We have no figures to compare with previous years, but very few stories had photos with them in the past. That is a significant increase but one we want to continue to grow as all the writers become more accustomed to using digital cameras and preparing the photos for the Web.
The number of videos posted since March 8 totals 24, or about half of what the survey indicated would be acceptable by newspapers. Much of the year was spent on a learning curve for the two writers who have begun creating news videos.
The audio offerings on our Web site have received less attention. There were only nine audio stories posted after the launch, all of them prior to June when the former news video specialist moved to a different position. The audio portion of our Web site is something we will consider in 2002.
The new Web site was enabled with existing technology whic h only included progressive download of videos rather than the streaming version that most of those surveyed said they preferred. The news team is in the process of converting to a streaming Web server and will complete that task in early 2002.
The number of web pages accessed and the total number of hits showed a 65 percent increase over the previous year with 2.2 million page requests (6.2 million total hits), up from 1.45 million pages (4.4 million total hits) in 2000.
About 40 percent of the requests are for news stories while the remaining is spread over the other features offered through our web site. Most of the traffic is from U.S. domains, but we also served people from 150 other countries (compared to 145 in 2000).

Conclusions

Supplying a steady stream of images, both still photos and video, will continue to take a concerted effort by writers. Now that we've been through one year of perfecting the system, we know that continued marketing and use of technology will keep our news Web site among the most used by our journalist clientele.
We hope to add more from the video news specialist and from the field team members.
We plan to work with newspaper Webmasters in 2002 to increase the linkage from their sites to our videos and news stories.