NPR’s Schiller & AOL’s Armstrong Headline ONA10

The Online News Association today announced NPR's Vivian Schiller and AOL's Tim Armstrong will headline a “keynote conversation” moderated by WSJ.com’s Kara Swisher at its annual conference in Washington, D.C. in October.

Jump-starting the discussion on reinventing media companies will be Vivian Schiller, who joined NPR as President and CEO in 2009, coming from The New York Times Company where she served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of NYTimes.com....

Joining Schiller in conversation will be Tim Armstrong, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of AOL, LLC. Armstrong is responsible for setting strategy and overseeing the businesses and day-to-day operations of the company. He joined AOL in March 2009 from Google, where he served as the President of The Americas Operations...

Moderating the pair will be Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. A former reporter for the Washington Post, Swisher the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web” and the sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”...

You can get more info on the 2010 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet, and register, here.

J-School Grads Are Getting Jobs .... Yours!

AOL's Daily Finance reports that, despite the miserable financial state of the media, enrollment in journalism schools is on the rise and, perhaps not unrelatedly, j-grads are actually finding jobs -- in journalism!

Columbia University and CUNY's graduate schools of journalism report that more than 60 percent of their recent alum have found employment related to their degrees -- many at those same institutions that are vigorously laying off veteran staffers.

And therein may lie the explanation:

My guess is at least some of it is a direct result of the massive staff cutbacks just about every media organization has enacted in the past couple years. It's a corporate cliche to lay people off and euphemize it as "restructuring," but you can be sure that some of the companies that are letting go well-paid editors and writers in their 40s and 50s are quietly stocking up on fresh j-school grads whose lack of real-word experience is at least partly made up for by their effortless fluency in the ways of the web -- and their willingness to work for $35,000 a year.

Guess How Much Online Video We Watch?

How many online videos do you watch every month? How much time do you spend watching them?

The average U.S. Internet user watched 111 videos, for a total of 6.4 hours, during the month of April, according to data released yesterday by ComScore Video Metrix service.

Nearly 152 million U.S. Web users collectively watched 16.8 billion online videos, an increase of 16 percent from the previous month.

What's especially remarkable is that Google's YouTube accounted for 6.8 billion of those viewed videos (or 40.7 percent of the online video market), with 107.8 million viewers -- a 15 percent increase over March.

Fox Interactive Media (MySpace) ranked a distant second with 513 million videos and 58.8 million viewers (3.1 percent), followed by Hulu with 397 million videos and 40.1 million viewers (2.4 percent) and Yahoo! with 355 million videos and 45.4 million viewers (2.1 percent). Also in the top ten: Viacom, Microsoft, Turner Network, CBS, Disney, AOL.

Other notable findings for April 2009:

• 78.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
  
• The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.

For the record, here at KobreGuide, we watch many hours of videojournalism every month to find the best story every weekday for you! If our average video is about 5 minutes, that would add up to nearly two hours of high-quality viewing we provide you every month. And, if you're an "average" consumer (as measured by ComScore), that would still leave you more than four hours a month for goofing around on YouTube!

So our advice: Enjoy your candy, but don't forget your veggies. They're good for you, and taste good, too!

Comparing Video Sharing Sites

What's the best site for uploading and sharing your videos?

There are so many criteria that we've been constructing our own list of what to look for. Every videoplayer seems to have some advantages, such as ability to link to the video from (or embed on) other sites. But all have innumerable inadequacies and flaws.

Joel Williams, aka the Blog Tech Guy, has diligently devised his Ultimate Guide to Online Video Sharing Websites for no less than 48 video sharing sites, and 13 video editing sites, including:

AOL Uncut, Blip, Break, Brightcove, Buzdeo, Crackle, Cuts, Dabble, Daily Motion, Dave.tv, DivX Stage 6, eefoof(VuMe), Eyeka, Eyespot, Fliqz, FlixYa, Google Video, Gotuit, iFilm, JayCut, Jumpcut, Kewego, Kiwivid, LiveVideo, Lycos Mix, Metacafe, Mojiti, MotionBox, MyHeavy, MyNumo, MySpace, Nelsok, Ning, OneTrueMedia, Ovi (Twango), Revver, SevenLoad, Soapbox, Spymac, Sumo, Veoh, Viddler, Vidilife, Vidszoo,Vimeo, Vmix, VodPod, Vsocial, Wat, Webshots, WeShow, Yahoo Video, YouAreTV, YouTube, Yurth, Zeec and Ziddio.

Did you even realize there were that many?

On one Quality Comparison Page, using identical test footage, you can see for yourself the difference in Color, Vision, and Sound. However, this doesn't take into account other factors, such as whether that annoying "play" triangle icon appears in the middle of the screen when you pause, or whether you can manually fast-forward the slider.

In a separate 45-page PDF ebook, Williams rates and describes the ease and quality of creating an account, uploading video, and viewing video at each of these sites -- along with annotated pros and cons.

Additionally, Williams offers a handy chart, Online Video Comparison Matrix, which features an apples-to-apples comparison of more than a dozen useful criteria.

He notes that video editing sites are different from video sharing websites: "While sites like Photobucket (and now YouTube with Remixer) do both, these sites are designed for the editing of videos, (which) are normally loaded from other video sharing sites, and not uploaded to the site directly." Here's a sampling of those:

http://www.clesh.com/
http://www.crackle.com/
http://www.grouper.com/
http://www.cuts.com/
http://www.dabble.com/
http://www.fliqz.com/
http://www.forscene.net/
http://www.gotuit.com/
http://www.jumpcut.com/
http://mix.lycos.com/
http://www.mojiti.com/
http://www.motionbox.com/
http://www.stashspace.com/
http://www.webshots.com/

Bet you didn't realize there were so many video editing sites, either! Bravo to the Blog Tech Guy for his diligent research!

Tell us: What's your favorite video-sharing and/or video-editing Website, and why?