Video

“LOON” in my case stands for “Lover Of Old Newspapers.” “Dr. Robert Woodson, professor of American Studies, Wesleyan University,” is not one of the faculty I met while earning two degrees there, but he reminds me of myself. (I, however, am not apocryphal.) This clip is here because it’s funny, and to remind me to sort out those piles of papers in the garage one of these days… Along with providing shortcuts to videos I like to show people, this page is here to demonstrate the use of video players within a WordPress blog.

One of my interests is journalism history, including the history of the technology of newspapers. Here’s a Vimeo video promoting a film about the history of Linotype typesetting machines — and people who are still passionate about these amazing machines.

As you can see above, YouTube and Vimeo clips insert easily on WordPress.com pages. Alas, for some reason the system won’t let me use the “object” tags offered by The Guardian newspapers when it shares its online videos. However, this video is well worth a visit for journalism students: At my AEJMC blog or at the original, The state of the modern give-and-take around news stories, captured in a story about three little pigs…

See separate pages on the Videos menu for clips from Citizen Kane, newspaper movies, and the documentary 17 Days (Missing the Newspaper).

Most of what follows are clips I’ve mentioned in the blog and various classes, especially about electronic tablets and the future of newspapers…

Tablet Demo: Sports Illustrated

Knight-Ridder Tablet Prototype, 1994

TED Talk by newspaper designer Jacek Utko

Michael Moore on newspaper capitalism

For students adding video to WordPress sites: Those were all YouTube videos, which WordPress.com embeds using a special “youtube” address code. You are, of course, at the mercy of the owner of the YouTube account that uploaded the video, if you did not do it yourself.

(Two earlier newspaper advertisements I had here are gone now because the owner of — a UK newspaper — closed its YouTube account.)

The free hosting at WordPress.com does not allow embeddable media-player codes from many other sites. One work-around is an intermediary video hosting site and plugin called “VodPod,” but I’ve had mixed results with it. Here are some attempts… If a video player does not appear, follow the link to VodPod’s copy, and from there to the original.

First, a promotional piece about the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute’s workshop on multimedia journalism, which I attended in summer 2009.

more about “Multimedia Journalism Bootcamp in Nashville“, posted with vodpod

This isn’t a new video, but I’m posting it to test the Vodpod-to-Wordpress connection:

Here’s a problem one:

From the Prelinger collection of “ephemeral film” at archive.org, “Seventeen Days” is a New York Daily News color documentary about a New York City newspaper delivery drivers’ strike in 1945, especially interesting to media historians because the strike showed how strongly readers’ valued their favorite newspapers. (Vodpod’s video player should appear here; if it does not, follow the link below to see the film on a separate page.)

17 Days: The Story of Newspaper History in the Making, posted with vodpod

Fortunately, someone has divided the “Seventeen Days” film into three five-and-a-half-minute parts and uploaded it to YouTube, which inspired me to create a whole page about it, with more information about the film’s contents. See it here.