Fox Chicago Journalists Seek to Bring News Alive Online
"In the last six to eight months, I see much greater acceptance in the end user, the non-techie," he said. "The regular old person who may be watching our newscast is much more likely now to go online searching for live video than they were six months ago."
Looking Ahead
Finlayson and Baron are hoping to turn that acceptance into a revolution. Finlayson said he expects that, soon, any news site that wishes to be considered credible will need to have the ability to stream live video.
"They’re going to want to own that video and that event from the moment it happens, then they can take that video, and they can chop it down and turn it into stories," he said. "Then they can create text stories, then they can have pictures from the video, then they can archive it. So, you can see that, in my mind, every major newspaper’s going to have teams of video journalists that are out capturing major events."
Baron agreed, adding that he believes LiveNewsCameras.com will go a long way toward solving the growing problem of perceived lack of transparency in the news.
"I think this definitely appeals to people that are looking for transparency and choice in the way they consume news rather than maybe the more traditional method of being told, ‘OK, it’s 9 o’clock, here’s your news right now,’" he said.
In addition, Baron said current citizen journalism efforts such as CNN’s iReport do not parallel LiveNewsCameras.com as closely as it would appear because iReport does not allow users to submit user-generated live video, only pictures and recorded video. He said he could see LiveNewsCameras.com adding a section for aggregated user video but added that the logistics of doing so would be difficult.
Finlayson, however, said he expects live user-generated video streams to be added to the site and other similar efforts eventually.
"Just as networks are now accepting pictures submitted by viewers, I soon think they’ll accept videos live from users," he said.
Promoting the Concept
Now that the site is up, Finlayson and Baron hope that their efforts will go a long way toward advancing their vision of live streaming news. However, for Finlayson, it doesn’t matter whether LiveNewsCameras.com ultimately becomes the site that breaks that concept into the mainstream. According to him, he’s just happy to have gotten the ball rolling.
"We believe in this concept," he said. "This may not be it, but I guarantee you in a few years, many websites will have some version of live streaming and then there will be aggregators of that content."