YouTube trailers

Quote :

OJR: Why a trailer? What prompted the idea? Have you done anything like it before?

Moor: First of all, we shot video as part of the multimedia presentation of these projects. Both "Unequal Justice" and “Texas Youth Commission” had significant multimedia components. “Texas Youth Commission” had a smaller print component, while “Unequal Justice” was mostly print with a small Web component. So since we had the video already, we just decided to leverage that to make a trailer. Secondly, these are large projects even for the paper as a whole. We spent time on them. We wanted to give them as much exposure as possible on the Web.

A lot of our challenge overall as news organizations is to try and attract an audience for these big projects with a public service mission. Our Sunday newspaper audience is already familiar with our work – we already have them. How can we get people who don’t read the paper on Sunday, who haven’t picked up the paper? We want them to become interested and informed by news and information that matters to them. Those projects can be daunting for audience to enter in this day and age because of all the competing media out there. So we need to attract a new audience by using more effective techniques to tell them about what we were doing. The multimedia project of course is a way of getting people to enter into the story.

Read the rest of the story and watch the videos

Why NOT use YouTube to distribute your material for you?