Centre County Report Digicast
The “headlines” package is the staple of cable news TV networks. Hourly, they run through the top stories in rapid fashion.A professor and student at Penn State University innovated on the concept, inspired by the capabilities of VERSE.
Lesly Salazar had two projects to complete before graduating in December. She spent the latest semester anchoring the Centre County Report, a twice-weekly news broadcast reported, produced and edited for Penn State University class credit. It is broadcast on PBS in 29 counties, and streamed live online. It is led by Professor Steve Kraycik.
Professor Curt Chandler’s office is in the studio where the show is taped, and watching their work gave him an idea. He studies how local television news stations translate their on-air product to the digital space. His research shows that rather than sitting through the digital re-run of the on-air broadcast, online users almost always use the “a la carte” option of picking and choosing different individual story clips instead.
With that knowledge, he asked himself — what about using a headlines package and Verse interactivity to quickly give users a way to navigate these stories via the top headlines? “It was the right convergence of students assets and technology,” Chandler said.
Chandler was working with Salazar to use Verse for one of her final independent studies. Since she’s the anchor of the show, she was the ideal candidate to bring this idea to life. They even created a term for it — the “digicast.”
While this digicast took a total of three hours to produce, from writing and recording the headlines, to working with the Verse tools to add the contextual links, he believes they can get the process down to one hour.
Why was Salazar interested in Verse in the first place? She had always loved journalism. After applying to Penn State University, her intention was to report and be on air. During the fall of her junior year she was shown multimedia stories from the New York Times and Boston Globe in class. “I hadn’t really experienced journalism that way. I fell in love with it. I became more interested in creating it than just reporting it.”
As she looks for jobs, she wants to work in broadcast, but to look for more character-driven storytelling opportunities and to “help bridge that gap between broadcast and digital,” Salazar said. She continued “I think this digicast is groundbreaking…because you can do that.”
