A pair of Scandinavian newspapers are placing big bets on video to boost revenue and connect with younger audiences. In addition to quick iPhone videos, the papers are producing long doc-umentaries and programs focused on sports and breaking news

netnewscheck
By Michael Depp

NEW YORK--Want to drop a pin on the epicenter of newspapers producing online video? Try Scandinavia.

If Norway’s Verdens Gang (VG) and Sweden’s Expressen are any measure, Scandinavian papers may be readier for video’s primetime than many of their peers across the globe.

 In fact, "Primetime" is the name of Expressen’s new video venture, launched just two weeks ago and airing from 6:30-11 p.m. daily. Anna Rastner, managing editor of digital content from the paper, shared its ambitious new video move with attendees of the International News Media Association on Tuesday.

She was joined by Espen Egil Hansen, executive editor of VG, whose own approach to video would be aptly described as voluminous. "Text and video is more effective than either text or video," Hansen said. And that's not just empty rhetoric for VG: It produced 400 live transmissions last year (with more slated for this year) along with 25 original shows of six to 10 episodes each.

Hansen said the paper’s weekly talk show draws 300,000 viewers and its soccer show is the nation’s most watched.

His ambitions for the paper’s video platform are nothing short of completely disrupting his television competitors, and with 44% of the Norwegian population checking in to the site daily, he said VG can continue to grow its video by building it on the back of established user behavior.

As Hansen walked publishers through a tour of his site, it was clear that aesthetics took a back seat to a heavy content push. But video was served by the dollop with each text story rather than a sprinkling, part of a plan to put iPhones in the hands of every staffer with a mandate to shoot content.

"We have gone in a few months from three live reporters to 480," he said, with a more active solicitation of user generated video content on tap next.

Hansen said it was hard to put a figure on VG’s overall investment in its video efforts, having built the platform incrementally over the last decade. But part of that investment has included an in-house studio and edit bay, a news van and five LiveU backpack units.

There are also about 15 staffers dedicated to video production, he said. Some of those staffers are working with outside production houses on VGTV’s entertainment programming, which has been largely outsourced.

Much of that programming--both internally and externally produced--is also shot in HD, he added.

And much of it also comes about in a kind of ad hoc fashion. Hansen highlighted as an example a doc-umentary VG produced last year that centered around a 100-year-old package found in the archives of a small Norwegian city with instructions to be opened in 2012. What started as a polished, long form piece on that package--Hansen repeatedly stressed that viewers will stick with a video online for more than 90 minutes if the storytelling is strong enough--evolved into a full scale event around the package's opening.

The doc-umentary alone drew 800,000 viewers, Hansen said. But that grew into live coverage of its opening, an eight-hour webcast that drew a staggering 1.7 million views (many of whom were doubtlessly nonplussed by the discovery of little more than a stack of old newspapers, ironically).

New shows and one-offs repeatedly come about in the same fashion, mutably growing or changing around user reaction.

But for all of its video experimentation and the sheer heft of its content, Hansen said that video remains mostly a break-even proposition for the paper.

Yet with 45% of VG’s overall revenue coming from digital--a number that dwarfs even the most successful U.S. newspaper publishers in the digital space (albeit fueled by anomalies of the Norwegian market), Hansen's leash for experimentation is long, he said.

Sweden's Expressen, for its part, seems to be just warming up. With 2.2 million unique visitors weekly out of 9.5 million Swedes, according to Rastner, it, too, has a sizeable readership to leverage against its video forays.

Averaging about 15-20 video clips a day, Rastner said that exclusive content deals to show Premiership and Champions League soccer highlights and a co-branded and co-hosted show with Sweden’s TV4 were early successes.

But then came "Primetime."

Slated to launch on the same evening as the Boston Marathon bombings, "Primetime" wasn’t quite ready to hit the Web in a wartime news posture and so was briefly postponed, but in its short two-week life if has already grown its audience by 45%.

"Primetime" is shot in an in-house studio against a green screen infused with a constant stream of dynamic graphics. It focuses on exclusive news and breaking stories, and to fill its long running time, largely draws from stories from the paper.

For all the polish of its news set, "Primetime" also comes together using a range of different video qualities. "We work with flexible technical solutions," Rastner said. "We are not stuck in old, traditional techniques."

That means a combination of professional camera work with contributions from iPhone,Skype, Google Hangout, and Bambuser, along with video shot with some of the paper’s LiveU backpacks.

Behind the scenes, Rastner said the paper invested approximately 200 million Swedish kronor in building up a studio and small control room.

The show--like all of the paper’s video plays--is monetized by pre-roll, mid-roll, banners and sponsorships. And while it’s too soon to gauge its profitability, Rastner said profits at the paper are up 186% overall from this time last year, attributing some--if unspecified--part of that growth to video efforts.

Both Rastner and Hansen framed their video moves as partly geared at gaining a younger audience, and to that Hansen pointed to recent coverage of Justin Bieber's four-stop Norwegian tour as having made huge inroads on that front.

Hansen shared just a sliver of VG’s extensive Bieber coverage--from helicopter shots to iPhone videos of screaming teenage throngs--and he said it was an illuminating moment for video’s power to forge connections between a newspaper and elusive younger users.

"In my opinion it has never been easier," he said. "So stop complaining if you don’t do Justin Bieber live."
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