A Word on Multimedia Management

By: Keith Jordan

The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words can be an understatement for media sites. Pictures attract reader interest and help tell the story in ways that words can’t.   

Other forms of multimedia can be just as important, when used properly.  

But when many content management systems are so heavily influenced by the needs of bloggers and static sites, what are the best ways for media sites — with their complex set of rights and ever-changing content — to manage these assets?  

For example, let’s say you buy a photo from The Associated Press or Getty Images to illustrate a story. You really only bought rights to use it in certain ways, for a certain period of time.  

Adding some color

The bread and butter multimedia asset for most media sites is photography. This can come in many forms, from pictures taken by your photographers or reporters, to licensed freelance work, licensed photo agency images, and royalty-free or public domain images.  

If you work exclusively with your staff images, or combine them with public domain images, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs. But if you use images under license, particularly images that have an expiration date, read on.  

The best way to handle this is to create an asset management system, whether it’s part of your CMS or a separate piece that your CMS connects to. The asset management system holds your photos. When a photo appears on a Web page, the asset management system provides the image.  

The system contains lots of metadata about the image, allowing your editors to search for and reuse the same images later, if they’re relevant to another story or a follow-up story. That saves work.  

But perhaps their biggest advantage is that, if properly designed, they track photo expiration dates. When a photo expires, the asset management system stops providing it to your website when a page containing it gets called up.  

The same concept can apply to photo slide shows. It depends on how both the asset management system, and your website (or app), are coded.  

Moving pictures

After photos, the most common multimedia element today is video. It’s also potentially the most lucrative, since someone who watches a video is probably highly engaged, and you can sell a video ad that goes beyond what a banner ad can present.  

How you host and serve videos is a complex question that depends on your goals, number of editors, budget, and volume of video. For a larger organization, there are solutions such as BrightCove that your team will upload videos into. You then get a block of code from the BrightCove interface, which you add to the article; that places a video promotional module inside the article.  

However, you can achieve a lot of the same things by uploading your videos to YouTube, Vimeo, or a number of other free video hosts. Not only are they free, but there are social media benefits to having your site’s videos there, where anyone can find it or link to it. A video posted on YouTube can be presented very similarly to a video hosted by BrightCove. The main differences between the free hosts and hosts that charge are less precise control about presentation and advertising.  

None of these are your tools. The key here is the next step: You will want a CMS plug-in or system that makes it convenient for your team to add multimedia to stories, as well as to create pages built around a particular video.  

I would not suggest that any but the largest media companies build their own video hosting and streaming services. The benefits are minor compared with the costs, since there are plenty of good options you can integrate with instead.  

Flash, etc.

A few years ago, Flash was a popular tool for interactive storytelling. Its popularity is waning, since the increasingly important iPad and iPhone can’t see it.  

In most cases, I would not recommend any investments in Flash hosting or infrastructure at this time. Creating a Flash enhancement is labor-intensive, but hosting it is easy for your tech team.  

The focus for replacing Flash for uses like those valued by media sites is HTML 5, which I will discuss in a future column.  

Keith Jordan is managing director of Upstream Digital Media, a consulting business that focuses on editorial site launches, redesigns, and workflows.