Fun experiment in prepcasting

Louis Amestoy has always amazed me with his creativity, tenacity and commitment to taking fresh approaches to journalism to Southern California communities big and small. I’ve known Louis for a few years, and he's always cooking up something.

His latest experiment is a Friday night online prep-football vidcast for the Riverside Press-Enterprise's localized version of the robust HSGameTime prep site. Louis and co-”anchor” Dave Zink deliver a wild 2-hour ride of scores, video, staff interviews, listener calls and chat-room highlights, all built on Louis’ sweat and a mostly ball-and-twine suite of free software.

The debut of "HSGameTime.com Scoreboard Show" last Friday drew a decent audience, with 600-plus viewers and 250 hours served. I suspect that’ll grow dramatically as time goes on, and my guess is they’ll line up sponsors pretty quickly. The show has sponsorship opportunities galore.

The experience is simple and straightforward, but has some nice touches that differentiate it from your typical Friday night football show in local markets nationwide:

• Detailed analysis from experienced reporters, both from the field and in studio
• A show that repeats and updates scores frequently, a recognition that viewers are not camping out but rather snacking for the info they want.
• Frequent mentions of chatroom comments, giving the audience a shared mission in the show's success. 
• Slideshow of still photos, which offer a nice contrast to the grainy and shaky video we see from many games.
• Calls from listeners. This is more typical of radio, but is rarely seen on TV. Louis said he’ll be taking more calls from viewers moving forward.
• References to the site’s uPickem polling tools, which allow readers to pick their favorites in local games.
• A casual presentation peppered with dashes of silliness that makes all the difference in the world in engaging viewers over an extended period.

To pull it all off, Louis is using a variety of mostly-free tools:

• Ustream to stream feeds from several studio cameras and game highlights
• A free QuickTime-based app called CamTwist for digital effects like switching cameras, and launching B-roll, text overlays, a score scrawl and live slideshows featuring Press-Enterprise staff photos. Louis is the producer/director, controlling the viewer experience from a desktop computer. 
• Twitter for the game-score crawl. Louis is ingesting a simple RSS feed into CamTwist, without any scripting.
• Skype to talk to reporters in the field as well as take calls from listeners
• Simple file cards to keep track of each game, scores and stats.
• Several fixed cameras and some decent microphone.

All in all, a great experiment in local journalism that will be fun to watch evolve.

Update on Sunday, September 27, 2009 at 9:40 AM by Logan Molen

And here's the second vidcast, from Sept. 25.