Professor Tremayne Receives Prestigious NAB Grant

Story by Jaime Loke

Imagine a world where ordinary citizens--not just reporters-- are able to produce and record video to contribute to their local daily broadcast news. This is the vision Dr. Tremayne foresees for the broadcast news industry.

A veteran of both radio and television broadcasting, Dr. Tremayne believes sites like "YouTube" (a video sharing website where viewers are free to upload any video) will become incorporated into daily broadcast news.

One of his most recent research projects titled "Viewers as Content Providers: The Impact on Broadcasters" is a study that aims to explore the possibility of audiences playing the role of reporters in their own community.

"It's a project to look at what happens when citizens start doing television," said Dr. Tremayne. "We will see what happens when citizens start to shoot video, edit video and contribute that video and if this is a trend that continues what might we expect to see from it."

Dr. Mark Tremayne, a professor at the school of journalism, was recently awarded the prestigious National Association of Broadcasters grant. According to information provided by NAB's press release, this annual grant program is intended to motivate interest in the broadcast field with a focus of economic, social or policy issues that pertain to the commercial broadcast industry.

The goal of this grant program is to produce valuable academic research on broadcast issues that will be available to both practitioners in the field and academic scholars. The proposals are reviewed by a committee group that consists of an independent panel of academic and industry research professionals, representatives of NAB's Committees on Local Radio Audience Measurement (COLRAM) and Local Television Audience Measurement (COLTAM).

"Mostly the funds from the grant will be to pay students to code... they'll be looking at content and categorizing it under a number of variables that we'll be trying to measure," said Dr. Tremayne.

"I'm looking at two sources of data. One is YouTube and looking to see the videos where they go out and shoot something in their own environment, what is it that they are submitting, what is it that they are shooting. Another thing is that some local television stations have started YouTube-like process where on their websites you can upload video to them and [this research will explore] what are they doing with that video and what kinds of video actually get submitted by viewers of local television stations," said Dr. Tremayne.

The research will also try to determine what actually happens to these submitted videos.

"Does the TV station just use it online, do they incorporate it to their on-air product and we will also be looking at issues of quality to see if the videos submitted are any good," said Dr. Tremayne.

"I'm guessing that they'll [TV stations] will use it [viewer-submitted videos] for spot news, for accidents, for things that blow up and they might also use unexpected things that people catch on camera," said Dr. Tremayne.

But Dr. Tremayne has a different suggestion for the local television news stations. ??I think what they ought to do is different from that. What they ought to do is to try and come up with a system that encourages people to do some reporting, to actually do a little work, find something out and put together a video. They can also do what others have called micro-local journalism where you're covering things in your community. They might not be big things, they might not be serious hard-hitting journalism but it might just be community events that are too minor to broadcast to a mass audience but certainly of interest to a relatively small audience,?? said Dr. Tremayne.

An example Dr. Tremayne gave of a community event is an Easter egg hunt. In the community that he resides in, there is an annual community Easter egg hunt held at the local park for children.

According to Dr. Tremayne, "This [the community Easter egg hunt] is not something that a local television station would come out and cover. They might go to one of those somewhere, if there's a big one being held downtown or something and they might just go to that for a few seconds of video for their newscasts but they are not going to cover these at every neighborhood."

"If someone shot that video in the local community event and you were able to access it on the web and there was an easy way to access neighborhood news sites where contributors from the neighborhood has sent stuff in both video and text based, I think there actually would be a market for that because people do care about what's happening in their immediate neighborhood," said Dr. Tremayne.

"In a universe where you can micro-target lots and lots of audiences then that kind of thing does work. That way I'm going to the website to see what's happening in my neighborhood, others are going to the website to see what's happening in their neighborhoods," said Dr. Tremayne. "I actually in the long run fifty years down the road that's the direction that we're sort of moving in. I think it will take a long time for it to play out and I think the first stage will be video for spot news that will be of interest to the local television stations' wider audience."

The findings of this study will be expected to conclude by May 2008 and be presented at the annual Broadcast Education Association Convention in Las Vegas next year. Stay tuned.