A new service by 5 Minute Media lets news organizations and other media professionals find video content to embed into their blogs and other websites easily.
If you’re a professional writer, reporter, or blogger, you know that pictures can help tell your story as well as your words. You probably also know finding those pictures, especially on the Internet, can be daunting.
5minMedia is a new service that aims to do for online video what the Associated Press did for wire reports. If you open up a newspaper (at least if you still know what one is) or browse newspaper websites, a good chunk of the reporting comes from wire services like AP and McClatchy. It just isn’t worth it for small-town newspapers in the middle of nowhere to have bureaus in different parts of the country or different parts of the world. So they get a lot of their national and international news from these services instead of having to hire reporters to cover the latest revolution happening in the Middle East.
This is the same thinking behind 5minMedia’s new Editors Room. Sure, you could include another YouTube clip in your blog post, but sometimes you really want something that’s professionally made (even though there’s much more professional content on the site these days, and “amateur” videos sometimes have high production values). Just go to the site, grab the embed code for the video you want, and stick in your post.
5minMedia has teamed up with some big names in media, including the BBC, E!, Scripps, and Hearst, among others, so you know you’re not putting some random kid’s videos on your site. The 5minMedia partners are paid via ads that run in the clips.
There are clips available for everything from breaking news, politics, entertainment, food, technology, health, even Halloween (this is the month of October, after all).
The only downside is that given the companies that are offering their video, the site seems (with the exception of the BBC) extremely U.S.-centric, which may be a problem for sites trying to reach an international audience. Some content is restricted to the U.S. Since this is the Internet, any site can be viewed from anywhere in the world, challenging the traditional notion of local and national content.
It’s still an easy way to grab some compelling video to go with your awesomely written content for your site, and it’s completely legal for you to do so. And if you so happen to own a major TV property, you too can become a partner and start raking in the money when other people embed your videos in their stories.
5minMedia looks like a great way for people writing for the Web to add some professionally-produce video to their sites. If you like this post, check out Crowdmug, an app that gets you paid for your pictures, and Videotop, an app that lets you search YouTube videos from the command line.
