Using a grant financed through a farm bill provision, Idaho and Oregon onion growers are producing short videos that showcase the homegrown feel of the nation's main onion-growing region.
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or your favorite RSS reader.
To listen, click here.
We have added a new feature this week to www.capitalpress.com. Editor Joe Beach is posting daily video updates to highlight some of the news stories you can — or will be able to — find on capitalpress.com and in the print edition of the newspaper.
We just posted the third daily installment online. So far, the video updates have been 2 minutes or less. You can play them from the home page of our website or from our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/capitalpressvideo. We are also making them available through our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/capitalpress. So if you want a quick capsule of the day's ag news, Monday through Friday, look for the daily video updates to be posted by noon each day. You can watch them on your computer, netbook or even your smart phone.
Have you seen this video from Associated Press? It's of office workers in Spokane, Wash., catching ducklings leaping from a second floor balcony and helping them get safely to the river.
Have you heard that members of Congress now have their own YouTube channels? It's true. You can watch part of President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for Agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack's testimony from earlier today on the YouTube channel by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Of course the portion in the video relates to Leahy's questions to Vilsack about organic agriculture.
See the video here (Leahy, or his staff, or Congress) disabled embedding, so I can't put it here.
C-SPAN has the whole hearing if you want to watch it (although the did not broadcast it live). Be forewarned, it's two and a half hours.
You can also watch the archived webcast from the Senate Committee Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry
One year ago, I was up in Portland covering an event. I had lined up an intern to do the important work, writing the story and taking the pictures. So, being free of that responsibility, I decided to make my first feeble attempt at shooting video.
I had no clue what I was doing or what I was in for. I had literally zero experience using a video camera. I was once a still news photographer, but had little interest in shooting video. So, this was my chance to do something different.
The video was not good, and knowing even less about video editing than I did about videography, the resolution sucked. But it was my first attempt and I counted it as a success to even get the video posted online.
The video I shot was of last year's watermelon and produce giveaway by Eastern Oregon farmers in Portland. Perhaps it is fitting, or merely ironic, that I've spent part of the last week working on video editing and posting, because it is watermelon giveaway time again.
So, to show how far we've come, here's a look at the first video I did a year ago and the most recent one I edited and posted that was shot by Capital Press reporter Cookson Beecher.
Then:
Now:
I've still got a lot to learn, as do my colleagues here at the Capital Press. But we are making progress.
We are testing out a new video posting tool. Our YouTube channel is available at the bottom of this page. Above is the one we are trying out. If you have a preference, let us know.
We have created a new YouTube channel for posting videos created by Capital Press staff (and perhaps even freelancers).
Up to this point, the members of our staff you have been experimenting with video have all created their own channels to get videos online to our readers could see them. But moving forward, to try to keep the videos together, we opted to create a channel we could give all of our staff access to for posting purposes.
So, check out our channel below, which features our more recent videos.
This week, Capital Press launched a new slide show video feature to share some of the photo images that appear each week in our four zoned editions of the newspaper.
You can get a glimpse of the diversity of agriculture we have in the West, but also the hard work of the people behind these agricultural products.
Here are the photos from the week of our March 21 issue:
And also for the week of our April 4 issue:
