Danny Reddington

Phil Vinter, video journalist at the Birmingham Mail has posted up an interesting interview with Dan Reddington (of Reddington’s Rare Records fame) about his old shop and a penpal friendship he had with Reggie Kray!

I’m becoming convinced that this “hearing the person behind the story” is one of the few ways videos on newspaper sites can work really well.

Alfie the opera budgie

I’m planning to buy a little camcorder to play around with videos on this blog, so I thought I’d check out the videos produced by our sister paper the Birmingham Mail.

The paper employed their video journalist Phil Vinter a few months ago and they have been playing around with the medium ever since, trying to find out what works for the paper.

I think some videos work better than others, but this particular one  had me in hysterics (it would be nice if I could embed it, can I?). It’s all about Alfie the budgerigar who can, apparently, sing along to Il Divo. A slow news day perhaps?