"You can't even take your family to the movies no more"

With gas prices at an all-time high in Texas, I spent an afternoon at a gas station talking to drivers about how rising fuel prices are affecting their personal budgets. The video, edited by ace colleague Randy Eli Grothe, aims to humanize the impact of skyrocketing gas prices.

Bunnies, ducks and squirrels, oh my

Videos about cute critters never fail to attract viewers.

Surprise endings

Web readers who choose to watch a news video are clicking on good faith that the video will be worth their time. Every now and then, it's nice to reward these readers with an ending that surprises them and makes them glad they took the time to watch. My colleague Richard Michael Pruitt pulls this off masterfully in today's video about Dallas area residents enduring their second day without electricity after a ferocious storm. I tried to take the same surprise ending approach in my accompanying story, but if you compare both examples, you'll see how video trumps the written word in taking readers to the scene to experience the moment themselves.

Capturing breaking news on camera

While many of us love the meticulous craft of producing feature videos that take weeks or months to complete, breaking news events almost always attract the most hits on newspaper Web sites these days. Mark Lorenz, chief photographer at the Salem News near Boston, captured compelling breaking news in this video showing a firefighter's escape from a burning second-floor apartment. (Click on the video on the right side of the screen.) Mark held his shot and let his sources tell the story.