A murder occurred on the third floor of the News Building on Monday and it still remains unsolved.

The fact that I was the victim may mean that it will be a cold case for a long time to come.

We were capturing my demise for video training this week provided by our corporate parent Gannett Co. Inc., and our videographers were crowding around the "crime scene" trying to get the best shot. There were some good zoom shots of ketchup dripping down my face.

When we took a look at the first story packages, we realized there was much work to do. Then again, none of the participants had shot video in this manner before and most had never edited a frame.

As I've mentioned before, we at The Advertiser know we have to keep improving our print edition, but we also realize that our Web site is growing dramatically and there's a great demand for breaking news headlines, community news sites, news databases, calendar listings and videos.

With 28 staffers from Honolulu and our sister paper, the Pacific Daily News on Guam, in video training this week — representing news, business, features, the editorial page, copy desk, photo, online, advertising and marketing — we learned about voiceovers and microphone levels and zooming and panning and stand-ups and b-roll and timelines and scrubbing and nat (natural) sound.

When the week ended, we weren't all perfect videographers, but now we have the basics to give you more and better video. Our reporters, photographers and others are excited about learning a new set of skills and delivering the news in a fresh way.

You may be wondering: Why try to turn a bunch of traditional newspaper people into journalists with video kits filled with Sony cameras, audio kits, portable lights and tripods?

Because we understand the phenomenon of YouTube (Google bought the popular online video site in October for $1.65 billion) and that online video will become a $1.8 trillion (with a "t") industry. We also know that broadband access in Honolulu is among the highest in the nation. As a leading source for local news, it just makes sense for us to find out if there's an appetite for video on our Web sites.

Gannett, which owns 22 television stations and 90 newspapers, has sent its trainers to 16 sites and has held sessions for 320 people from 62 U.S. newspapers, including ours. In the United Kingdom, it has trained 68 people from 19 newspapers. And there are many more sessions to come.

Since the training began, more than 6,000 videos have been produced by Gannett newspapers. Last March, about 3,700 videos were streamed from Gannett newspaper Web sites. By December, the number was 555,123. To us, that means that there is an audience for video on newspaper Web sites.

We are not turning into a television station, and clearly TV news does a good job of covering what goes on in Hawai'i. Television station Web sites are getting better at showcasing their video clips. But we believe our audience might enjoy what we have to offer, and so our videos are growing in sophistication and number.

Last month, we produced more than 40 video clips and page views amounted to more than 27,000. Our goal is to double that number soon. We're proud of all our efforts, including a fire at a business edited by one of our photographers. We also contributed a video to Gannett News Service on the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Besides our own video, we will be soliciting footage from other sources, including readers.

For fun, take a look at the video of my murder. The one we are presenting is pretty good because it was prepared by our trainers, who happen to be professional broadcasters, but after five days of training, our own reporters and photographers are now putting together pretty impressive video presentations and they are excited about what's to come.