Khatz had mentioned this website previously in one of his posts:
http://www.fnn-news.com/
So what I did is have that browser opened in one window and then open up another window to this page:
http://yomoyomo.jp/index.php
select the hiragana version and enter the FNN News site in the URL
This will put everything in furigana (It does furigana if you have Google Chrome in Japanese installed anyways...otherwise it will put the hiragana in parenthesis next to each word for some weird reason)
Now just read through the furigana version and use rikaikun to learn any words that you are having trouble with.
Why not just use rikaikun in the 1st place? Because for some reason rikaikun can't figure out names and places very well. The Yomo Yomo site solves this pretty well.
So after all of that watch the video again and you'll be amazed at how easy it is to understand!!

My only question is... is it somehow possible to import these short video clips into Anki or something for review? That would be pretty nifty...

The furigana injector plug-in works fairly well. Granted, it has some issues with FNN due to it's page layout and video imbed.

Hashiriya Wrote:My only question is... is it somehow possible to import these short video clips into Anki or something for review? That would be pretty nifty...

You could use something like Orbit Downloader to download the videos, and then Aegisub to create subtitles from the transcriptions.

Then you could use Subs2Srs to create Anki decks from the news.

Or you could just download the videos and create a card for each one (since they're rather short).

srs a lot of vocab, especially news. That's basically what it takes to understand/read news to it's fullest. It's not hard to understand to it's fullest but it does take time. It took me a while to gain the ability to read/understand majority of stuff in general and from news. Around 10-1 year mark. (Mean japanese,different media,etc)

thanks for the replies guys... i'll look into these links

Just when you can understand it, be diligent as always to not take mainstream news to seriously.