Aperture

I recently had an email discussion about the future of video on newspaper websites with a print-journalist friend of mine. I thought it was interesting and wanted to pass it along. So here it is, in Q&A format. I’ve anonymized everything, as the person offers some fairly candid opinions, and would prefer they not get in the way of good work relationships.  Anyhow, what say you?

Note: If you’re reading this on the front page of Understudy, click through the permalink to bring up the comment-enabled version of this post.

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Friend: Newspapers are getting big on video—really big—which I am not convinced on, because people look at news sites during the day, when they’re at work. And it’s pretty hard to look busy while watching video at work. This is why video hasn’t gotten huge traction yet and I’m not sure how much of an audience there is for video news in the off hours. And if it’s going to be done, I suspect it will be by people who specialize in video, either out of TV or Hollywood. (This is the same reason NPR’s podcasts are successful and so many newspaper podcasts are unbearable failures.)

Right now, newspaper websites are confusing technology with talent. I mean, producing, filming, scripting and editing (not to mention, say, interviewing and thinking) are all actual skills people have, for years and years, gone to school and learned and practiced in a several marketplaces. But we act like the ability to put it on the Internet automatically produces people who can do that stuff and do it well. It’s as if we had page designers or printers write the stories.

Me: Do you think the next generation of journalists, many of whom seem to be cross-training in different media, will do a better job of this stuff?

Friend: Well, probably, but I don’t know how good the video programs at the J-schools are. That’s not code for “I’m suspicious of them.” I mean, I honestly don’t know.

I mean, print and radio and video are all pretty different from each other, right? So while I think you’ll get a few people who are good at all three (like athletes who can play baseball and basketball and football), mostly people will do one thing. And there’s the real problem—that some newspapers now expect you to do text, audio and video for the same story, which is not such a hot idea. I mean, it’s possible to be a tri-athlete but it’s impossible to run, bike and swim simultaneously.

Me: Okay, if we take your premise, might we see a few outlets that allocate different resources to different stories, though? Lots of TV news organizations, for instance, run wire stories for most of their print articles, and produce their own video. With varying levels of success, of course. Not everyone likes the end product.

Friend: In my ideal world, the same place would employ people to do audio, video and print. I mean, we’re already comfortable employing both photographers and reporters.

It’s just that right now newspapers have the peculiar idea that before the Internet such things as audio and video didn’t exist, and therefore we don’t have to hire outside of our narrow industry.

Plus, there’s the youth thing. Editors both don’t understand young people, and simultaneously crave them as totems of relevance. Ditto for the Internet. So they assume that all young people “get” the Internet and are good at it—and since they assume audio and video are Internet things, the young must also be good at audio and video. Never mind that your shiny new videographer is a film school reject.

Me: What about newspaper sites that do seem to have put together some high quality video, like the Washington Post? Their animated editorial cartoons and their illustrator series on “drawing the candidates,” for instance, have both been both well-done—and apparently very popular.

Friend: Yeah, some of the video over there was pretty nice. And someday in the future when the Internet replaces both television and newspapers, video will be a very important part of that. But while it makes all sorts of sense to get good at video in advance of that day (you never know when it will arrive), I don’t think it should be championed ahead of what works right now and what you’ll still need in the future—an organization of your information that is both complete and versatile, i.e., having working digital archives and good search engines, along with some good tags and context linking.

But that stuff frequently gets ignored at newspaper organizations—it doesn’t make for sexy PowerPoint presentations.

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Further Reading:

Newspaper Video Blog on Blogspot

“Newspapers Find Online Video Niche” on B&C

Newspaper Association of America on Online Video

As a research project, I’ve been studying news values on Daily Kos. Kossacks have a culture of sourcing. They provide links to all the facts in their posts and replies, or risk being called out by other community members. DK isn’t a news outlet, but in that respect, the community operates a lot like journalism and plain old good conversation. Linking to sources is a way of establishing (or demanding) credibility in online conversations, and so it has the potential to raise the level of discussion, and to increase the credibility of the commenters who, I would argue, bring a lot of the unique value to online news.

And then there’s Wordpress. I love Wordpress. I do. It’s an awesome CMS and a flagship of the open source community. My question here concerns its spam-blocking settings. Even without enabling Akismet, Wordpress is set, by default, to hold comments for moderation that contain more than 2 links. That would seem to penalize well-sourced replies to blog posts. It doesn’t permanently delete them, true. But it also holds up impromptu conversation of the sort that takes place on Kos, unless of course the blog owner is hovering over the “moderate comments” button.

While a blog (or WP-based news outlet) is small, and receiving only a couple comments a day, then that’s not a big deal. But if it has a large readership, this could inhibit discussion, or dumb it down considerably by discouraging well-sourced replies. And what happens when a blog is making the shift from small to large readership?

Well, I suppose I should give credit to bloggers for being smart people. They can change the Wordpress defaults if they’re a problem. And if their blogs are becoming wildly popular, then they may just be hovering over the “moderate comments” button anyhow. But I do wonder whether there’s an insidious side to spam blocking, which prevents occasional value-added discussions from happening where they otherwise might.

What say you? Have you ever been left out of a blog discussion because your brilliant post sat in the comment queue, while other people tossed around pithy remarks? Have you ever watched someone duplicate your idea in a thread, simply because your reply is sitting unread in the holding bin, with links to credible sources, while the come-lately blogger tossed off the same idea as a hypothetical?

Or do these things never happen?