The Modern Journalist

Ah, Web Video. The Latest Savior

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One of the rather disturbing trends I have experienced in my talks with newspaper folks is there insistence on latching on to the latest trend.

It’s easy to get caught up in the mix. After all, new technologies roll out every day and if you’re not careful, you can find yourself at the bottom of an avalanche of circuits, software and gadgets.

Video is one of those trends that frightens me. Not because it’s not important. Clearly, media of all types are important and the rise of the vlogger certainly show how powerful the medium can be.

But news organizations really need to think about their video strategy. They need to understand what does well, what their strengths are and what the best use of the video is. Not mention, what sells.

The Online Journalism Review has the best description I’ve ever read about how you should think about video.

What concerns me is what Pat Thornton wrote at the Journalism Iconoclast today: Web video isn’t hard to make.

The reason for my trepidation with video isn’t that I disagree with the fundamental point Thornton makes. He’s correct. You can bang out a video in just a few hours.

The question is: why?

There are tons of ways to create cool video stories that don’t involve sending out a videographer — or worse, making a reporter shoot video while they are out (unless it’s a breaking news situation or a situation where video does as some relevance to the story).

Community-driven video is the most obvious way. Encouraging people to upload their videos, tagged correctly, on YouTube gives you access to as much content as you desire (assuming you have a community manager and a marketing department willing to take the time to engage the community).

Now, I do agree with Thornton’s premise that news sites shouldn’t focus on aesthetics and produced packages. The brilliance of the online sphere is that raw data is still king. You don’t want to produce these pieces. You want to find the portions of it that illustrate the story, that humanize the event, that bring attention to the people who are the heart of the story.

Production online seems…weird. The point of the computer medium is that it strips away the artifice that is television. It enables us to capture a different tone — a more human tone — because we don’t require someone to spoon feed us information.

You would never see a raw, 4-minute story (like Thornton posted) of a eulogy on local news. But I defy you to not watch. It’s riveting because it’s real, raw and human.

If news companies get that, we’ll have an explosion of video online.