In May and June, the Oriella PR Network surveyed 770 journalists in 15 nations. They were asked some touchy-feely questions, like whether they’re happy and satisfied (shockingly, yes, for the most part), and a bunch of questions that get to what the work of journalism is becoming in this chaotic time.
The trend that leaped out at me is the decline in journalists’ interest in multimedia content. While blogs and Twitter were on the rise, the percent of journos whose organizations produce online video clips dropped rather sharply, from 47% in 2009 to just under 40% in 2010. And that decline didn’t translate into getting more video-based publicity materials. Only 27% wanted links to video content from PRs, compared to 35% the year before. The proportion interested in audio content also shrank.
That’s kind of interesting at a moment when the bar to producing video is lower than ever, ad rates on video content are halfway to decent, and, it’s safe to say, our culture is no less image-driven than before. We haven’t exactly become voracious readers overnight.
Yet Oriella’s numbers confirm a feeling I’ve had for some time now: that the expiration date on all the enthusiasm about historically text-based news organizations becoming multimedia players and making the leap to video has come. While there’s a seemingly boundless appetite for music videos and clips of kittens and Justin Bieber, it’s not easy to aggregate a meaningful audience for online video news.
Except that it points to the continued resource-starvation in newsrooms, I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing simply because the sloughing off of forms that don’t work can lead to better focus on the ones that do.
Anyone who dived into the early days of online video news saw and heard some scary stuff. Droning conversation with little regard for readers’ attention span, a preponderance of, to coin a phrase, faces for text, a lack of appreciation for editing, awful visual effects, bad suits, foundation applied like spackle.
Part of the problem was the lack of imagination that infected most newspapers, however well-funded, when they decided they wanted to do video. Basically, these have amounted to taking the TV news format — serious-looking people sitting behind a desk talking seriously about the news of the day –and transposing it online. While this might be the only way to do the job in a cost-effective way, it’s a format that doesn’t hold up terribly well in the age of “The Daily Show and The Onion, whose mock news network got attention for its forthcoming “News from the Year 2137.” (Here’s the trailer.)
The other problem is that video news is typically user-unfriendly. You can scan a headline, a lede, and maybe even a nutgraf and then move on to your kitten films before the lame spinning global intro comes to a close on your typical news clip. And there are contextual problems for many readers. Most of us read news sites in a workplace where we can’t easily turn up the volume or put on the headphones.
Given the cost restraints of most news organizations, your average text report will serve a reader better than its video equivalent. I’m exempting both large organizations that specialize in video (CNN) and relatively high-quality productions that truly take advantage of the form. Vice’s VBS.TV would be one of these, but I don’t know of too many like it — offerings where the video form is integral to the content.
Because of that relative paucity, the decline of online video news is one of media’s ailments that I find tough to lament.
As a reward for reading to the end, here’s your bonus kitten video.
