Comments on: Video does not equal new media

By: MichaelJ

MichaelJ — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:47:21 +0000

Thank you getting this out there. Just my two cents, There are two mass media. One is TV/radio. The other is Print. Everything else are niche media. What makes it so confusing is that the niche is all filled with journalists and media types.

By: Julie B.

Julie B. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:30:55 +0000

One of my major problems with online video reporting is, as you said, that I want to watch at work. And it’s a pain to get out my headphones so I don’t disturb anybody. I think that using captioning or subtitles on videos is a great way to get around that, and I wish more newspapers would start using it. Not captioning goes back to that “good enough” mentality – but it’s an accessibility issue, too. :-/

By: Video

Video — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:12:56 +0000

Agreed…but shooting, cediting, writing as one man band in HD with a documentary feel is rather new. Let alone doing so from the field, which the times does. We’d be happy to see a stronger nod to the video done at the New York Times…in the context of your discussion on quality.

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:30:51 +0000

I wrote in the Press Gazette on this subject last November – the blog version is at http://ojournalism.blogspot.com/2006/10/analysis-video-journalism-is-easy.html – and podcasted on it at http://onlinejournalismblog.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/the-lofi-podcast-should-newspapers-bother-with-video-journalism/. To their credit, I think newspapers are starting to get the video thing, and you can’t argue with 43% of users accessing video. But I still can’t stand not being able to click through in the same way you can with hypertext…

By: poor_journalist

poor_journalist — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 02:21:11 +0000

Lighten up, Frances — there’s nothing more annoying than a “tough guy” posting online.

And as has been pointed out several times already, he’s right. Newspapers are obsessed with adding video to their sites it seems at the expense of anything else — i.e. a hyper local journalism database. The quality is often poor, and you’ll find newspaper using valuable real estate on their Web site’s “front page” to promote it.

I think the NYTimes has the right idea with it — video almost never leads their site, but it’s a nice little section “below the fold” on the site. It’s a supplement, not the main course.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 01:20:16 +0000

I’ve heard more than one online journalist, editor and/or producer say that it seems as if about a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, all the newspaper execs must have gone to the same conference where someone told them they all ‘had to” do online video. And like robots, they accepted that command and ran home and made everyone start doing video, willy-nilly. I am not saying this literally happened, but to many working in online journalism, it SEEMS like this is what happened. Because it was sudden and in many ways unexpected.

I think they (the execs) just saw viewer numbers for YouTube. Compared with their own dwindling numbers, this seemed a harbinger of … something. And as usual in the newspaper business, they didn’t research or plan or strategize. They just made new rules.

I agree completely that online video is hardly the sum total of online journalism or “new media” (a phrase that sounds dumber and dumber as the years pass). However, it’s not all bad, either. There’s some wonderful work being done by these new videographers.

Like you, I wish some of the time and money going into online video would go into database projects and explanatory and/or interactive graphics. Online journalism would be better as a result.

By: bored_at_work

bored_at_work — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:43:44 +0000

not sure why jimmy’s quite so upset…it’d be hard for any intelligent journalist who isn’t in denial about the state of the profession to deny any of what is said in this post…

and, if he was wondering about the research/poll methods, there’s certainly a right and wrong way to inquire.

By: pat

pat — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:05:53 +0000

Jimmy, it’s a singular survey from my journalism honors thesis, and it was one prong of several I used for it. The survey was for Lehigh University students (all were allowed to take it within a 24-hour period). It’s not a survey that is representative of the U.S. population, but the reason I like it is that it shows how young, educated people view journalism.

I plan on making either my whole thesis or parts of it available on this blog or my personal site. I think it would be a good read for many people, but I should caution that some of my research dates back to 2005, and that’s a lifetime ago on the Web.

By: jimmy

jimmy — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:21:37 +0000

Hey Pat – put up or shut up. You keep mentioning all these “surveys” you’ve conducted. You should step up and let us know a little about your survey methodology so we can know just how big a grain of salt we need to take with your coils of journalistic “insight.”

For starters, how about your target population and sample frame? Response rate? Confidence intervals? What steps did you take to account for response bias? How did you handle recruiting? Multiple contacts over multiple modes? Snowballing? Convenience? What incentives were used? And how about your analytics? Did you just tally up numbers and intuit your findings? Or did you manage to bring to bear any actual statistical analysis? How about showing us your instruments?

Yeah, I thought so.

By: When it comes to newspaper video, focus on the bigger picture : William M. Hartnett

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:58:19 +0000

[...] thoughts on newspaper video today from Patrick Thornton (Video does not equal new media) and Ryan Sholin (Why shoot newspaper video?). On the specific issue of newspaper video, for [...]

By: Invisible Inkling » Why shoot newspaper video?

Invisible Inkling » Why shoot newspaper video? — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:02:08 +0000

[...] a missive from the camp I’ll call BiggerBetter, from Patrick Thornton, in a post about how not only is video not “new media,” but how we shouldn’t even be b… if we’re not going to treat it with as much care and reverence as we treat the print edition: [...]

By: Martin Stabe » links for 2007-08-13

Martin Stabe » links for 2007-08-13 — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:25:30 +0000

[...] The Journalism Iconoclast: Video does not equal new media Pat Thornton: “Reporting the news with video isnâ€™t exactly new. So, why would throwing some random video on your Web site all the sudden make you new media? It wouldn’t.” (tags: video online newspapers multimedia journalism _er) [...]

By: Marc Matteo

Marc Matteo — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 04:36:08 +0000

Oh thank you!

I’ve been saying this for sometime… to an empty room. I think a big part of the problem is that many (most?) newspapers are only now trying to get into this “new” medium in earnest after almost a decade of pushing it off on 20-somethings in the marketing department (“it’s just a fad”).

Now they’re making the same mistakes that we did in 1997 and none the wiser. The problem is, now it matters, back then it didn’t.