Web video doesn’t need to take a long time to create

Posted on May 7, 2008 by pat

A lot of journalists are concerned that Web video will eat up a lot of their time.

It doesn’t have to. In fact, in most instances it shouldn’t. The Return On Investment for spending a lot of time on Web video just isn’t there.

There is a lot of advertising money available for broadcast news. Online advertising is a much more competitive landscape (just like online advertising is much more competitive than print advertising). Keeping this reality in mind, Web video can’t afford to be as polished (overproduced) as broadcast news.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

For instance, I covered an event today at the Vietnam Wall. Several new names were being added to the Wall, and one of the widows spoke. I was able to shoot video, edit it and produce a 4 minute piece in about 3 hours. This is keeping in mind that the even itself lasted about 45 minutes.

And let’s be clear here: video is not my strong suit. Writing is my original journalism skill, while Web design is my original Web skill. I also don’t do a lot of video, yet. I’m sure with more practice with Adobe Premier Pro (I was trained on Final Cut Pro), I could get a quicker turnaround.

But the point is we were able to produce a perfectly watchable video that has a point within a few hours (Someone else wrote a short written story, which is quicker to complete than a audio voice over, and he also did a photo gallery. We sell prints of our photos, which increases the ROI on photo galleries).

Note: click here for the reedit I posted later.

The point is no amount of additional production would have made this video that much better, especially from a ROI perspective. Sure, I could have spent a few more hours polishing this piece up, perhaps adding a TV-style narration to it (or we could have skipped the time spent on the written story and photo gallery and put it into a glitzier video package). But that would have just left me unable to do other things to, like write a story on a different subject and do some work on our Web site.

The biggest difference is that content is king online, where production is often king on TV. I call it guerrilla video. It’s about the immediacy and impact of the video, not the production quality.

And while it might be about good enough when it comes to production quality, it’s still high-quality journalism when it comes to content. That’s ultimately what matters.

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  • http://www.chrisamico.com/blog Chris Amico

    One of the biggest advantages of doing video for the web that I see is that the video doesn’t have to be the centerpiece. Sometimes the video tells the whole story, sometimes it adds another branch, sometimes it just illustrates one part.

    In the above example, I’d suggest two things:
    Make the first speech (not sure if it was a eulogy) its own video. Embed that with the text story. It’s illustrative, and while it doesn’t tell the whole story, it gives more depth to one part that readers might be interested in.
    Voice over the name-chiseling, mix in interviews, tell the story. Make this a (very short) piece that can stand alone as a short version of the story, then link to the text version.

    Hopefully, breaking up videos into shorter chunks will save both readers and producers time. At least, that’s what I’m counting on with my own work.

  • http://www.patthorntonfiles.com pat

    @Chris,

    That’s the approach I often use with audio. I break up interviews, events, etc into short vignettes. It tends to work well with at least audio (especially when teamed up with written content). It might work with video too.

    I’ll post a link to the written story and photo gallery shortly when they go live. I think it makes more sense to view it as a total package, then just a video report. I’m a big fan of mixing different mediums together to tell better, more immediate stories.

  • Joe Ruiz

    Honestly, I think that’s been one of my biggest problems with working on my own video. I fear that maybe I’m not putting enough production value rather than just providing a clean outlet for the content.

    That might come from working on a TV station’s Web site, but you’re right — getting the content up quickly is more important than a full-fledged production effort.

    Much appreciated.

  • http://www.chrisamico.com/blog Chris Amico

    The other thing that I think is important (I should really be writing my own post on this) is how video is used within the context of the whole site.

    A lot of newspaper.coms, including those I’ve worked for, have this “video vault” thing shoved off in the corner. It’s sort of an online news channel, which makes it easy to find all the video the site does, but it also limits the kind of video journalists can do.

    Video that’s away from text and on its own pretty much has to be the packaged, short-doc style, which takes longer to produce. Otherwise it doesn’t have enough context to tell the whole story. I find myself watching a lot of these and asking where the nut graph is. Also, I’ve found very few sites that link from the video vault to the related text story.

  • http://patthorntonfiles.com/blog/?p=265 The Journalism Iconoclast » Reediting Web video is easy, fast

    [...] About Home The Pat Thornton Files « Web video doesn’t need to take a long time to create [...]

  • http://www.themodernjournalist.com/2008/05/07/ah-web-video-the-latest-savior/ The Modern Journalist » Blog Archive » Ah, Web Video. The Latest Savior

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

  • http://www.themodernjournalist.com Brad King

    Hey Pat:

    Since I blogged about it, I figure I should comment about it.

    I think there’s lots of smart things here — and in the comments. The idea that reporters should be shooting video is misguided in most cases (although I like this clip).

    There are so many ways to engage the citizenry in this process. It’s hard to imagine trying to cover the city when with a simple tag and zip code, you could create a citizen-video channel, with oversight by the editors to create a “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned” channel.

    This requires a community manager of some kind, it’s true, but what a wonderful resource.

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