My friend, Ken Sands, has a very good post on Poynter today, High Cost, Low Quality Plague Newspaper Video Efforts, which I sent around to my colleagues as recommended reading.
Even at the Washington Post, where they hired skilled TV professionals and produced top-quality video, the return on investment has been elusive.
Let me more snarkily summarize the progression of the discussion over video that played out in newsrooms across the country:
1) "Hmm, this YouTube thing is catching on. Think we should be doing video?"
2) "Omigod, circulation is down! Everyone must shoot video of everything all the time."
3) "Geeze, cameras are kind of expensive. I never realized. And what's this button for?"
4) "We're getting flip cams for everyone on the staff. Video everything."
5) "Betty, um, you need to, um, hold the camera still when you're shooting. And please don't smack your gum, either."
6) "Who's going to edit all this video? And what's this button for?"
7) "Gee, you know, if we spend a day shooting video of a feature story, we're lucky if 80 people look at it. We write a story that says a truck overturned on state Route 100 and it gets 4,000 page views."
8) "We have to do live streaming video of every news conference the mayor holds!"
9) "Man this stuff takes time!"
10) "You know, one reason no one is watching this video is it, well, kinda sucks."
11) "Hey wait, how do we put advertising on here? We should have advertising on here."
12) "Hmm, why don't our advertisers want to pay to be on our video player?" (See Nos. 6 and 9, above.
13) "With all these staff reductions, we can't afford to do video anymore. No one watches it and we're not making any money at it."
14) (then back to:) "Hmm, this YouTube thing is catching on. Should we be doing video?"
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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