Breaking news video—regardless of quality—is building audiences for a select few sites. According to the Web research firm comScore, news is keeping pace with the explosive growth in all online video viewing. In May there were 566 million views of what comScore classifies as news video, which includes weather sites. That’s about double the 278 million views recorded for May 2009. CNN.com and MSNBC.com are the two biggest news sites in terms of video traffic, says a comScore spokesman. The two sites, plus Yahoo News, make up 70 percent of comScore’s video news category. (ComScore’s data is really just a rough approximation of news viewing online, given the difficulty in classifying what’s news. For example, everything on YouTube is considered entertainment by comScore and is not included in its figures, although YouTube does stream a lot of news uploaded by media organizations as well as individual users.)
The problem with traffic as the main measure of news video, though, is that great video stories that don’t attract big audiences are perceived to be failures. David Leeson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who began shooting video in 2000 for The Dallas Morning News, says publishers initially backed video “because they had visions of YouTube fame. But with 80,000 to 90,000 videos published every day, going viral is like winning the lottery. Good luck with that.” Leeson, who took a buyout in 2008, acknowledges that a thirty-second clip of an eighteen-wheeler that crashed and burned gets a lot of hits. But he argues that managers need to take their eyes off the number of streams and instead look at the larger, changing market for news. “Over time, people will recognize quality,” Leeson says. “People will know to go to your site for credible news and information. That’s how papers built circulation. You didn’t know if everyone read an inside story on page four of Metro, but we still covered it.”
Photographers and video journalists like Leeson are increasingly attracted to work for advocacy groups and corporations that see the value of powerful visual storytelling. With that exodus, serious journalism suffers. In journalism, “ultimately, video was viewed as window dressing, a fundamental misunderstanding of its potential,” says Tom Kennedy, a former managing editor for multimedia at Washingtonpost.com, who stepped down in early 2009 to teach and consult.
Kennedy, who will begin teaching at Syracuse University this fall, recently authored a white paper on video journalism for Bill Gentile, an independent documentary filmmaker and journalist-in-residence at American University. Gentile has launched the “Backpack Journalism” project at the school, a program to teach people to act as one-man journalism bands on video stories: report, interview, shoot, edit, narrate, and upload their files for publication.
Kennedy and Gentile make a powerful argument for this as the storytelling of the future, but the white paper adds, “Backpack journalism may afford interesting future career opportunities, albeit perhaps most strongly in fields other than journalism.” Ugh.
On July 18, I did a Google search for video of “oil spill” and “BP.” I specified “high quality” in my query, but didn’t limit the length or narrow the date range. No videos from major news organizations appeared in the top ten returns. What did appear seemed random. Search is a real problem when it comes to quality news video.
My search’s top-ranked video was from a site called Hollywoodbackstage.com: a silent, fifty-nine second montage of aerial images from an oil-slicked Gulf. Numbers two and four were entertaining, but not news: two was a Saturday Night Live skit via Hulu.com and four was a funny spoof of BP executives dealing with a coffee spill during a meeting, performed by UCBcomedy.com. Number three was an informative snippet from Al Jazeera’s English-language broadcast, with a host explaining an animated graphic of the engineering needed to cap the blown well. The other top ten picks included a couple of souped-up home videos, a couple of apocalyptic screeds, and an excerpt from ABC’s The View, with the hosts discussing BP’s apology.
Abs. Superb!
Drew, Leacock et al were massive pioneers, fundamental in shaping a visual medium and a methodology, as were Rouch, Marker et al in Europe. You could even look to the work of Eisenstein whom instigated cinema verite (kino). All had a passion, all searched for an aesthetic.
Videojournalism's Achille is in part its search for a home. Shooting a camera, making a news film was never quite as revolutionary as it was made to seem. Jessica Borthwicke in 1914 would further prove that when at 24 with a Newman camera and a few days training she left London to film the Crimean war.
What's dogged film all the while and thus attracted stern critique is the search for an aesthetic. History informs us these have arisen through a number of supervening moments.
But videojournalism's supervening time, at least as a creative aesthetic construct has often been junked in favour of a replication of a status quo inured by saving costs and multiskilling.
It's finding one now; small pockets.
If you'll pardon me. In 2005 when I was awarded a Batten Award, this was the precise question within videojournalism that taxed me then and still does today.
The judges commented on viewmagazine.tv (the site and video I produced) as:
“This interactive magazine foreshadows the future with its use of hip new story forms and highly video-centric Web tools.”
-2005 Batten Advisory Board Judges
That future then, is now upon us at present, but the aesthetic and philosophy has moved on. There's a fresh media ascendancy, albeit limited at the moment that resides in the collocation of photography and video, animation, and less a reliance on television and at times the classic video obs docs lingua franca.
Hence the bril work of Travis Fox, Angela Grant, Brian Storm et al. I've had the opportunity in many cases of talking to them personally or on the dog and bone (Gosh these air fares are killing me).
Your post is prescient as I have just returned from interviewing some of the UK's leading television/media figures about this,, such as Stuart Purvis who was Editor-in-Chief and then Chief Executive of ITN from 1995-2003.
One little unknown story, which I'm pursuing acknowledges the contribution of a UK cable outfit in 1994 solely dedicated to videojournalism called Channel One. I'll post what Stuart says on Youtube and my blog.
But Channel One 1994, which I was part of accepted in its early days (tutored by a young Michael Rosenblum) the need for a newish aesthetic.
What's more none of the videojournalists were constrained by a paradigm or semiotic of news production. We made programmes - a Zero or Z principle of media production. Nothing was wasted, it all unfurled together.
We were informed, at least I was, by a run of programmes on BBC e.g. Reportage and Def II. Stuff today we might take for granted, but led to great late night debates and films.
And today many of those former videojournalists work in the industry and their work has attracted huge acclaim e.g. Dimitri Doganis Raw TV .
The videojournalism ( that poor word) I see is one that is maturing but beyond its traditional stables, driven by, yet not wedded to exclusively a cinema aesthetic, a motion graphic derivative, a visual verite, a narratology which will do for it, what blogs did for news copy. A time when we'll video hyperlink pieces and drill further into aspects of design and video and how they work.
There's still work to be done, but articles like yours Jill become, or should become a camp fire to explore the contemporary, antecedents, and what ifs.
Videojourna
#1 Posted by David Dunkley Gyimah, CJR on Thu 23 Sep 2010 at 11:09 AM
If you folks aren't careful, you'll invent television.
#2 Posted by Stuart Watson, CJR on Thu 23 Sep 2010 at 04:26 PM
Good roundup, but how on earth did you miss KobreGuide to the Web's Best Videojournalism, which showcases nearly all the gems you've cited and hundreds more, all selected and annotated by pros, published by legendary SFSU Prof. Ken Kobre since 2008... It is consulted daily by leading media organizations, top practitioners, aspiring VJs and journalism students around the world... It's one-stop-shopping for all videojournalism enthusiasts who want to view the best the medium has to offer, and are stymied by the very problem you cite -- news Websites hide their stuff so well that nobody can find it amidst the rubble... Another point worth making: Local audiences for, say, the Detroit Free Press (freep.com) or the St. Petersburg Times (tampabay.com) are unlikely to view videos on out-of-town websites -- despite the fact that many have national and/or universal appeal... KobreGuide.com increases the visibility and audiences for those meritorious video stories. ... http://www.KobreGuide.com
#3 Posted by JERRY LAZAR, CJR on Thu 23 Sep 2010 at 05:13 PM
I would be interested to know where you would draw a line between video journalism and documentary film-making - topics? audience? distribution? challenges getting noticed? funding? The two would appear to be very similar.
#4 Posted by Michael Fox, CJR on Fri 24 Sep 2010 at 12:21 AM
Great piece. I think the biggest factor related to time spent is the user's expectations prior to clicking on a video. Simply producing a 15-minute video isn't enough. You have to build an audience that appreciates long-form visual storytelling on your site by producing great work. If a video is sandwiched between a web gem and some breaking news, then why would any user expect to stay for an entire 15-minute piece?
I don't see how any organization can build an audience that will stay for longer stories without clearly separating the different forms of video on the site. On the Web, you don't know what you're going to get until you click. Anything that news organizations can do to alleviate that uncertainty on the web will be crucial to the success of in-depth, visual journalism.
#5 Posted by McKenna Ewen, CJR on Fri 24 Sep 2010 at 11:21 AM
I think Vimeo (www.vimeo com) should yield better results than Google or YouTube for this type of content, since it's generally home to more professional film makers. I think another videojournalism website worth mentioning is Journeyman Pictures (www.journeyman.tv).
#6 Posted by Rodrigo Ordóñez, CJR on Fri 24 Sep 2010 at 11:51 PM