Aperture

Newspaper Video, Today and in the Future

Josh Braun — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:55:38 +0000

I recently had an email discussion about the future of video on newspaper websites with a print-journalist friend of mine. I thought it was interesting and wanted to pass it along. So here it is, in Q&A format. I’ve anonymized everything, as the person offers some fairly candid opinions, and would prefer they not get in the way of good work relationships. Anyhow, what say you?

Note: If you’re reading this on the front page of Understudy, click through the permalink to bring up the comment-enabled version of this post.

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Friend: Newspapers are getting big on video—really big—which I am not convinced on, because people look at news sites during the day, when they’re at work. And it’s pretty hard to look busy while watching video at work. This is why video hasn’t gotten huge traction yet and I’m not sure how much of an audience there is for video news in the off hours. And if it’s going to be done, I suspect it will be by people who specialize in video, either out of TV or Hollywood. (This is the same reason NPR’s podcasts are successful and so many newspaper podcasts are unbearable failures.)

Right now, newspaper websites are confusing technology with talent. I mean, producing, filming, scripting and editing (not to mention, say, interviewing and thinking) are all actual skills people have, for years and years, gone to school and learned and practiced in a several marketplaces. But we act like the ability to put it on the Internet automatically produces people who can do that stuff and do it well. It’s as if we had page designers or printers write the stories.

Me: Do you think the next generation of journalists, many of whom seem to be cross-training in different media, will do a better job of this stuff?

Friend: Well, probably, but I don’t know how good the video programs at the J-schools are. That’s not code for “I’m suspicious of them.” I mean, I honestly don’t know.

I mean, print and radio and video are all pretty different from each other, right? So while I think you’ll get a few people who are good at all three (like athletes who can play baseball and basketball and football), mostly people will do one thing. And there’s the real problem—that some newspapers now expect you to do text, audio and video for the same story, which is not such a hot idea. I mean, it’s possible to be a tri-athlete but it’s impossible to run, bike and swim simultaneously.

Me: Okay, if we take your premise, might we see a few outlets that allocate different resources to different stories, though? Lots of TV news organizations, for instance, run wire stories for most of their print articles, and produce their own video. With varying levels of success, of course. Not everyone likes the end product.

Friend: In my ideal world, the same place would employ people to do audio, video and print. I mean, we’re already comfortable employing both photographers and reporters.

It’s just that right now newspapers have the peculiar idea that before the Internet such things as audio and video didn’t exist, and therefore we don’t have to hire outside of our narrow industry.

Plus, there’s the youth thing. Editors both don’t understand young people, and simultaneously crave them as totems of relevance. Ditto for the Internet. So they assume that all young people “get” the Internet and are good at it—and since they assume audio and video are Internet things, the young must also be good at audio and video. Never mind that your shiny new videographer is a film school reject.

Me: What about newspaper sites that do seem to have put together some high quality video, like the Washington Post? Their animated editorial cartoons and their illustrator series on “drawing the candidates,” for instance, have both been both well-done—and apparently very popular.

Friend: Yeah, some of the video over there was pretty nice. And someday in the future when the Internet replaces both television and newspapers, video will be a very important part of that. But while it makes all sorts of sense to get good at video in advance of that day (you never know when it will arrive), I don’t think it should be championed ahead of what works right now and what you’ll still need in the future—an organization of your information that is both complete and versatile, i.e., having working digital archives and good search engines, along with some good tags and context linking.

But that stuff frequently gets ignored at newspaper organizations—it doesn’t make for sexy PowerPoint presentations.

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Does Wordpress penalize good conversation?

Josh Braun — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:16:22 +0000

As a research project, I’ve been studying news values on Daily Kos. Kossacks have a culture of sourcing. They provide links to all the facts in their posts and replies, or risk being called out by other community members. DK isn’t a news outlet, but in that respect, the community operates a lot like journalism and plain old good conversation. Linking to sources is a way of establishing (or demanding) credibility in online conversations, and so it has the potential to raise the level of discussion, and to increase the credibility of the commenters who, I would argue, bring a lot of the unique value to online news.

And then there’s Wordpress. I love Wordpress. I do. It’s an awesome CMS and a flagship of the open source community. My question here concerns its spam-blocking settings. Even without enabling Akismet, Wordpress is set, by default, to hold comments for moderation that contain more than 2 links. That would seem to penalize well-sourced replies to blog posts. It doesn’t permanently delete them, true. But it also holds up impromptu conversation of the sort that takes place on Kos, unless of course the blog owner is hovering over the “moderate comments” button.

While a blog (or WP-based news outlet) is small, and receiving only a couple comments a day, then that’s not a big deal. But if it has a large readership, this could inhibit discussion, or dumb it down considerably by discouraging well-sourced replies. And what happens when a blog is making the shift from small to large readership?

Well, I suppose I should give credit to bloggers for being smart people. They can change the Wordpress defaults if they’re a problem. And if their blogs are becoming wildly popular, then they may just be hovering over the “moderate comments” button anyhow. But I do wonder whether there’s an insidious side to spam blocking, which prevents occasional value-added discussions from happening where they otherwise might.

What say you? Have you ever been left out of a blog discussion because your brilliant post sat in the comment queue, while other people tossed around pithy remarks? Have you ever watched someone duplicate your idea in a thread, simply because your reply is sitting unread in the holding bin, with links to credible sources, while the come-lately blogger tossed off the same idea as a hypothetical?

Or do these things never happen?

On not being boring…

Josh Braun — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:46:43 +0000

You hear quite a bit these days about the huge impact of new media. Blogs have apparently brought down the careers of successful politicians and media stars like Trent Lott and Dan Rather. They’re reflowing Internet traffic and hitting traditional newspapers in the pocketbook. Well, a few blogs are doing those things.

The vast majority, however—and I include myself in this category—are influencing and exciting…well, pretty much nobody. The triviality and vanity on which so much of the blogosphere rests was immortalized for a time on the t-shirt, “More people have read my shirt than your blog.” But the world of less-than-stellar academic blogging has somehow ground along uncommemorated under its own weight—until now. I send you, dear reader, away to this instant-classic of a post by communication scholar Henrik Örnebring.

A sample…

There is no shortage of pundits pontificating about the media, substituting anecdotes and case-of-one sociology for evidence. I wanted this to be different! I wanted this to be about the facts, what we actually know about media and journalism. And evidently, I wanted it to be boring.

Publish then Filter: A Review of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody

Josh Braun — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:38:48 +0000

Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody is at once highly readable and a massive undertaking. He sets out to explain, as many recent authors have done, how new communication technologies and the people who use them are changing the world we live in. This is a task so large that, to my mind, no one’s really done it successfully. But watching people try is always enlightening. In effect, reading through books on Internet and society is like watching a multitude of really smart blind folks grope the proverbial elephant. I claim no special knowledge as to what the final shape of the beast may be, but I will say that some descriptions are more satisfying than others, and this is one of them.

The author makes a number of fascinating arguments in the book, but these I see as the main ones:

The Internet and new communications technologies have caused the cost and difficulty of forming groups to collapse, and as a result, online groups frequently perform tasks that traditional organizations won’t take on because the resources involved in traditional infrastructure and management would make these tasks unprofitable.
Because of the traditional cost of publishing, much of the overhead involved in the workings of traditional organizations has been in the cost of selecting, gathering, and filtering information and ideas that are ready for prime time. But this only makes sense when it costs something to put your product out there. New groups aren’t limited to the number of column-inches they can print, or the amount of airtime they can spare. It makes more sense for them to “publish then filter.” To put everything out there, then see what sticks among users and readers. As a result, the Internet is filled with a few great things, and near-endless crap. But on the whole, this system produces more cool stuff than the expensive professional systems of production that came before. Moreover, online groups get value from users who contribute next to nothing, simply because they don’t have to pay for the privilege of using those people’s good ideas, however few and far between they might be. Organizations can’t afford to hire one-hit-wonders, and while they may benefit from hiring the most productive people, they also can’t take advantage of the tiny contributions made by the least productive folks, which are actually valuable in aggregate.
Shirky concludes that three things are necessary, but not sufficient, for new-style groups to be successful. First, they must put forward a “plausible promise” (Eric Raymond’s term). That means, they must promise users something for their efforts that seems both engaging enough and realistic enough to inspire their participation. Second, they must employ an appropriate tool for users to work together. A blog or a wiki isn’t good for just any task. Shirky emphasizes that tools must take into account the number of people a group involves and the length of time a group must exist. Finally, the group must strike an appropriate bargain with users. This ranges from the terms in the license agreement—”Wikipedia will never sell your work”—to the rules and norms that are set for participation.

Overall, I think Shirky makes a compelling case for these theses. The second chapter, on Cosean economics, is particularly well-argued, and I’ll be assigning it to students next semester. Casual readers should get a great deal of food-for thought out of Here Comes Everybody, and academic readers will be pleased as well.

From a theoretical standpoint, Shirky’s book provides a lot of mill-grist for scholars engaged in the long-standing debates over technological determinism. He denies that the mere act of technological invention changes societies, saying that technologies only become socially interesting once they’ve become ubiquitously adopted. Discussions of how people co-create tools and content are also at the heart of his book, and he suggests at the outset that technology merely offers affordances for our hardwired group-forming instincts. In short, there are many paeans here to the notion of technology as socially constructed.

At the same time, Shirky is at times very much in the “technology as revolution” camp. He suggests that our control over technological adoption is limited—comparing the progress of the information age to steering a kayak. We have some control, but the path is largely inevitable.

Shirky may be synthesizing constructionist and determinist perspectives in interesting ways, but he’s bound to draw some criticism from entrenched theorists in the process. He employs the widespread adoption of the printing press and moveable type as an example of a previous world-changing technological revolution, which has been one of the most contentious historical examples with which social scientists examining technology have bludgeoned each other. His claim that online communities succeed or fail based in large part on whether their tools support the longevity and size of their endeavors mirrors Harold Innis’ claim that successful empires require communication technologies that extend their rule over time and physical expanse—scholars who read Innis as a technological determinist may push on this notion in exploring Shirky’s work.

In the end, though, the book is a collection of sharp, highly readable thinking about not just the possibilities, but also the hard truths surrounding new communication technologies. It’s a must-read for people interested in these topics, and an early entry into what I hope will become a larger corpus of academic literature detailing the influences on, and day-to-day realities of, online groups in as thorough and critical a manner as previous generations of scholars looked at media professions from filmmaking to journalism.