Why is the content for online journalism different than print or broadcast? And why are journalists confused about what work should be entered in which contest?
The assumption that text, photos and videos are merely the “same content” online as they are in print is part of the mindset that has helped cripple U.S. paper’s online efforts. The change in thinking has been considerable in recent years, but these paradigms still surface in the award season.
The monopoly on information is no longer ours alone. The business models for monopolistic control over distribution and eyeballs is busted, too. That much we can agree on now.
Still we see comments from photographers that somehow wished that online worked like a medium they know already.
But why are we segregating what we do for print versus what we do with the Internet? Why isn’t the BOP (Best of Photojournalism) Web video judged against/with video produced for TV? Aren’t they the same product?
- Will Seberger”> posted on Wired Journalists
Why is the content for online journalism different than print or broadcast? And why are journalists confused about what work should be entered in which contest?
Web video is not Television!
That is a seminar topic I have been delivering for two years now around the world. Why have so many editors and publishers been looking at the wrong models for Web video journalism? Because they haven’t come to terms with the dynamics and story potential of the new tools and user expectations yet.
e.g. YouTube is the model for the user experience and look at how smartly YouTube lets users scale up a video when THEY want to. Embed it share it, group it, rate it. How many of you let your users do this with your media?
The Web also makes excellent use of is a thumbnail gallery interfaces. Click on a thumb and get a slideshow or larger image. Done. Users get this.
If you are producing the same content and merely porting over - you can’t succeed. Online works differently, the media user is in charge of the experience.
The Web is about ‘now, not six months from now - when you decide to post up your ‘Emmy award-winning’ video project. Who will be watching that work then? Contest judges? Maybe. But probably only if you tell them about it. Full-screen-only, bandwidth hogging HD video projects - who is that for - to impress the board of directors? The shareholders? The Pulitzer committee? Ask first - whose ego are you serving?
Placing undue emphasis on the work that is, let’s be brutally honest, produced to impress primarily other journalists (AKA the stuff we produce to enter in contests) is harming our transition to meeting consumers’ expectations. Why is it that we think that the big, time-consuming, far-flung, High-Def, special-section work is the best work we can accomplish?
Whenever I hear journalists praise the design or Flash quality of a big, expensive “award-winning” online project, I first go to the reader comments. l often see a huge disconnect from the people producing the work and the people who are supposed to be consuming it.
You’ll be lucky to find many reader comments at all for some of the most celebrated stuff. Sometimes you’ll be lucky to even find where the comments section is at all. Again, the complete opposite of the the YouTube video experience. If you are not connecting with your community then you are producing journalism in a vacuum and, tell me, why should that work win any awards at all?
We are in a transition and transitions are bumpy and disorienting. Getting to the point where newsrooms are producing everyday multimedia is the only foundation I know of that will accomplish the goals of getting to the promised land and still be able to produce a range of stories including doing large-scale projects.
It’s just that in my world, the super-excellent, nine-month enterprise piece should run first online WHILE it is being reported and then perhaps a year later as a documentary film at Sundance. And in between the story gets better, it gains traction in the community because of the online engagement. Why can’t newsrooms think like this? Awards? How about a chance to win an Oscar with your visual journalism? Hmm, Pulitzer or Oscar next year . . . . Is that enough drive for you to produce a new brand of “award-winning journalism?”
Great, I will be looking forward to seeing you on the red carpet.
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