Here’s a piece I wrote recently for the BBC’s College of Journalism site. Andy Dickinson has some interesting — and more extensive — posts on the same topic.
Approaching the
Telegraph’s clean, attractive new website video jumps straight out at you and starts playing. It’s a couple of comedians. They’re having a laugh. On behalf of Apple.
The ad, a shameless rip-off clever re-purposing of Apple’s US campaign with Justin Long and John Hodgman, is simple. Two similarly configured British comedians are shot against a white background. Clean, unfussy, simple. Not only has Apple’s advertising concept crossed continents, it can cross platforms and go on display, radio, TV and online. (The WaPo’s cool-looking but concept-lacking onBeing site shoots similarly.)
But news stories lack the longevity, the expense or the conceptual simplicity of advertising.
So where does video as journalism currently stand on the UK web? Newspapers have at long last got to grips with the issue of what they read like on the web. Butt hey still don’t seem to know what they sound like or what they watch like.
Given how unimportant news is these days to newspapers, it’s strange to see how much of their video offering is oriented towards news.
Take the Mirror for example. It carries a white-label video news service from AP (complete with American voice-overs) that is squarely based on the late 20th century portal principle. Over at the Telegraph they’ve brought in an English-accented ITN white-label video news service. The Belfast Telegraph has gone the same route with the indie team that produces GMTV’s breakfast bulletins.
The Sun has been dining out on hits generated by its ‘cockpit video’ coup, but as far back as Bruce Grobbelaar ‘Sun video’ tags have appeared on our screens. Now the Sun’s occasional piece of video has a home. But it remains a sidebar to their newsgathering.
Nowhere is newspapers’ ingénue attitude to picture more apparent than at the Mail. Its website prefaces some video of a New Zealand skydiver surviving a fall after his chute half-opened with the tag ‘the most dramatic video on the Internet.’ Pace the excellent Seamus McCauley, the Mail guys must be living behind some firewall. Video drama comes from sound and pictures.
If the A10 cockpit video hadn’t included the pilots’ talkback, it would have merited only a screengrab. The skydiver pictures ought to have been dramatic, but because there’s no commentary (understandably) they’re actually just like watching any parachute headcam pictures you’ve ever seen, except the final second of descent is replaced by black as the camera hits the grass. The calm, serious behaviour of the skydiver’s companion drains any drop of hysteria or drama from the pictures. In TV news, we call these pictures ‘rushes.’ To make them dramatic requires context and that requires narrative structure.
So on newspaper sites agency wraps compete with an unlikely blend of home video horror and hilarity.
How does this compare with the BBC’s own online news site? The BBC is awash with audio and video material but rather modestly, it hides these jewels away. TV news bulletins are deconstructed package by package, some longer coverage is gaffed and filleted. BBC text is unexcited by the possibilities of serifs and glyphs that occupied the New York Times on its relaunch last April (the NYT’s online font is Georgia, since you ask). Yet the BBC’s online commissioning power seems overwhelmingly text-based. Its ‘Magazine’ section reinvents the Listener, complete with Lynne Truss and Clive James. Where are the bite-size video innovations offered by sites like www.meettheauthor.co.uk? (Irony alert – the site’s run by ex-BBC radio producer.)
We know that people will watch short video clips online, but the conventional TV news piece is no longer the way to hack it.
Because I now realize the importance of branding, I have a few banal observations to pass on that I will be repackaging as Monck’s Maxims® of video news online:
- No newscasters. News anchoring is a presentational trope borne of the complex organizational demands of analogue TV studios. The newscast is to online as Top of the Pops is to YouTube.
- Make sense. Reporters need to deliver their own intros/lead-ins, to camera or over picture or graphics. Images and clips need labelling if they’re raw. The most important thing video clips online require is standalone coherence.
- Stick to your part of the story. Reporters shouldn’t try and tell the tale in one giant wrap. Text, graphics and other sources can carry a lot of the extra context and narrative required.
- Get graphics. Voice and video aren’t the only ways to skin the cat.
Necessity may be invention’s mother, but the lousy commissioning budget is the care home of creativity.
For all the hub-a-hubba and newsroom redesigns, newspaper power online resides with newspaper people, the younger of whom now ‘get’ online. But, if you look at where video journalism could be heading, the presentational equivalents of content visionaries like Adrian Holovaty haven’t yet stormed the executive barricades.
So, a quick review of video online tells you newspaper guys are still in charge of newspapers, and TV and radio people at the BBC control the commissioning strings for the content that ends up online.
If companies are serious about video innovation, then we need a faster, less destructive and less threatening route than managerial régime change. And a serious commissioning budget for online video to go with it.
Oddly enough that lead could come via the BBC, which as we all know, doesn’t have to make commercial sense. But would that kickstart the online video journalism revolution commercially — or kill it off? Therein lies the rub.
