Will video kill the editorial star?
Many of the companies I’ve worked with on the web have depended highly on editorial content for survival. The golden rule has always been, “content is king” – but ‘content’ was always silently understood to be written content; should it be? Since its mass adoption, people have been trying to figure out how to relate the internet to print (the internets’ closest living relative). As Google acquires YouTube and AOL hires a TV guy from NBC as their new CEO – is video on the web about to revolutionize the industry as we know it?
The beauty behind the internet was that anyone could build a successful website at virtually no cost. But what really made this industry easy to be a star in was the low barrier to entry. Nothing more than some simple HTML chops and some valuable ‘content’ and you’ve got yourself a website with tens of thousands of hits a day– the popularity of blogging has surly proven this point. Will this same entrepreneurial spirit exist when it takes a little more – a little more technology, talent, money and time?
There used to be a time way-back-when where two newspapers were published in a day; the morning paper and the evening paper. Do you know what killed off the evening paper? The five-o-clock news! The evening paper was only as current as the time it was printed – as soon as televisions entered the homes of many, the news was delivered faster, more relevant and in motion!
As CNBC.com is debuted to launch on Monday, I wonder if this is truly the beginning of a new revolution on the web. Will those with access to rich video content just trample those that can offer nothing more than the “written word”? How will CNBC.com’s competitors keep up? Sure they may hold a niche here and there, but will video win over straight editorial? Will the demand to watch prevail over the demand to read?
Plato once said that the book would be a fad – a trend that would never catch on. He proclaimed that it was verbal communication, the art of an elder to pass down wisdom among a crowd that was the ideal form of communication; will Plato prove right on the internet? Is the internet as we know it just a placeholder for the internet as it is meant to be? Will those who refuse to step-up simply fall-down?
The computer and the television were always more similar than the computer and print – but the technology couldn’t support it. The brief popularity of the Podcast was a small stepping stone in this upcoming evolution of the internet – it made the internet more like the radio (the first evolution of printed communication). As video to web becomes as lightening fast as print to web, will the mind-sets of the 90’s finally change to realize it is the television that is in fact the internets closest living relative.
- November 28th, 2006
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“There used to be a time way-back-when where two newspapers were published in a day; the morning paper and the evening paper. Do you know what killed off the evening paper? The five-o-clock news! The evening paper was only as current as the time it was printed – as soon as televisions entered the homes of many, the news was delivered faster, more relevant and in motion!“
But there’s still the morning paper, and by this logic there shouldn’t be any newspapers, perhaps not even print magazines. Yet there are, and they’re still successful - perhaps not as successful as they were pre-Internet, but successful none the less.
Video on the ‘Net won’t kill editorial on the ‘Net because no matter how cheap it becomes to produce and distribute, producing and distributing text is still many orders of magnitude cheaper. It always has been, and it always will be. I can’t see too many blogs “working” as pure video, nor do I see sites such as this or Digg working as video. While it’s true that a newspaper is only as current as the time it was printed, so it is also true for the evening news, and so it will be true for ‘Net content. The only difference is that content on the Internet can be updated much faster, again, because text is easier and quicker to produce.
“The brief popularity of the Podcast was a small stepping stone in this upcoming evolution of the internet – it made the internet more like the radio (the first evolution of printed communication).“
Not quite sure I understand that.
Andrews, the reason the morning paper lasted where the evening paper did not is because the evening paper was very limited in its scope, covering the news from the morning paper to that afternoon (say 7am to 4pm), where the morning paper evolved into encompassing what was once the evening paper — the morning paper has significantly changed as a result of the death of the evening paper.
I don’t disagree that editorial content won’t continue to be successful — I am just wondering if the web will prove to be more video centric. We have been programed from the beginning to read on the web — we were never programmed to completely read on the television — so our understanding of how it works and should work is different.
The TV didn’t put the magazine out of business, but the internet will prove to be something new — a hybrid unlike anything we’ve had exposure to before. It is hard to envision because it has never existed. We traditionally predisposed to try and related new things to existing things (forcing the web to be like something). The web will prove to be something beyond that of anything we know today.
“Plato once said that the book would be a fad – a trend that would never catch on.“
Well, as we all know Plato got that one wrong (too). There is also the saying that ‘one picture can say more than a thousand words”, but that is hardly the truth when comes to moving pictures. The visual media are the most powerful, but they also tend to reduce the complexity level of the messages broadcasted, because there is not just an emphasis but a need for entertainment.
Some scientists say that it is because reading forces the reader to create his own mental images, which keeps him/her occupied.
You can also approach it from a marketing angle: What is the product of an editorial? You sell opinion, and in a deeper sense, meaning, involvement, context and coherence.
All in all, I would think online video content will become a little more serious and less action/comedy oriented than now, but not enough to make Internet writing obsolete.
I don’t know Claus — some say the verdict is still out on the book; worries of television and computers making them extinct (I don’t agree, just saying).
My only point to this article was that the way in which we look at the internet is soon going to change. Comparing the internet to print more so than television is a philosophy that won’t hold strong much longer. Sites like Yahoo! News, AOL News and maybe even the Wall Street Journal will have to quickly adapt. You already see the adoption of video in sites like NYTimes.com, WashingtonPost.com and CNET.com — but will video become to center-point over editorial?
Look for AOL to become more of a television network in the next few years than a “website” as we know it today. I think it will be successful and the masses will obviously follow suit.
Back-to-back comment time!
Actually, I think it will be extremely easy to watch this evolution take place. Just watch as the video spots on sites like NY Times and Washington Post get larger and move higher on the page — thus forcing editorial to be smaller and further down on the page.
I’ll do a follow-up to this post in a year from today and see how things have changed (if at all). Be on the look out in the classifieds for more video production assistants and more designers with video experience (that is the first step, the second step is seeing video people with some web experience).