You really think so? “Titanic’s Got Talent? I dunno…. OK. I’ll tap.. you sing…”
There is an old expression that says ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
On the contrary, new inventions come along and for the most part people have no idea of how to use them
And when they do start to use them, they use them as assitances in their old way of working.
My 85-year old father-in-law in England, for example, uses the Internet to send emails, but before he types out the email on the computer, he writes it out longhand on legal paper first – making his corrections with his pen and paper. When it is perfect he transposes it to the computer and then hits ‘send’.
We may smile a bit at this, but in fact, it is what pretty much everyone does with new technologies to some extent.
When my company VNI was bought by The New York Times I shared a floor with Martin Nisenholz, who was just starting nytimes.com.
Joe Lelyveld, the managing editor of the newspaper (and an excellent managing editor he was) issued a dictate that nothing could be ‘published’ online on the new website until it had already been published in the print version of the paper – and it was on the street.
This was, in many ways, no different than my father-in-law and his pen and legal pad.
This kind of jamming new technologies into old and comfortable ways of working is as old as building steamships with sails (a long practice), ‘just in case’.
The migration of newspapers from paper to screens – online web, iPhones, iPads and so on, militate for a very different kind of newspaper.
Yet if you look at the website for any newspaper, they pretty much look like the print version – except onscreen.
Again, little different from writing out an email longhand and then typing it in.
Now, it seems, change is in the air.
Screens demand video. It’s their natural environment.
And now, Editorsweblog.com (doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue), is reporting that “video is ever more significant in online news reporting than ever”.
How significant?
One of the most obvious features that makes online news publishing stand out from paper reporting is its ability to present video. According to a new survey by D S Simon, reported by SocialTimes.com, news websites are increasingly taking advantage of this feature; 85 percent of online media websites are now using video to cover the news. The growth has been immense: 33 percent more media outlets are now using online video than a year ago.
The reasons for this explosive growth:
- News consumers have shorter and shorter attention spans
- Young news consumers (if there are to be any) are far more comfortable with video than with text
- Video pre-rolls (not my favorite) are an increasingly popular source of revenue for websites in search of income.
And of course, more and more ‘breaking news’ (as newspaper websites have to continually refresh to stay relevant – no disrespect Joe Lellyveld), comes in the for m of ‘citizen journalists’ with video equipped cell phones. Note Egypt and Libya for starters. More to come.
It is apparent that as the medium matures, online newspapers, if they are going to survive, are going to be very very different than the ink and paper that we were once used to . As Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the NY Times said last year – in 15 years it may not be paper at all.
Probably true.
This is one of the things driving our partnership with USAÂ TODAY and the USAÂ TODAYÂ Travel Video Academy.
