Is a video worth a thousand words?

Posted by Jennifer Lush on October 12, 2009 at 11:12 AM

Video blogging, quite simply a blog which employs video as its medium, is a phenomenon which hasn't shown the same success as its text-based parent amongst everyday web users. Despite the fact the 'tools of the trade' - cameras, editing software, and a platform to broadcast - are no longer unaffordable or complex obstacles, the significant investment of time to produce something that is of a publishable quality is still a drawback for many.

Adam Singer, in his blog The Future Buzz, writes that in video blogging professionals still have a 'leg-up': "In text-based communications, professional writers don't... In fact, amateurs are in many cases more compelling than the professionals of yesterday because they are not bound by rules that constrain and constrict the emotion possible through words." In the realm of video, however, Singer says: "It's hard to compete against professional personalities who have honed their skills in a competitive environment and have sharp writing and production staffs behind them."

This leaves a big gap in a what is a widely consumed market. Mashable reports: "In August, more than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer, according to data from the comScore Video Metrix service. A whopping 81.6 percent of the total US Internet audience viewed online video and the average online video viewer saw 9.7 hours of video in August.

Robb Montgomery, CEO of a public charity promoting journalism education, backs up these statistics arguing the value of digital storytelling and the importance of training journalists to incorporate it into their work. "It really helps if you engage with your audience in social media," he told Leah Betancourt in an email interview. "I got 9,000 YouTube views in one day for my 'Obama in Cairo' report (second only to Al Jazeera) because I used Twitter, keywords and other social media to promote the publication at the right moment and in the right social space."

Obama's visit to Cairo University: June 4, 2009 from Robb Montgomery on Vimeo.

The potential for quality video journalism reports is great, and could help to boost traffic to other news websites. "The power occurs because the small talk is in a network environment. Take YouTube, for example. It's not only about watching the videos, but seeing how many times it's been viewed, ranking them, sending them to friends. "That behavior around the content is very, very powerful, and news organisations have been very slow to pick it up, " Montgomery told the 2015 Newsroom Conference in Prague.

As the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words, and journalists should take advantage of the skills they already have, with some modifications for the online audience, and make the most of the void in the video blogging market. The rapidly changing nature of the media industry means journalists have to be open to new methods of communications and who is to say that video journalism does not have a significant spot in the future of broadcast?

Source : Mashable, The Future Buzz