Will Online Video Save the News Industry? - Page 2

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Web video, the focus of the panel, remains a murky solution to the ailing news industry's woes. The panelists generally agreed that the medium won legitimacy in the 2006 Senate race in Virginia, when George Allen, a heavily favored incumbent, lost the election after a video of him mocking a staffer of his opponent and invoking a racially charged epithet became a viral hit on YouTube.

So online video is both popular and influential. But that doesn't mean it will save the news industry. Derry and Brady both said that their papers haven't figured out how to make money off their Web content. Derry said that the Times' online ad inventory is much easier to sell with video content, but that monetization remains an unsolved problem.

Nevertheless, the editors acknowledged that online video -- both on the news organizations' sites and other Web destinations like YouTube -- is increasingly important as people's news-consumption habits change.

"Our philosophy is to put our video out every single place that we can," Brady said. Once the Post's reporters warmed up to the idea of adding a camera to their journalistic arsenal, he said the paper's management decided to "blanket all the possibilities" on the Web in the hopes of reaching "a whole new generation of watchers and subscribers."

"There's this whole generation that doesn't think about the New York Times or the Washington Post as the automatic go-to place. So for us, we need to be where they're spending their time," Brady added.

In an online market where bite-sized YouTube videos carry the day, interactive Web content can be a far more effective way for news reporters to tell their stories, the editors said. Web video can be used to tease out longer-format written stories, or complement them in cases where video content could help bring to life the sorts of stories that otherwise might not jump off the page.

Still not on print's level

But even with their sites bubbling over with rich-media content, newspapers' digital properties are only making a fraction of the revenue that their print counterparts enjoyed in their heyday.

Factor in the fragmented content-distribution model, where news organizations feel compelled to promote themselves on the hottest sites on the Web like YouTube and Facebook, and the revenue proposition becomes a highly unsettled question.

As a more engaging format than print journalism, Web video can introduce and cultivate a journalist as a personality in the reporting of a story. This model aims to develop a following for certain reporters by building them into a brand.

To some, the journalist-as-a-brand model paired with the Web-wide dispersal of content foretells the future of the news industry. The reasoning goes that as more newspapers close up shop or prune their operations, the reporters will simply move to smaller or individual Web sites and continue doing what they've always been doing, just with a more economical masthead.

Of course, the individual reporter/blogger sites won't necessarily be able to marshal the substantial resources required to investigate and report the really big stories. Could a blogger rely on a hearty CPM to sustain him while he travels and conducts the dozens of interviews that inform the reporting of stories like the Times' uncovering of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program or the investigation by the Post's Barton Gellman of the Cheney vice presidency?

"I'm not sold that microjournalism (a.k.a. blogging) can't get the job done," Fred Wilson, principal at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures wrote in a recent blog post. "As reporters/journalists leave the big papers and start writing for their own blogs/brands, I think they'll keep doing what they've been trained to do their entire career. Can they all make good money doing this? That's not nearly as clear."

"My gut tells me that microjournalists are going to have to do more than just post to their blog to earn a living. In fact, the blog will probably be the loss leader that keeps them in the game," Wilson said.

"I am not sure that anyone has the answer to this question and that's why it's bothering so many people right now."