Video killed the publishing star

People are getting dumber. It’s a simple observation anyone could make after taking a fleeting glance at the video streams now being produced by the cash-strapped publishers of the print media world.

The folks actually purchasing newspapers or reading them online must be so bereft of imagination or attention span that the simply can’t visualize what a reporter is explaining. And the reporters themselves must be devoid enough of descriptive narrative that they can no longer evoke the sensory perception carried in some of the finer works of literature; for disinclined readers, all those books without the pretty pictures. And the publishers, well they must have IQs that are plummeting faster than either the ability of their writers or the cognition of their readers. This is especially if they believe the recent scourge of net videos is going to somehow grow their markets.

Today, all of the Capital Region’s daily newspapers carry some form of video. Naturally, the Albany Times Union was the first to include the feature. They were quickly followed by the Post Star, which was joined this year by the Saratogian and Troy Record. Coming in last in the race to animation, was Schenectady’s Daily Gazette, which has just recently included “copyright” videos on their fledgling Web site.

In the TU’s case, the video sometimes –let’s stress sometimes –show a greater degree of insight into events that would either be difficult or impossible to explain in print. Taking cue from the networks, they typically keep their news videos to less than a minute. They appear to be shot with a decent resolution camera and usually offer degrees of narration, whether it’s from the subject or a reporter explaining the subject. They also seem to devote a reporter solely to shooting video, instead of having the poor sot switch between filming and writing.

Were they to call it a day here, life would be good. But in the TU’s typical bombastic style, they had to go one step further. Enter the so-called Night Cam. So you want a recipe for disaster? Take an entertainment reporter, give her a microphone, send her into a drunkfest with a ludicrous question to pose to revelers and then cue some ultra-cheesy stock music for the background. The resulting video would have made Victor Frankenstein proud.

The Post Star had made news inroads into video similar to the TU. They post them in relatively decent resolution, almost always contain some sort of narrative and are kept short. Unfortunately for the non-union staff at the paper, reporters are often faced with both writing and videoing the news. Does this mean they get paid double? Well, let’s allow the readers to decide that one.

And then there’s the Saratogian. To even view one of their shoddy flicks, one has to sit through a 30-second advertisement, which would be fine if the footage was even remotely worth watching. Unfortunately, it’s not. In fact, after watching the long, often dragging videos, there is usually a sense of remorse for a moment of life that was needlessly squandered. Again, the Saratogian’s news crew isn’t unionized, so reporters are now faced with both shooting video and reporting the news. Here’s a tip: Why not just have them paginate the paper and deliver it too?

Last but not least, there’s the hapless Gazette, which seems to be pioneering new lows when it comes to Internet video. Granted, the Gazette is more than six months behind even the Saratogian when it comes to video. But even that isn’t an excuse for what the paper has fortunately buried anonymously on its still-developing Web site. The footage is blurry, shaky, often without narration, and of subjects that usually don’t warrant the effort. Cue the Roger Wyatt jokes here.

Seemingly, the newspaper outfitted its reporters with dime-store video cameras that are barely passable to shoot the family vacation, much less something that will appear beneath the paper’s masthead and before thousands of online viewers. It’s bizarre the paper doesn’t utilize their photographers for the task –fancy the thought that a camera jockey would know how to shoot video. And. judging by the quality, the reporters have very little knowledge of the instrument they’re using or how to edit the footage they shoot.

But who could blame them? As with the Saratogian and Post Star, it’s doubtful anyone is getting anything extra for their new job detail. Not to mention, the addition of video footage seems to coincide very nicely with the Gazette’s most recent spate of layoffs. In other words, dump a few salaries, buy a dozen shitty video cameras with the savings and then pray to the circulation gods that everything will somehow pan out. Now that’s forward thinking.

Yet no one ever accused the news industry of forward thinking. If the media moguls thought for a half-second, they would have ditched the idea for cameras and simply started posting the hours of footage shot by their ‘news gathering partners.’ The Post Star almost endeavors into this realm with NBC affiliate WNYT. Sadly for the Gazette, they’ve got a partnership with CBS 6 Albany, which has great difficulty in simply grasping the basic precepts of journalism. Still, posting the station’s ‘raw video’ would behoove them better than the pathetic video graffiti now posted at their site.

The bottom line is that the Capital Region’s newspapers still don’t understand their bread-and-butter lies with the printed word. Sure, outlets like the New York Times can afford to craft professional-looking video feeds that are both alluring to the eye and interesting to watch. But with the cash-strapped budgets of most newspapers with less than 1 million subscribers, it’s best to invest the time and effort into with what they know best.