snuggle, a photo by vjworkshop on Flickr.

I like this photo because it suggests that everything in nature has a certain affinity to others. While we might think that these shells are lifeless, we are forced to reconsider somewhat and, perhaps, wonder whether there’s a universal factor that operates in all things. Maybe it’s love!

Via Flickr:
Love is everywhere!

A “lively discussion” (Debbie’s term) appears to be continuing about Amina’s concerns that an unreliability of online content, particularly in wikis and blogs, could (as Amina put it in her Discussion #2 post) “create a society that perpetuates inequality where wiki and blog information developed an ignorant community of learners because the education provided was not properly manage(d), controlled or overseen.” The issue struck a sensitive nerve among our EDIT772 community. Theresa countered with a very pointed question: Whether one-sided history books are “any better.” And while Matt, in his blog post, appeared to concede that point, he noted an additional problem of online content – it’s malleability, if you will – that is, even when errors are corrected, “there is still a lag when errors are treated as fact and also some errors can remain for extended periods of time.”

I think this discussion goes to the heart of the question about whether Web 2.0 services are valid learning tools. In a related post (Discussion # 2), I mentioned that being in the news business, I’m very cautious about using Wikipedia as a citation for facts for publication. So I always verify information through the links to primary sources before using any of that information.

In my view, I think the solution is to make sure that users of these online tools are trained to think carefully and critically about whatever information is presented – to test it against other sources, dig deeply until the information is confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt.

Powerful trends in the digital delivery of news are creating a fertile environment for expansion of video journalism, particularly among embattled newspaper companies striving to forge new revenue streams and appeal to a wider online audience by transforming themselves into multimedia, multi-platform media organizations.

There are a variety of factors driving the expansion of video journalism in America’s newsrooms, including:

• Online video commands much higher advertising rates, with a video view bringing in several times the amount of ad revenue than a text page view.
  It is far more difficult for aggregators to appropriate than a text story—that is, if an aggregator chooses to display an external website’s video, that clip will include an embedded ad whose revenue accrues to the content creator not the aggregators.

 

• Video can serve as a powerful differentiator for a print news organization at a time when basic text stories, including Associated Press reports, are widely and freely available through giant portals such as Google and Yahoo.

 

• Video helps satisfy a voracious public appetite for visual storytelling. According to comScore, 174 million U.S. Internet users, up 4 million from February, watched online video in March, ave raging 14.8 hours per viewer and engaging in more than 5.7 billion viewing sessions: “Google sites (YouTube) continued to lead with 143.2 million viewers, followed by AOL with 57 million. Yahoo sites were third with 56.4 million, and Microsoft sites fourth with 53.1 million.”

 

• Even as they face an existential business threat, newspapers have a strong competitive edge in the digital playing field: They are arguably the most important source of solid news reporting in our society, a journalistic capability and bulwark of our democratic system that the “news ecology” would be hard-pressed to replace on such a broad scale anytime soon.

 

• Telling stories—with an eye for detail, a nose for facts and a flair for narrative—is what newspaper reporters and editors are trained to do, day in and day out.

For all the above reasons, to help assure their survival amid the ongoing disruptions of our Internet-connected media world, it seems clear that newspapers must abandon their print-centric cultures and translate their newsroom storytelling skills into the visual language of video.

If newspapers don’t rise to the challenge of expanding their video capabilities, other media sectors undoubtedly will, and in fact are already doing so. In a recent interview with Beet.TV, Paul Slavin, digital chief at ABC News, declared that the audience hunger for online video seems insatiable.

There’s been a “real explosion in consumption” that is “almost outstripping” ABC’s ability to produce enough of it, he said, adding that an “almost limitless demand” for the news organization’s video is occurring across all digital platforms, including tablets and smart phones. “More people are consuming news and information in larger numbers than I think we’ve ever seen before.”

But the evidence suggests that the newspaper industry, which appears to have been sleepwalking through much of the media’s digital metamorphosis, is starting to wake up. “The threat of oblivion should be a powerful motivator, and we now see—finally—after a decade of decline, its specter moving us away from incremental, ‘experimental’ tests to a fundamental restructuring of the business of news,” says Newsonomics author Ken Doctor.

Many newspaper organizations appear to be coming to a similar conclusion about the vital importance of video. That assessment comes from Brightcove, the provider of on-demand software that more than 2,500 media companies and marketers use to publish and distribute video on a wide swath of digital platforms. Brightcove’s survey of its media industry clients early this year found that newspapers have “fully embraced” video reporting:

“Continuing a trend from Q3, Q4 saw a massive increase in titles uploaded for newspapers, with quarter over quarter growth of 147%. With 1.2 million titles uploaded in the quarter, newspapers uploaded more than four times as many titles as the next highest category, which was online media. This dramatic increase for a second consecutive quarter suggests that newspapers have fully embraced video production and licensing to offer multimedia news coverage to audiences. We have heard from many newspaper customers that they are having great success selling pre-roll advertising against news video content, and this massive increase in the number of videos suggests that newspapers are attempting to dramatically increase inventory in light of this strong demand.”