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.