As the word “paper” becomes less and less a part of the newspaper world, things like video are becoming more and more common. While there are some exceptionally well-designed video efforts out there — such as the Washington Post’s OnBeing, which I wrote about recently — there are also some that are, well… underwhelming, if that’s a word.
Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism blog says that his hometown newspaper in Bolton is one of those that seems to be struggling with the whole concept. In fact, Paul says its efforts are “the worst attempt at online video I’ve seen so far.” And Kurt Anderson has a piece at New York magazine in which he writes about some of the video work that the New York Times has been doing — including film critic David Carr’s Oscar blog Carpetbagger. He also mentions David Pogue’s tech videos, which I have to confess I find exceptionally irritating. But maybe that’s just me.
“In the online archives of U.S. papers are thousands of videos, among them dozens of exceptional short docs, more like miniature Frontlines or public-radio-with-pictures than like network-news segments, available anytime. This is video-journalism-on-demand.”
In other recent newspaper video news, the New York Times just announced that it is going to dip its toes into the “user-generated content” field by allowing couples who want to be featured in the wedding announcements to send in video talking about how they met, or a clip from their wedding. Fittingly enough, an NYT staffer describes the effort in a Google video interview, and says that the paper decided to do it as a way of experimenting with video.
Update:
In a followup post, Paul says he came across some video at the Eastern Daily Press website that fits his definition of really well-done video content.