Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Heyward
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Andy Plesser: What is the opportunity for newspapers to embrace videos?
Jeff Jarvis: I think there are a lot of ways. Again, I think, try – as you said a minute ago – if they try to be like big TV, I don’t think it’ll work. The Washington Post video was very good because it’s lar; it’s less polished; it’s closer to the source. My students and community liked it better than more polished video.
So that means that the barrier entry to doing this is not great. You don’t need 25 producers and huge rooms to do this. If the content is good; if the shooting is decent, it’ll be good enough, and it works in short bits in small TV.
Of course, I think the presidential candidates coming on have taught me that this is an eye-to-eye medium, and so you have a new relationship to people in small TV; that you can talk more directly to people right there directly, and that’s very powerful.
Andrew Hayward: We’re still a long way from the time when professional content is going to be obsolete. I think a better way to look at it is through the prism of the history of American media, which is new forms of media tend to find some kind of equilibrium with the ones that were there before. Radio still exists; it changed; movies still exist; they changed.
When television came along – I think what you’re going to see is a coexistence of mainstream media with media that is either created or filtered by citizens. That still leaves a big threat though, and that threat is that mainstream media tends to be expensive to produce.
The salaries are high; the cost of production is high, and as the share of audience diminishes, there is a question whether it’s going to be possible to aggregate enough viewers, listeners, users to justify the cost of the very highest quality programming, and if you think about it, that creates a kind of Catch 22 because if you start diminishing the quality, then you no longer can make a special claim on people’s time and attention, yet it may be that you can’t afford to maintain that level of quality and distinctiveness.
So there is the potential for a kind of downward spiral in which mainstream media becomes even less relevant than it has been. However, for the moment, it’s still enormously important. It’s supplemented, not supplanted by the up-starts, and I think the challenge for news media executives today is to understand how to harness the power of the consumer to actually enhance the news product.
Andy Plesser: Would you encourage newspapers to make their videos more viral or keep them on their site?
Jeff Jarvis: Absolutely make more viral because you wanna find
a new audience. A homepage is a very
limiting thing. You could only promote
so much, so I was with my friends at the Star-Ledger in
They put something on the homepage, and it’s gone, and then nobody finds it, and they started a new thing called tvjersey.com, and they’ve encouraged people to send their own videos in, just tag it in YouTube, and then putting their videos on YouTube in turn.
And so if you go in there and you search for, I don’t know,
cheerleaders in
We need to put our stuff out there, our big media. We wanna be swimming in the same pool with the people stuff. Out there in the world of video now, there’s an unbelievable range of quality and, frankly, ethics and responsibility, and there are things that are terrific, and there are things that are awful, and there’s a great potential for fraud or trickery or just satire imparity, and the news organization, understandably, are much more confident about content they’ve created themselves than about opening the portals and letting everything come in.
But I do think that in order to stay connected with the next generation of consumers, they’re gonna have to acknowledge that the relationship with those consumers is different. It’s not going to be the news handed down from on high. It’s gonna be more of a peer-to-peer relationship in which they bring a professional – the mainstream news organizations will bring a professional perspective, and then it rubs up against a citizen’s perspective, and it’s the net result that becomes the product.
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