“Local online news video content: what’s working and what’s not”: a response

Mashable contributor/former MNDaily editor Vadim Lavrusik just posted his senior thesis paper on Minnesota’s mainstream media institutions and their use of video on the web; you can, and should, check that out.

As a college paper, it’s certainly an “A”. It does a good job of lining up the online video uses, the bibiliography has a respectable list of sources, and Lavrusik writes for Mashable, which is cool.

(Shit, the paper is 54 pages long—that kind of length is worth a “B” at the very least.  And if you’ve read anything from a recent grad in the last 10 years, the fact that the paper is grammatically correct easily puts it in the top 10% of all college work. So excellent work, Mr. Lavrusik. Also, here’s my disclaimer: my grammar is bad, too, and I also left one of these local TV stations two months ago.)

Outside being a thesis, though, here in the wild west of internetland there’s some issues with Lavrusik’s paper. While a good summary piece, the paper doesn’t really say anything other than “there’s differing approaches to video among the mainstream media of Minnesota”.  And as such, there’s some real missed opportunities for analysis and data-gathering.

The first, and possibly the most important, element of any news organization’s use of video is defining down what is an acceptable standard for online video across the web.

Taken side-by-side, Minnesota’s mainstream media video usage is comparable. KSTP is on-par with MPR. Great. But taken against general video developments online, the group is easily two years behind an acceptable standard of online video usage.

“Compared to who?” is up for debate (a debate that should be had).  However, when the professional video applications from the local media are lined up next to the free services of YouTubeHD, Blip and Vimeo, and the content of scrappy sites like @TheUptake (who get a brief mention in the full paper, but should be more prominently featured), the lag behind a standard becomes more clear.

(Also to be noted is the fact that the MnIndy, which has SPJ members on board and won “Best Use of Video — Independent website” from the SPJ, didn’t get mentioned. It should also be noted that the best videos in terms of content in the market come from the magazines MSP and METRO.  Also, JasonCam.)

Most local media outlets would be better served by simply uploading high grade video content to Blip and embedding a large Blip player to a page on their site, but proprietary business practices are much more important to the local media than the audience, and that says a lot.

Next, the position that all elements of an online news piece — text, linking, video, images, etc. — need to exist side-by-side on an already clogged page illustrates the fact that local media don’t understand online formats and subsequently reduce their user experience. (And speaking of “user experience”, I’m not surprised the term “user experience” barely shows up in a report on Minnesota’s mainstream media web performance.)

Vadim writes: “Clonts said the Pioneer Presshasbegun embedding more videos within story pages because they are more likely to get picked up on search engines. Clonts said putting a video within a story page will make it more visible in search engines because of the text on the page.”

Having SEO is great, but also a given for anything after 2007 in the professional web world. Additionally, video is a great enhancement, but it’s also a destination on a page.

We’re 2 years passed where a tiny video player is okay. Check out mtvmusic.com. Or a Frontline documentary. These pages are mostly dedicated to just the video. And if there’s additional elements to the story—*click*— there you get the new elements and the next page.

Local media outlets and their inherited systems reject this simplicity and instead cram as much content as possible on to a page, regardless of whether it serves the user/viewer or not.  Instead of producing a well-formatted product that fits user habits/wants, the business process is first and foremost.  And that brings us to…

The “where” of the audience has been virtually ignored by all of Minnesota’s mainstream media outlets.

As mobile use increases, so do the sales of televisions/computer monitors with capabilities to play media via file uploads and digital media centers. And local media outlets still treat web-based interfaces as red-headed step children.

While highspeed connections and white collar shackles for the last five years drove users to news sites during the workday, Best Buy and Dell and Qwest and AppleTV and Hulu are also giving viewers the ability to dial up on-demand video when they get home, too.

(Srsly, my dad has even hooked his computer up to his TV; that should tell you something. David Erickson also linked to a piece that 62% of adults watch vids online.)

How have local media responded? By emulating NBC and Frontline by posting full broadcasts or developing web series? Nope. By taking the video they already have and chopping it up so you couldn’t watch a full show even if you wanted to. (To be fair, ABC, which is a national station, still has a player so shitty that I can’t watch “Wipeout”.)

And while a lot of folks would recognize that putting up a full broadcast online—you can even keep the commercials—serves people who get home at 6:15 but still want to see local news as a no brainer, the local media mindset is not at all near addressing user experience when it comes to using video online.

Again, Lavrusik’s paper is commendable, and it’s nice to see some summary data-gathering in a paper like this. Good work. But depending on the execution of video on a page, video is either worth it, or it’s a massively expensive proposition that eats up too much real estate.

What’s missing is that idea that video, as an element of a site, can either be very efficient or very inefficient, and that can help or hurt when it comes to delivering news. And  Lavrusik points out that Minnesota’s media is interested in efficiency (they’re clearly nothing if not cost-conscious), but making a few changes in perspective would easily show that the way the Minnesota media’s approaching the web is highly, highly inefficient, and affects user experience.

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