The Long Telegram

Fishbowl DC is more than a bit myopic in its criticism of the new Post Now video series. The grumbling in the WaPo newsroom is justified, but it has nothing to do with Anqoinette Crosby’s bra size and everything to do with The Post’s overall video strategy. So if Fishbowl missed the mark, why is the video so contemptible? Exhibit A is two minutes you won’t get back:

First off, it’s a cheap knock-off of the NYT’s TimesCast, which at least gives viewers the advantage of hearing from the actual people reporting the news. Though I can’t imagine the shareability of that feature is very high either.

Second off, the debut episode was a riff on the weather. The weather! Video takes time and effort to make. Why would you expend that time and effort at a newspaper on talking about something that could be hammered out in ten minutes in a blog post? Why would you take the time to stand in front of a camera and talk about something that half a dozen weathermen are talking about five times a day on three different local channels?

This is the Twitterfication of Web video, and I think it has to be resisted. This strategy may feel good in the short-term but it’s wrong-headed in the long term. It’s clear that the road to a successful Web video operation goes through Twitter, but you don’t get RT’d by sounding like a Twit. At least, that’s what Brightcove’s third quarter report on Web viewership concluded.

Twitter was the highest average engagement source across the categories, and also accounted for the highest engagement rates specifically for broadcasters (1:57 minutes) and online media properties (1:40 minutes).

The key there is shareability, the kind of unique voice that goes zipping across Facebook and Twitter with as little effort as possible. No one will tweet the stock b-roll of Hu Jintao walking across the red carpet to conduct a plodding press conference with President Obama. People can get cheezy green-screen effects from Auto-Tune the News; they don’t need it from The Post. What they do need is original video reporting, and it’s not like the post doesn’t know how to do it.

The Post has clearly decided to take a nickel-and-dime approach to drawing video traffic and ad dollars, 500 hits there and 1,000 there on a steady stream of repurposed APTN content and boilerplate broadcast news parroting of the days events. It wasn’t too long ago that they laid off video journalists like Travis Fox and Pierre Kattar. I can’t imagine that, with a decent social strategy, Fox’s video featuring an interview in the middle of a pot farm wouldn’t have more viral potential than ten green-screen specials from Ms. Crosby.

Last week, I stumbled in to consuming two pieces on the brutal end of the decades-long war between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government for control of the island’s northern scrub forests and beaches. Back to back, I watched MTV’s puerile, pseudo-news magazine, The Vice Guide to Everything, take on the topic of child soldiers then read Jon Lee Anderson’s comprehensive analysis of the 30-year conflict in the New Yorker. (Abstract here. Unfortunately, you’ll have to hunt down a dead-tree version.)

If you don’t know a Tamil Tiger from a Bengal, the piece will catch you up while challenging your perceptions of the civil war, the definition of terrorist and the true nature of counter-insurgency doctrine or at least what American military minds find inspiring in the government’s takedown of LTTE last year.

But my purpose here is the sheer WTF of Vice’s meager attempt to tackle a subject that the world should know about and their odious equivocations when they don’t get the story. You can watch Vice’s Thomas Mortonand his lame excuses here:

With the death knell sounding for foreign correspondents, Morton goes past stuttering over his own failure at providing any perspective to a conflict that claimed 100,000 lives and instead offers this rhetorical gem of media criticism.

Look, a lot Sri Lanka’s problems can be chalked up to the government refusing to give anyone a pube’s worth of information. But the other side of the problem is us. I mean, we came here so rabid for a scoop about child soldiers that we were willing to shove a camera in the face of kids who spent the last five years watching their friends get blown up. The 24-hour news cycle has made us so conditioned to getting immediate answers, we’re willing to take the word of people who forced tweens to serve in their army over official silence. This kind of attitude is bad enough when it’s celebrity gossip. But when it’s something as complex and traumatic as war, how about we chill out a little and give these people some time to rebuild their lives?

You can find the quote at the end of the third segment in this video.

But Mr. Anderson of The New Yorker offers this description of the game plan for Sri Lanka’s government during its war with the Tigers.

It’s basic tenets were: deny access to the media, the United Nations, and human-rights groups; isolate your opponent, and kill them as quickly as possible; and segregate and terrify the survivors–or ideally, leave no witnesses at all.

When Anderson later shifts from the historical to the contemporary, he outlines the best he can a sort of low-grade ethnic cleansing and re-education that appears to be taking place in the wake of the conflict. With limited access, “secrecy descended over the former Tiger territory.”

Now, I’m not one to hold Vice TV to the standards of The New Yorker. But Morton’s philosophical navel-gazing in the face of investigative failure represents two creeping influences on foreign correspondency in general.

The first is that, faced with a lack of robust information, Morton immediately starts trying to cast one or the other side as in the right, a Manichean exercise that the press plays through in nearly every international story. See Tunisia (people = good, Ben Ali = bad) where the immediate lionization of a people’s revolt has now faded in the headlines, leaving instead lackluster analysis of a rudderless nation. That story is more important but seems to complex for most American media. Morton eventually sided with the Sri Lankan government, justifying their denial of access in his mind. But Anderson’s reporting tells us that determined foreign correspondents may be the only people with any leeway to cover the conflict seriously.

The second is a hit-and-run model that sees foreign journalism as something to be amped up and made more palatable for wider audiences. MTV ponied up enough money to travel to the island and arrange for a skeleton journalistic crew to engage in reporting about child soldiers. Instead, they got a diatribe against the entire pursuit of foreign news. This criticism extends beyond Vice and MTV to all media organizations that bungled coverage of the 2008 war in Georgia amid a presidential election or swarmed to Haiti to film rubble and then never returned to see that it hadn’t been picked up. There are, of course, countless exceptions to this. But there is also a better model.

Foreign journalists are needed and each one needs to do more. The days of plum assignments in foreign bureaus are all but over. But talented storytellers, filmmakers and photojournalists need to be provided the modest resources they need to work as hard as they can and bring home stories that even the citizens of Sri Lanka might not be able to tell. What’s needed is to reject the nihilism offered up by Vice in this case and instead look to new models of providing that support.