PATRONS ARE REQUESTED TO FAVOR THE AUTHOR BY CRITICISM AND SUGGESTION CONCERNING HIS SERVICE
It’s been way too serious in this space the last few posts. Back in the day, I used to psyche myself up for going out into Moscow winters by listening to Destroyer on loop, which is nowhere near as hardcore as it sounds. The new album is Devo on Nyquil with a dash of Ornette Coleman on valerian root. And I love it.
The track that used to get me through the morning is after the jump.
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.
At first glance, this post might look like an unseemly ploy for Web traffic. And that first fleeting feeling is correct. But also, I’ve gathered these videos over the past few months because I think they make two larger points about Web video in general. The first is a matter of audience and the second is a matter of style.
One night this summer, I was stationed near the back of one of the few bars in the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. At the other side of the bar, there was a 10-foot projection screen and the bright blacks and whites of an Usher video filtered over heads and through clouds of hookah smoke. The bar stereo blasted something – not sure what – but it wasn’t Usher. I was watching the music videos divorced from their soundtrack, and I was drawn to the editing, the intentional jump cuts, the colors. At this point, I was knee-deep in about four video projects and fairly obsessed with Final Cut.
The vast majority of news video – the stuff of 10 p.m. newscasts and cable news – is pitched to an audience that takes itself seriously and its news seriously. (There is something unsettling about approaching a story about a man forced to eat his own beard with faux, Edward-R.-Murrow earnestness when you know what you’re trying to do, but that’s another argument, another day.) I have no beef with this, love it in fact, and hope it continues.
But as someone in the business of making videos targeted specifically at Web viewers, that whole pile of news video is not my competition. The Usher video I was watching in that bar has 34 million hits on YouTube. That is my competition. That tells me that I need to push my video content toward the not-so-edgy edges of the Internet meme-scape. Only then can I differentiate myself from the pile of wholly admirable but not-so-trafficked newsy video to my right while peeling off a portion of those 34 million Usher views to the left. The videos below are the types that I, personally, aspire to steal from. Taste is a fickle thing.
That’s all well and good, but what does it mean in practice? To me, it’s a matter of style. News video gathered faithfully, ethically and truthfully should then be edited faithfully and truthfully while blatantly ripping off techniques and tactics from every inspiring movie and music video you can find.
That means have fun. Use jump cuts, graphics, color correction, music beds and anything else you can to grab the attention from your competition: the much-more-enticing music videos and kitten clips that flood the Internet on a daily basis. This comes with two caveats. Video journalists need to be (almost) as good as those directors… on deadline. Also, video journalists must be faithful to the tone their subjects projected during the reporting process. Fabricating reality is not an issue, because it’s right there on the tape. Augmenting reality beyond the bounds of journalistic forbearance is a definite danger.
Hoes Come Out at Night – Tiombe Lockhart
This video kind of slid by a month or so ago in my inbox, but I wanted to swing back around to it. The first ups go to the person in charge of casting, because the faces drive this clip beyond anything else. The tone-poem nature of the video leaves me with no doubt that the women featured are absolutely badtastic and powerful. Tone, the director of photography on this project, did a great job on the edit and it cues up exactly what I’m talking about with asymmetric and incongruous edits. I don’t think news video should look this hot, but I do think news footage gathered in good faith could be edited like this and entice viewers.