Publishers Are Making More Video -- Whether You Want It or Not (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mic, a website aimed at millennials, used to employ 40 writers and editors producing articles on topics like "celebrating beauty" and "strong women." Ten were let go this month, with most in the revamped newsroom of 63 now focused on making videos for places like Facebook. Critics have called such moves "100 percent cynical" and out of sync with audience demand. Yet Americans are watching more video snippets online, either because they secretly like them or because they're getting harder to avoid. The growing audience for video, more valuable to advertisers than the space next to words, is causing websites to shift resources in what's become known across the industry as the pivot to video. Americans are expected to spend 81 minutes a day watching digital video in 2019, up from 61 minutes in 2015, according to projections by research firm eMarketer. Time spent reading a newspaper is expected to drop to 13 minutes a day from 16 minutes during that time. The question is whether those trends will sustain the growing number of outlets flooding social networks with video clips. Mic, a New York-based news site founded in 2011, was just the latest to fire writers when it announced its pivot to video this month. Dozens of writers and editors have also been laid off this summer at news outlets like Vocativ, Fox Sports, Vice and MTV News. All of the moves were tied in part to focusing more resources on making videos. Publishers are heading in this direction even though polls show consumers find video ads more irritating than TV commercials. Google and Apple are testing features that let you mute websites with auto-play videos or block them entirely. More young Americans prefer reading the news than watching it, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center. But many publishers have little choice.

Comments

Re:I do hate videos, but...

[Attila Dimedici]

They're a waste of time for me, as I am able to read and comprehend faster than any video can present the information.

While that is true, my objection to videos is that it is easier to mislead with a video. I will give two examples. First, in "Bowling from Columbine" there is a video of a Charlton Heston speech with a cut away to a sign from the audience in the middle...except that it was not A speech, it was two separate speeches. The cut away to the sign was so that the audience would not notice that he was wearing a different shirt in each part of the "speech". They seamlessly combined the audio of Charlton Heston speaking from both speeches with no break in the audio to hint that it was not all one speech. In written text, you would need to put some ellipses in, or some other indication of a break and people would expect you to tell them where the speech occurred. Then if you did not state that it was two separate speeches, they would, rightly, call you out for lying. In the video version, Michael Moore claimed it was an innocent oversight.
A second example was my first exposure to Alex Jones, now of InfoWars. A friend, knowing I am conservative, sent me a couple of videos from Alex Jones. I watched the first one and at one point there is ongoing audio over various video clips. The video clips LOOKED like they were related to what was being said in the audio...and if they were they lent great credence to what was otherwise a suspect idea. Well, I happened to know what the video clips actually were and knew they had nothing to do with the audio. Just as in Bowling for Columbine the video was designed to make you interpret the audio in a way contrary to what logic would dictate.