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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.
Wow, that's pretty disconnected from reality. Point is it's all going video and writers are being fired.
If there's nothing to read and there's only video and you won't watch them, then you are then removed from access to news and information and no longer a viable member of society. (With the state of things these days one could argue that's the case for everyone already...)
Maybe it's because I'm a fast reader, or I can skim for certain words.
This is a common habit for on-screen consumption of information. Few "read" a website, most scan/skim for headings, and read the first 5-6 words of the paragraph to determine if the information they are looking for might be in that area.
Videos break how users regularly interact with finding information online/onscreen, and it slows down their ability to complete their task (find the information they want), which is why this practice is found annoying.
Reference: How Users Read on the Web (Spoiler: They don't)
I remember a lifetime ago, in a journalism class, we covered the relative strengths and weaknesses of reporting news in print vs in video.
One of the exercises was to take a news broadcast and write up the transcript for it. It pretty much drive home this little fact: the amount of information in an hour's news broadcast fills about 2/3 of a single page of a newspaper.
Some stories work better in video -- but all video has serious time constraints, and so in terms of actual information, video (even long-form video like documentary movies) can only ever give you a summary.
The same hold true for fiction. Movies, for example, are the equivalent of a written short story.