There’s a sense of dread that the move into video is fundamentally different from the advent of digital and that writing jobs may disappear permanently. The shift to video is a convenient scapegoat. With the rise of digital, print writers could reinvent themselves as online journalists. This time, they don’t have that option.
Read the full piece at Digiday
The idea that a writing journalist’s only recourse in “The Great Pivot to Video” is to learn to make vids is erroneous. Because what’s most valuable about people with a writing mind is not their facility with a keyboard vs a camera, but rather their skill at fashioning story. Teaming a story-trained writer with a media-trained videographer is the secret sauce in most of my Newsplexer projects.
Together, they almost always produce something much more successfully informative and engaging in today’s mediasphere than either would have accomplished alone. Any sensibly pivoting media companies will realize the same thing.
What it does require of writing journalists, however, is a willingness to learn and embrace new forms of writing rather than being stodgy about the supremacy of paragraph-based storytelling.
After all, even in the case of stories that are still, in today’s digital world, best told with long-form narrative, it’s not about the text. It’s about the words. It’s about the meaning. Good journalistic video needs that just as much.
