Online video journalism- is it the way forward?

Today, I’m just full of opinion….so bare with me as I try to explain my complicated thoughts.

I’ve come to the conclusion, that the more ‘citizen journalism’ grows on youtube or elsewhere- the more there is pressure on media outlets to publish their own online news videos. Although I have no concrete evidence to this conclusion, I truly believe that is the case.

I come to think of all the news that started as citizen journalism. ‘Happy slapping’ is a prime example. If people weren’t uploading those ridiculous clips online, would it of even hit national newspapers? The answer (in my humble opinion) is a straight up no. It eventually hit national news because they were watched by so many people.

I think for a while, professional journalism was depending on citizen journalism for news- and suddenly- all of them thought actually lets go out and shoot news ourselves and upload it online. I don’t remember depending on one website to watch online news videos. It seemed as though if I wanted to watch something- I knew I’d find it on BBC or Al-Jazeera or CNN. My point here is no one started online video first- they all did it because the public were using the internet to upload videos.

And look here- the Wall Street Journal has made loads of money out of what I think, was a public phenomenon. Apperantly, their audience has grown to 10 million streams per month- and they’re making $200,000 of revenue just from video ads.

I read a quote from newsvideographer.com and I couldn’t agree more. It said:

“As information converges on a digital platform, news organizations are starting to see that video is replacing photography as the attention-getting feature that differentiates their take on the news.”