YouTubing the editorial page
The Sacramento Bee’s public editor reports that, starting soon, the paper will be accepting video letters to the editor:
Holwerk said that, to his knowledge, no other large paper is accepting such videos, so there’s no one to learn from or “past practices” to follow.
The idea is that by using YouTube or similar sites, readers would make their videos and e-mail them to the paper.
The main task right now for Holwerk and his editorial colleagues is figuring out how things will work. There are more questions than answers. And the questions are many.
Those questions, though, mainly cover content and editing questions. (And they’re mostly unnecessary questions with ready answers — letters to the editor are already restricted in length and content.) There is one question that doesn’t need to be asked, and that’s, “Why?” There’s no need to ask that because this is a freakishly brilliant idea.
The report continues:
The video letters to the editor would have no such filter and, in theory at least, would be a product of the reader’s own initiative, work and creativity.
Who knows how it will turn out. It could be a big hit or a big flop. Maybe it will drift somewhere in between.
But, in my opinion, it’s worth the effort. I like the freshness of the idea and trying something new, particularly when it comes to tinkering with something as venerable as letters to the editor, which have always served as the vehicle for readers to interact with their paper and each other.
Exactly. The newspapers that will survive the industry’s impending collapse are the ones that use their old-media knowledge to build vibrant new online communities. Letters to the editor were a wonderful way for ordinary citizens to find an audience; now, blogs, podcasts and videoblogs fill some of that functions online. The trick is for newspapers to build platforms enabling people to use these new technologies, and I think the Bee’s online videos are a step in the right direction. I also think that once readers are faced with the immediacy of video (especially if editorial responses are made in video form as well) they will prefer the format to written letters to the editor.
A printed newspaper can’t do photos as well as a Web site can, and it can’t do video at all. Driving readers online to find these features can help keep them online and build the paper’s online audience until it can handle being, not a “paper,” but an online news portal that serves up written articles, videos, sound clips and photo montages. Newspapers don’t need to compete with online; they need to become online. (Via Romenesko.)
