Filmmaking is officially dead. Newspaper video reporters are dying.
As of five years ago, there weren't many film camera makers left: Arri, Panavision, and Aaton were the few that remained. As reported on Creative COW, all three have now ceased making film cameras. Film labs are closing. Hollywood camera rentals are more and more digital these days. Over 50% of the theater screens in the US now have digital projection.
All this, of course, puts pressure on film labs, which in turn puts pressure on Kodak and Fujifilm. We're seeing dominoes topple very quickly now, and cameras like the RED and the CineAlta are pushing them harder.
As someone who spent many an hour deep in film clips in the editing room, I miss the physical contact with my creations. While the virtual editing world of video has many advantages, it's not the same as manually pawing through a world of visuals hanging all around you to find the thing you want. We've lost the ability to actually touch and see our work directly. Video killed that, too.
Meanwhile, I wrote many times over the last decade that I thought that newspapers were insane to believe that major video pushes would "save them." I was right.
The notion was a convoluted one: the Internet was competing with newspapers and the Internet was competing with television and the Internet had video, therefore a newspaper needed to have a Web site with video. I argued that this was really abandoning the role of a newspaper and starting a news television outlet, replete with untrained videographers and on-air folk. I also argued that it was a complete misunderstanding of a newspaper's customer.
The way you consume news in a newspaper is different than video. Video is a one-way street where the time line is controlled by video editor. Once someone clicks on it, they're pretty much stuck in that time line. Even being able to fast forward, pause, or rewind doesn't really give you the same experience as reading a newspaper.
Newspapers allow you to glance among many stories and pick what interests you most. It allows you to jump around. It allows you see balance between stories (i.e., where does the New York Times put what the editors believe is the most important story of the day? What other stories are on that page?). There are a lot of subtle things that are going on when someone consumes a newspaper. Some Web sites can come close to this, but most don't. Web sites tend to "chunk" lots of small bits and force you elsewhere or to actively click on them to consume them, as the economics behind the site (ads) tends to force that construct. Even USA Today, which started out as "small chunked news" has reverted to longer form stories. Why? Because that's what a newspaper reader wants. And they don't want video.
If you look at eye-tracking studies you see differences in the way someone consumes a newspaper, articles on an iPad, and on the Web (on the Web you read the first two lines, then scan down quickly to see if anything else catches your eye on the visible page--i.e. you don't scroll--what's known as the F pattern). Simply put, someone who reads a newspaper (or most magazines for that matter), is actually trying to read the content. In other online media, there's a tendency to skim (you did make it this far, didn't you? ;~). With video, there's a tendency to do other things while the video is playing--you use the audio from the video presentation to alert you when to focus back on the screen. Do you think these differences cause different subscriber bases? I do.
So what happened to all those newspaper video endeavors? As of 2007, over 90% of the top 100 US newspapers had video presence on their Web site, and this was propelling requests for video in the still cameras newspapers bought. But an AP study of 100 US newspapers earlier this year shows that most are cutting down on their Web video presence and laying off video journalists.
This week, Assistant Professor of Journalism Barbara Selvin at Stony Brook University got widespread notice when she wrote "Newspapers should jettison most of their web video efforts." She bases part of her argument on yet another study that reports that less than 10% of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites are watching the videos. Duh. A newspaper subscriber wants to read. They want to read a tight, dense, fact-checked stream of words. Probably words that give them deep knowledge and not the trivial talking head crap that you get from video reporters standing in front of a place where something happened.
So video tried to kill newspapers, too. The smart ones are fighting back, and a few still live.