You Must Be Streaming

In a sudden reversal of fortune, newspapers have taken to online video and might just beat TV news at its own game.

W e think we know that the professional news media, especially newspapers, are obsolete, that the future is all about (excuse the expression) you—media created by amateurs. But such PowerPoint distillation tends to overlook the fact that mainstream media are not all simply shriveling and dying but in some instances actually evolving. And in evolution, there are always fascinating transitional iterations along the way. Such as newspapers’ suddenly proliferating forays into online video. (And now magazines: Time Inc. just announced a new “studio” to develop Web video.)

Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense. One of the Times’s new Web-video stars, David Carr (as the jolly-noir, movie-tasked Carpetbagger), recalls that when the Times’ video operation started fifteen months ago, his bosses said, “ ‘Let’s give it a whirl.’ Which is the exact opposite of the Times’ usual DNA. ‘Let’s give it a whirl’—that’s not something that comes up a lot.”......................

NY magazine