Is video the lazy answer?

At the Online Journalism Association conference in Washington earlier this month, I heard several people say too many newspapers are grasping at video and because it looks like the easy path to multimedia. Now comes Paul Bradshaw in the UK, blogging the same point of view.

Like Bradshaw, I was puzzled by a report on journalism.co.uk last week decribing how Trinity Mirror plans to "re-launch all its regional and local newspaper websites by the end of the year to refocus on interactive elements" -- because the article goes on to describe nothing but video plans for the "interactive" website.

Unless your users are producing it, "interactivity" just isn't the right word. Video is not only linear, watching video is fundamentally passive. At least print requires the consumer to take some sort of action in order to acquire each word.

Don't get me wrong; I think news sites ought to be equipping themselves to do "professional" video. I bought a $150 Chinese video camera a couple of weeks ago and I've been showing it to pretty much everybody who will look and listen. I took it to the ONA conference. I didn't shoot very much -- the place was far too noisy and lighting was poor. But I'm convinced that we're at a breakthrough point in terms of price/capability.

The real revolution will be in video produced by the people formerly known as consumers. And I think that's just getting started.