Writers of the World, Unite!

Scoble writes that "[t]he skills journalists will need in the future are going to be a lot more varied than just churning out good text," insisting that journalists will need to know how to "capture audio, photos, and video, and edit all that together to tell a compelling story on the Web." Now, he's not necessarily wrong, video and such can probably enhance a story, it's just that I don't like the deprecation of writing as a crucial basis for any kind of journalism.

In Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” he derides video as a poor medium for conveying information, claiming that it is better suited for entertainment. This book was written in the 1980s, so he is writing solely about television, but it still applies. In Postman's view, most television news is entertainment because it fails to communicate any real information to the consumer.

You can't help but see this vacuity in your eventing news broadcast. TV news is a video-based news source is that presents 'news' as detached and contextless chunks of digestible content, it doesn't have capability to tell a rich story. The war in Iraq, for example, is reduced to accounts of car bombings and death statistics, but there's no real analysis meaning there, no examination of the deeper story. But we get to see the pictures. We're just not told much about what those pictures mean.

The problem with video as an integrated part of a journalists job is that journalists will come to overly depend on it, they will become lazier writers, and the profession will continue to deteriorate. If we're not careful, online journalism will be the same as TV journalism...complete crap.