Comment Sigal to noise ratio (Score 1) 403
I've commented on this before in previous videos. It's all about the signal to noise ratio.
Interviewing people is fine. But spending a great deal of time listening to a neckbeard droning on, pontificating about whatever tangent distracts him is a waste of time. Watching someone talk doesn't actually provide any useful benefit. In fact, it does the opposite. It buries the bits and pieces of useful information where it's hard to find. If the interview isn't concise and on point, I tend to zone out and then I'm not paying attention when they say something useful.
The obvious fix for that is to edit the interview to get rid of the fluff and increase the information density. Interviews like that are easier to follow. However, they still suffer from the problem of having to sit and listen to the person talk. And that's a slow process. It's made even slower if the person being interviewed is a dull speaker. Again, listening to some monotone engineer type drone on, even if it's all relevant information, tends to make me zone out and, again, miss important information.
The solution to that is the transcript. I can read it much faster than listening to the video. I can easily go back and re-read something if I missed what they say. But there's still a problem. It's still a dialog between two individuals and despite the best efforts of the editors attempting to pare it down, there is still a lot of unnecessary chatter that one has to slog through. The signal to noise ratio still isn't high enough.
The obvious solution to that is for the interviewer to use the interview as the basis for actually writing a story. They can entirely get rid of the useless chatter and focus on writing about the subject based on what was said. Granted, some journalists are better at that than others, it's still the only effective way to get the signal to noise ratio up to an acceptable threshold when you're dealing with interviewing someone on a subject.
So when it comes to interviews, the video format is the wrong way to do it. Having a real journalist write a real story based on the interview is the right way.
Having said all that, there is still room for video. There are good reasons to have a story accompanied by a video. It is sometimes difficult to explain how something works with words and even pictures. Providing a video animation of the process often times makes it much easier to see what is actually going on. Video of some activity that is taking place is also useful. Watching time lapse erosion of a landscape, or the video of a building implosion or anything else like that is useful.
In summary, you don't have to get rid of all videos. Just set a policy to only show video that actually add value to the story. Otherwise you're just wasting people's time for nothing.
