Lack of production experience holding back web video for newspapers, survey suggests

Video on newspaper websites requires an average of four hours of production to provide one minute of footage, a survey by an online journalism academic has suggested.

Video Workload survey, conducted by Andy Dickinson, senior lecturer in digital and online journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, took the opinions of more than 50 journalists which suggested a lack of production experience is 'slowing things down' when it comes to creating online video for newspaper sites.

According to one respondent to the survey, which asked 'how video is produced in newspaper newsrooms and who does it', trainee video producers can take more than eight hours to edit a short video.

Their more advanced colleagues, who have more than a year's experience in this field, can reduce that time to between one and four hours.

The study, which was dominated by US-based responses, also highlighted a lack of clearly defined roles in newsrooms for video, with video shot and edited by the same person in 84 per cent of workplaces surveyed.

In both US and non-US cases, Dickinson's research showed that fewer reporters are tasked with producing and editing video for the web compared to photographers or a dedicated multimedia member of staff.

In a blog post, Dickinson said that, while most newsrooms surveyed were satisfied with the amount of breaking news they generated on their website, they 'recognise that video is not the way to break it'. Only 14 (26.9 per cent) of the newsrooms surveyed said breaking news was the main way they use online video.

In contrast most newspaper video, according to the survey, took the form of features, with 71.2 per cent of respondents saying that this accounted for the majority of their web video output.

Over half of the respondents (51.9 per cent) said they wanted a more multimedia approach to video in their newsroom, though Dickinson said that such a change in approach would require 'a serious look at the skill set required here in terms of training and staffing'.

Concluding the survey on his blog, Dickinson said a more specific study into the workflow of newsrooms is needed to determine exactly what responsibility each journalist has for video content.

Full results of the survey can be viewed here.

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