How Online Video Content has Changed Journalism as we Know it

Ryan Sullivan
The University of Rhode Island

Abstract
Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, society has undergone an extremely dramatic
change in regards to news. Due to the explosion of the digital age and video production, news
has been more accessible to more people, in a variety of different ways. Print media is being
overshadowed by web based media. What used to be a professional only business is now
dominated by amateurs who can say whatever they want and post it on whatever platform they
would like. These people are making blogs, recording videos, or writing Facebook posts about
what is going on in the world, and this new accessibility has changed journalism. Newspapers
are declining rapidly while web based content is surging exponentially. But in order to
understand the cause, we need to look at one certain aspect of the digital age; the introduction of
videos. Videos have been around for over a century, however not everybody could record and
view one until recently. Today, every person with a cell phone can record a video at any time,
and send it almost anywhere in the world. As a result, the new accessibility to the news has made
drastic changes to the way we view it. It is because video news can be produced by anybody, not
just the news organizations, that journalism will never be the same again.

Fifteen years ago, there was no such thing as an iphone, or camera phone. All of the video
that we got was taken from a camcorder, and all of the calls that we made were on these big and
massive cell phones. However, as the Twenty-first century progressed, in just fifteen years those
two devices were merged together to create the tool that would become a menace to news

organizations. Before video was so accessible to the public, before both the internet and virtually
everybody having a camera, the best way to get the news was either on television, or in the
newspapers. However the best way to see the news, was undisputedly on the television. These
television channels would be the only ones who could broadcast these videos, as there was no
other viewing platform. This went on for decades, and it was an accepted part of journalism. The
television news was the only source of video content. But as the internet expanded and as
websites became more and more popular, one website began the destruction of the video
monopoly that the television news organizations held, and that website was YouTube.
YouTube did not immediately rival the news for video content and is not competitive
with the news organizations inherently. YouTube was and still is primarily a major entertainment
website, not focusing on the news. But as YouTube exploded in popularity, being valued at over a
billion dollars after just one year, news content came trickling in, and began the downward spiral
of old fashioned journalism. Three years after the creation of YouTube the world was thrown into
a recession, with a lot of major businesses losing copious amounts of money. Newspapers were
not immune to this, as many newspapers closed their doors, or had to lay off staff in the
recession. Even Americas premiere newspaper, the New York Times, suffered catastrophic
losses, and laid off over one hundred staffers at the start of the recession (Perez-Pena, 2008). But
at this time, YouTube grew exponentially, the exact opposite of what the rest of the news
business was doing. According to a study from Journalism Studies, the content that was viewed
online was based more upon entertainment than real news, as the study found that only 36.7% of
the news videos that they sampled used real sources (Peer, Ksiazek, 2010). Even though the
content of these videos might not have been factually correct, these people made content that
people wanted to view. Complementary to those statistics, a study by the Atlantic Journal of

Communication found that the most common formats of news that the young adults viewed was
not the traditional news like other generations. The study found that, 69% said they had
watched at least some traditional-format news clips on YouTube, (Armstrong, McAdams, Cain,
2015). Today, in the #news channel on YouTube, the category boasts thirty three million
subscribers, one of the most subscribed to channels on all of YouTube. What we can infer from
this is that YouTube is becoming one of the most used sources for acquiring news. For young
adults, the overwhelming majority of them view some of their news content on YouTube as
opposed to a newspaper or other mediums. But in order to understand why YouTube and other
videos are so popular, we need to understand how the brain and human body perceives these
videos internally.
The human brain is a very complex organ and a lot of it is not understood yet. However,
through studies we can understand a lot, and when it comes to understanding video content
studies have shown many results which could explain the power of video. First, video utilizes the
most material out of any other medium. Video is an assault on the human senses, utilizing sound,
visuals, emotions, and spoken language to convey a message. Using that information, it should
come as no surprise that video is very effective in certain scenarios. A study conducted by Media
Ethics found that video content is more effective in some scenarios, and less effective in others.
The study looked at three videos, a police sting, a man drowning in a flash flood, and a fight
where a young teenager was viciously beaten. Of the people who were polled, the police sting
was voted to be shown in both online and on the television news. However, the mans death and
the beating were both overwhelmingly voted to not be shown in video, as the video was too
graphic. The study called this affect, moral judgement. (Meader, Knight, Coleman, Wilkins,
2015). This study proves that video content is not always the best way to convey a message.

However, the study showed that it was always better to run the video online rather than on the
news. Online content is not always held to the same standard as television content, thus making it
more acceptable to post such a video online where a viewer can choose whether or not to watch
it. When a video is acceptable to watch however, it is an extremely powerful tool, illustrating
more than just a still image. After realizing that YouTube is a major source of news, and
understanding why the brain prefers certain video content, it is crucial to see the catalyst behind
the rise of video journalism, the Arab Spring Protests.
In early 2011 the Middle East was in chaos, with several dictatorships seeing their end
via mass demonstrations. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and many other nations successfully disposed of
their dictators, and other countries were plunged into massive civil wars, like Syria. However the
citizens of all the countries involved realized they had a new superweapon that the government
could not stop, Twitter. Twitter was instrumental in the Arab Spring protests, showing the world
what was happening during the protests. The protesters would tweet about ongoing situations, or
about where a mass protest would be staged. However, when it came to the international scale
Twitter served another important role, providing video evidence of what was happening. This
eyewitness video content forever changed the way news is reported, as the world realized the
benefits of accessibility to front-line video content. As mentioned earlier, the findings of the
Media Ethics study prove that video content is more powerful in certain aspects than others. The
protesters took advantage of this, and got their message out to the entire world. These protesters
were a special breed however, as they are known as citizen journalists.
Citizen Journalists are at the core of the decline of journalism as we know it. What had
once been a field that was nearly exclusive to professionals is now dominated by amateurs and
those who are not necessarily educated in journalism. The rise of these citizen journalists, or

citizens who produce newsworthy content, are a byproduct of the digital age. Since everybody
carries a camera on them at all time now, anybody can become a citizen journalist at any time.
During the Arab Spring protests and followed by the Syrian Civil War, this became very
apparent. As previously mentioned, the citizen journalists would post their videos onto Twitter,
or upload them to YouTube to be swept up in the mass of news circulation. Before this age,
almost all news content was produced by the news itself, rather than the people there on scene.
However eye-witness video produced by these citizen journalists have changed that dramatically.
These have been so transformative in fact that The Lede, the New York Times online blog, used
content straight from the citizen journalists in the blog. This created the collaborative news clip,
as one study described it. The collaborative news clip, previously unseen in history, allows
audiences to gain a deeper, more visceral perspective on the Syrian violence (Wall, El Zahed,
2015). The collaborative news clip plays on human emotions in several ways, utilizing sight,
visuals, sound, and sometimes emotions, making them one of the most effective ways to convey
news. However, citizen journalism is not limited to the Syrian Civil War, or other major
conflicts. A citizen journalist is anybody who makes newsworthy content, which makes any
blogger a citizen journalist. YouTuber Philip DeFranco is an excellent example of a citizen
journalist, as he is self employed and makes news videos Monday-Thursday each week.
DeFranco has over three million subscribers on his channel, however he has no journalism
degree. He had an affinity for the news and began producing the videos several years ago, and he
has not stopped since. Across the world journalism is being whittled down because of these
people, the citizen journalists. As the news is free to more people, and controlled by less, these
citizen journalists are changing everything that journalism has been since its inception.

Journalism is one of the most important businesses in the world. It keeps society
informed with what is going on with everything and anything. However journalism has been
forced to adapt and to evolve faster than ever before in this hyperspeed age. The internet and
other mass media technology have made journalism very different than the way it was a mere
fifteen years ago. But the real catalyst behind it was the growth of the video, the way it was
produced and seen. Websites like YouTube have been the platform for a whole new form of
journalism, citizen journalism to develop. The rise of citizen journalists have broadened the field
of journalism, giving the field a new, fresher set of legs to evolve the entire field. Since the
digital age began, it is easy to say with certainty, that video has changed the world of journalism
as we know it.

Works Cited
Meader, A., Knight, L. Coleman, R., Wilkins, L. (October 27th, 2015) Ethics in the Digital Age:
A Comparison of the Effects of Moving Images and Photographs on Moral Judgment. Accessed
on December 1st, 2015. Accessed from: http://www-tandfonlinecom.uri.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/23736992.2015.1083403
Wall, M., El Zahed, S. (April 23rd 2014). Embedding content from Syrian citizen journalists:
The rise of the collaborative news clip. Accessed October 16th, 2015. Accessed from:
http://jou.sagepub.com.uri.idm.oclc.org/content/16/2/163.full
Perez-Pena, R. (February 14th, 2008) New York Times plans to cut 100 Newsroom Jobs.
Accessed December 20th 2015. Accessed from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/business/media/14cnd-times.html?_r=0
Armstrong, C., McAdams, M., Cain, J. (April 30th, 2015). What is News? Audiences May Have
Their Own Ideas. Accessed October 16th, 2015. Accessed from: http://www-tandfonlinecom.uri.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/15456870.2015.1013102
Peer, L,. Ksiazek, T. (October 7th, 2010). Youtube And The Challenge To Journalism. Accessed
October 16th, 2015. Accessed from: http://www-tandfonlinecom.uri.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2010.511951