Comparing Online Video from Newspaper and Television Websites

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Journalism 1 –18 Showing versus telling: © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: Comparing online sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914568076 video from newspaper and jou.sagepub.com television websites

Mary Angela Bock University of Texas at Austin, USA

Abstract Video has become a central part of news on the web. As an emerging form of news, news videos are appearing with varied narrative structures, styles and formats. Narrative structure is one way that journalists establish discursive authority. Because of contrasting traditions regarding visual news, newspaper videos might be expected to employ different narrative strategies. This content analysis compared the narrative structure of videos posted by newspaper websites with those posted by television organizations. It finds that form reflects contrasting traditions, with newspaper videos taking a more mimetic (showing) approach and television websites using a more diegetic (telling) narrative style.

Keywords Content analysis, narrative, newspapers, video journalism

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Marshall McLuhan (1964)1

Video news is no longer a novelty for newspaper organizations. The ads that are attached to online videos provide one of the few potential sources of revenue growth for the industry and have become, as Editor and Publisher put it, a newspaper mainstay (Bobolo,

Corresponding author: Mary Angela Bock, School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, 300 W. Dean Keeton A1000 BMC 3.384, Austin, TX 78702-1073, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 Journalism

2014; Fitzgerald, 2008; Sass, 2010). A recent Pew Foundation recent report on the state of the media found a small uptick in digital jobs at newspapers, a bright spot in an other- wise dismal business climate (Pew, 2013). Even the staid and serious Wall Street Journal announced a video platform in 2012, with its reporters using iPhones to submit stories and stream them live (Yang, 2012). As newsrooms of all types work through the ‘web-first’ convergence process, video journalism presents a number of technical, organizational and creative challenges (Ingram, 2010; Sterling, 2011). Newspapers are hiring video journalists, purchasing equipment and re-training staff, some of whom have never held a camera before, let alone produced a video story (Huang et al., 2006; Robinson, 2011). As a recent project on web video from Columbia University reports, ‘… there seems to be no consensus on how to roll it out’ (Tu, 2014). Television news organizations, no strangers to video production, are also still working through decisions about live streaming, copyright, and formatting software. Mobile video, another growth area, complicates these decisions for everyone. In addition to technical considerations, decisions about video are likely to be influenced by the politics and practices of newsroom culture. Contemporary newsroom ethnographies have captured the tensions cause by multi-media demands and what Ruppel (2009) dubbed ‘mono-media sensibilities’ (Brannon, 2008; Cawley, 2008; Usher, 2012). Print and television news organizations have traditionally worked in competition with one another, but convergent newsrooms have placed them, not always happily, working side by side (Bock, 2012a; Klinenberg, 2005; Robinson, 2011; Silcock and Keith, 2006; Singer, 2003). Tensions between word-people and picture people, long present in the newsroom, are inflamed when economics and deadlines challenge professional identities. Journalism schools might be re-configur- ing curricula to eliminate ‘silos’ of media separatism (Claussen, 2009), but it is one thing to change a syllabus and another thing entirely to change a professional’s sense of who they are and what they do. Journalism scholars have also examined the way digitization is changing news stories in terms of content and style. Barnhurst (2013) identified a long-range shift to longer- form political news over time. Boczkowski (2004) documented the online journalism’s homogenization of coverage. Anderson (2011) has sounded the alarm regarding reporters’ new awareness of online metrics. These studies have focused on journalistic story choices, placement, and gatekeeping practices. Video, however, demands attention to narrative style as well, since a video story is produced, composed, and scripted very differently than a text-based story. Now that web video is freed from the scheduling constraints of broadcasting, narrative choices are myriad: Story length can be more fluid; journalists can appear or disappear, and a story might include interactive graphics, animations and a mix of stills and moving images. How are newsrooms taking advantage of this freedom? To take a turn on Barnhurst and Nerone’s (2001) title, what is the form of online video news? This project is based on an analysis of 200 online video news stories posted by newspaper and television organizations in 2011 and 2013, with particular attention to narrative structure, and the way newspapers and television stations – institutions with separate histories, traditions, and professional cultures – are using video in the converged media environment. Examining the way stories are constructed offers a chance Bock 3 to better understand modern newsroom practices and can provide insight about how journalists establish their legitimacy.

Narrative, medium and authority News is a specialized form of discourse. Zelizer (1990a, 1993, 1995b) has outlined the way journalists use discourse in their stories, histories and cross-talk to support their authority as society’s storyteller. News stories themselves represent a specialized form of discourse: narratives that situate facts into a particular kind of rhetorical construct that connotes truth, temporal sequence and causality (Bell, 1991; Bird and Dardenne, 1988; Van Dijk, 1988; White, 2005). Filmic news narratives are even more specialized, in that they are presented in a factual context, link images to journalistic discourse (in the form of Barthes’ (1977) anchorage or as a script within) and the story’s ‘characters’ (whether subjects or journalists) are materially present, that is, they are somehow seen or heard. The differences between television and newspaper content are well documented, and television’s special form has long been criticized for its emphasis on visuals, short sound-bites and moving graphics (Allan, 1998; Epstein, 1973; Hallin and Gitlin, 1994; McManus, 1994). The rivalry is more than a matter of competing media forms; it is rooted in a historic elevation of word over image. Newspaper journalists have historically been considered and have considered their work to be the more ‘serious’ form of news (Becker, 2003; Zelizer, 1995a). The rise of television news in the 20th century and its eventual emphasis on fires, car crashes and sex served to crystallize, in the minds of serious journalists, the impression of visual news as cheap entertainment (Kaniss, 1991; Kerbel, 2000; McManus, 1994). TV and newspaper journalists also differ in the way they structure narratives (Ben-Porath, 2007; Epstein, 1973; Schudson, 2003; Zelizer, 1990b, 1995b) and a well-established line of scholarship has examined the way journalists establish their authority through their discursive practices (Fiske and Hartley, 1978; Karlsson, 2011; Van Dijk, 1988; Zelizer, 1990a, 1993). Narrative strategies, such as detached descrip- tion, quoting and references to eye-witnessing, are part of a news-writer’s authority ‘toolkit’ (Allan, 1998; Bell, 1991; Zelizer, 1990a, 2007). The new media environment that invites everyone to ‘be the media’ pressures today’s professional journalists to assert their authority even as they struggle with other challenges, such as declining financial support and expanding job descriptions. Somewhat overlapping with narrative authority is the concept of authorship, that is, the presentation of a story’s teller and how that teller is identified (Chatman, 1990; Herman and Vervaeck, 2005). Printed news stories may use a byline or carry a marker from an established institution (such as the Associated Press). Television stories are presented as part of a network or station’s offerings, and are usually presented by a visible human being: These are markers of authorship. But the narratives themselves, the images and the words within also present authorial markers, and this is often one of the key differences between television and printed news (Bock, 2012a). These differences reflect, in part, the way that newspaper and television journalists have traditionally considered the value of visuals (Carlebach, 1997; Kobre, 2004; Lowrey, 2002). 4 Journalism

Studying narrative structure in online video news, therefore, can shed light on the ways that journalists from different traditions work to assert their authority. But first, it helps to review a bit of history to understand how these traditions evolved.

A brief history of visual storytelling Photography’s invention inspired enthusiasm in many quarters in the 19th century, but journalism was slow to embrace it, for reasons both technical and organizational (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001; Carlebach, 1997; Clarke, 1997; Rosenblum, 1973). Illustrated newspapers in the mid-19th century did not print photographs but woodcuts, often very subjectively drawn by skilled artists (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001). Towards the end of the 19th century, photography became the norm, in part due to the lure of modernism and shifts in publication patterns (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001; Cookman, 2009). Nevertheless, images remained an ill-regarded stepchild of more serious journalism (Becker, 2003; Carlebach, 1992; Zelizer, 1995a). Photojournalists, even those working for major pictorial magazines, rarely held ultimate control of their own work, instead turning their images over to be contextualized by the writers (Hagaman, 1996; Kobre, 2004; Lutz and Collins, 1993; Morris, 1998). Both print and television photojournalism can trace part of their lineage to the documentary tradition and filmic news in its earliest forms, the slice-of-life shorts produced by the Lumière brothers with their small, 5-kg hand-cranked camera2 (Barnouw, 1974; Barsam, 1973; Rosenblum, 1997). Political leaders seized upon film as a means to spread their messages and enhance their visibility, both literally and metaphorically. Soon ceremonial occasions (or often, their re-enactments) were filmed for mass distribution (Barnouw, 1974; Barsam, 1973). By 1900, this newsreel genre was in full flower, and its form would eventually be adapted to early television news. Today’s television news is marked not only by its scripting style but by the way it is attached to a scheduled program, with news ‘shows’ as a distinct genre, complete with music, animated graphics and narrative arcs that end on an optimistic note. For a while, documentary and newsreels existed side by side on network television. The gap between individual, in-depth and more opinionated documentaries widened as television news developed its own short, seemingly objective and almost staccato narrative style, marked by its brevity and authoritative third-person narrative (Bliss, 1991; Tuchman, 1978). Content analyses of television news have found that over time, sound- bites have become shorter and journalists have appeared more often (Barnhurst and Steele, 1997; Grabe and Bucy, 2011; Hallin, 1992), but this authoritative voice was largely consistent over time (Bock, 2012a; Fiske and Hartley, 1978; Zelizer, 1990b). Today’s television news continues to use the third-person, diegetic style. In the tradition of Walter Cronkite, television reporters tell the audience ‘the way it is’. Documentary filmmakers, however, often choose a more mimetic cinema verité style that allows their subjects to tell their own stories and lets the stories ‘breathe’ (Aitken, 1998; Butchart, 2006). Multi-media journalists, many of whom were originally trained as still photographers who traditionally stayed in the background, tend to favor this mimetic form (Bock, 2012a). Here, the terms mimetic and diegetic are used not in a formal, rhetorical sense but as useful labels for two poles on a narrative continuum. Journalists are clearly the Bock 5

‘tellers’ of diegetic videos, while mimetic video narratives tend to shift storytelling responsibility to their subjects.

The form of online news All journalists who are being asked to think ‘web first’ are now in the position of taking on new tasks while figuring out what this means. Freed from the constraints of a broadcast schedule, web video can be just about anything: long form, Vine snippets, first person accounts, raw footage or surveillance clips. Web video presents a particular challenge at newspapers, where writers and photojournalists are being compelled to craft multi-media stories as part of their daily work, and they complain of feeling stretched thin (Bock, 2012b; Brannon, 2008; Yaschur, 2012). Not only are they being asked to take on these new tasks, they’re being asked to do the sort of work their profession traditionally maligned and reinvent it. In response, some (though not all, see for instance Bardoel and Deuze, 2001 or Barnhurst, 2013) researchers report that journalists are just practicing shovel ware, cutting and pasting material from the traditional product to a website (Cawley, 2008; Dimitrova and Neznanski, 2006). As Brannon (2008) described her subjects: ‘They felt the pressure of immediacy and often failed to take further steps to develop content suitable for the medium’ (p. 106). Organizational partnerships seem not to make much of a difference, for instance, Thornton and Keith (2009) found more of an impact on pro- motional efforts than on converged content. Content analyses of newspaper websites have identified other differences between the print and online product, with more breaking crime and sports stories online (Barnhurst, 2013) and a long-term trend toward more analytical political stories (Barnhurst, 2012; Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997). Studies of web design during the early 21st century have noted that newspaper organizations continue to experiment with multi-media, hyperlinking and layout designs as they adapt to the online environment (Barnhurst, 2012; Greer and Mensing, 2004). While some of these studies have analyzed the presence of multi-media, they have not focused on video story form. This project was designed to take a detailed, systematic look at what web video looks like in terms of narrative style and how convergence might reflect organizational cultures.

Methodology: Studying narrative structure Seymour Chatman’s seminal work on narratology contended with fictional cinema, but proved useful for the study of filmic news (Chatman, 1978, 1990; Herman and Vervaeck, 2005). As part of his original work on literary narrative, Chatman described the way a reader (or ‘narratee’) might not be the textual narratee, and the implied author might not be the textual narrator. Charles Dickens’ books, for example, told the story not from Dickens’ perspective (the actual author) but that of a character in the story (the textual narrator). As Chatman (1990) later applied this model to filmic narrative, he described the complexity of identifying a cinematic narrator’s presence, manifest on screen or off, with voice, music or other noise, by way of visual appearance, camera angle, lighting and so on. 6 Journalism

Text(Website, Newspaper, TV Broadcast)

Story

Implied Textual Textual Implied

Author Narrator Narratee Narratee

Journalist Audience

Figure 1. An adaptation of Chatman’s conceptualization of implied authorship.

Identifying authorship in news appears to be simple but rarely is. In the case of a traditional TV story, the correspondent is presented as author; for a text-based newspaper story, the presumed narrator is a journalist – usually named in a byline (Reich, 2008; Schudson, 1978). A newspaper story is not entirely the work the person named in the byline. Editors, publishers, photojournalists and others within the institution take part in the production and relay of a story. Images further complicate the construction of news authorship, as photojournalists have not historically been the writers of their stories and images are often haphazardly credited (Zelizer, 1990b, 2006). Cameras are occasionally implicated as autonomous newsmakers, their perfect ‘eyes’ witnessing events on behalf of others. The filmic, or video3 story itself further complicates the authorial construct because it constitutes a multilayered presentation that combines elements such as journalistic scripts, interview sound, background noise, moving or still images and graphics. Video journalism is in part a material practice, and not simply textual manipulation. Today’s news videos might be created by one person working as a ‘VJ’ or backpack journalist, by a crew on site, or by the combined effort of more than one journalist. Video stories, therefore, include the discursive construct of authorship along with actual voices, often recorded by journalists or interviewees (Figure 1). Video stories are also edited using at least two, but usually more ‘streams’ of information, a visual stream and an auditory stream. As Figure 2 illustrates, digital editing makes it possible to add many more parallel streams of information in time: visually, there may be the photographic/video stream, and any number of graphics (or even other photographs) layered on ‘top’ of the scene. The sound stream might also include background noise (known as NATSOT), music, interview sound-bites and narration. Key to this discussion is the way digital editing affords journalists multiple ways to structure a video story. Digital editing makes it easy to string sound together and adjust and re-adjust it anywhere in the timeline. Editors are no longer slaves to the audio track the way they once were, and so a determinant script is optional. Newcomers to multi- media are no longer always taught to start with a script; they might be instructed to connect a few sound-bites, or even just use one long sound-bite to serve as the story’s timeline. Bock 7

TIME:00:00 00.1000.40 01:00

Video wide shot city plazaHead shot Band playingWide shot campaign party

Graphics Today, Springfield Governor BlusterWanda Jones

NarrationThe Governor was happy: This is Wanda Jones Reporting

Sound-Bites I’m so glad I won

Music (low) (low)(high) (low)

Natsot (low) (low) (low) (fade out)

*Editing software generally does not display the text of what is said or descriptions of the visuals, it displays sound volume levels and markers for shot changes; the information was added here for clarity.

Figure 2. Schematic of a video story.

Research questions News organizations are converging, and video is part of that process, but it remains unclear how or whether online video will evolve into a unique form. How might the traditions of print and television influence the style of stories on the web? And might online video be evolving into its own unique form? These questions can be formally posed as follows:

RQ1. What is the structural narrative form of news video on the Internet? Sub-RQ 1. What differences in narrative form might exist between videos posted by newspaper websites and television websites? Sub-RQ 2. What factors, in terms of news practice or institutional traditions, might contribute to the form of online video news?

Decades from now, it may be that institutional tradition will be less relevant, but the contemporary situation is still largely a system of formerly separate media operations adapting their ‘mono-media’ traditions to the Internet, and these sensibilities likely will affect the narrative structure.

Method This study combines qualitative close reading with content analysis to compare online stories from television websites and newspaper websites in two waves. A coding scheme was designed primarily around elements of filmic narrative, with a few additional con- ceptual elements such as topic selection and journalistic transparency. The analyses were conducted 2 years apart: first in 2011 to investigate whether differences between the two types of organizations existed and again in 2013 to see whether there might be discernible changes. The 2013 wave used a codebook very similar to the one used in 8 Journalism

2011, identical categories for key variables for the sake of comparison. For both the 2011 and 2013 waves, coders were encouraged to make notes and comments as they worked, making it possible to further refine the instrument and make some additional (though subjective) observations. Both the 2011 and 2013 waves each used a random sample of 100 websites, half from newspaper organizations and half from television stations. Newspaper sites were selected randomly from papers listed in the library database NewsBank using random numbers until 50 newspaper sites with video stories could be identified. Targeting 50 organizations each time ensured that a wide range of market sizes could be represented for both print and television organizations and still allow for a manageable video analysis. Stories were selected from sites according to whatever story was listed as a ‘top’ video (which was, in some cases, the only video). Once a site was identified as having video, the ‘top’ or first video story posted was chosen for analysis. Locating videos on television websites was understandably more frequent. Television websites were chosen by randomizing the national Demographic Market Area (DMA) numbers. Stations were chosen from each market by alternatively starting from the top or bottom of a list provided by www.stationindex.com, until a station that covered local news was found. Here again, the ‘top’ story or first video seen was analyzed for the sake of consistency and comparison. Only locally stories that were produced by the organizations were studied; national wire videos, ‘trending videos’ or user-generated contributions were not included. The study was designed to look for story topic, production style, editing elements, narrative style, authorship, reflexivity, institutional markers and narrative voice. Specifically, the coding scheme identified:

Story category (feature, politics, crime/disaster, consumer information, health, sports and so on; Technical style, such as ‘VO’ (unseen person’s voice over video) ‘PKG’ (a television package in which a reporter narratives video and appears in the story on camera), ‘RAW’ (raw, unedited video clips) or recorded live shots according to narrative voice; We made note of the appearance of the journalist, that is, whether or not the journalist was ever visible in the story; We counted the appearances of story subjects, that is, whether or not other people appeared on camera and how often they spoke; Stories were timed and certain individual shots were also timed in order to determine a ratio between the narration of a journalist and subject-driven interview sound; For each story, the overall number of shots was noted, as were the number of shots of a journalist, subject and ‘natural sound’, again, in order to determine a ratio of production value. A higher number of shots per minute of edited video were indicative of more intricate editing; Stories were analyzed according to the narrative ‘voice’, that is, who told the story: a journalist? A subject? No speaker at all? Bock 9

As a means for understanding the way journalists established authorship, we looked for the story’s mode of address, that is, the use of first, second or third- person language; Finally, we looked for the presence of what we called ‘transparency’ statements that would reveal news processes; for instance, ‘We knocked on the councilman’s door’ or ‘I met with Senator Darcy in her office’.

Both waves of coding were accomplished by a two-person team, who worked to a standard until they achieved acceptable inter-coder reliability (above 85% measured by Krippendorff’s alpha (Hayes and Krippendorff, 2007)). In all, coders timed, mapped and analyzed 200 stories representing 492 minutes of video news. Individually and in combi- nation, these nominal and ratio categories made it possible to look for mimetic and diegetic tendencies in the stories selected. Coders were also encouraged in both studies to take qualitative notes on characteristics that were not part of the codebook for the sake of qualitative analysis and to guide future research.

Discussion and findings What may be one of the more important observations occurred during the sampling process. In 2011, roughly half the newspaper websites had to be crossed over in order to find one with video on the website. By 2013, only a handful of newspaper websites had to be crossed over to reach the sampling goal of 50. The 2013 sample also included at least five instances of newspaper–TV partnerships (this was not part of the coding sheet, nor were the partnerships always made clear). These newspaper−TV partnerships changed the nature of the comparison, as the analysis will show. To review, this project was designed to explore the structural narrative form of stories posted by television news websites and newspaper websites, with special attention to differences between the two. Based on organizational culture and tradition, it is seemed likely that newspaper websites would more closely proximate a mimetic narrative style than a diegetic one and this was borne out in the analysis. Video news posted by newspaper websites did more closely proximate a mimetic narrative style the cinema verité documentary film tradition, measured here by the amount of time subjects, rather than journalists, tell a story. Comparing the two sets of stories over time also points toward what seems like an erosion of those differences. Table 1 presents some of the key observations and how they changed from 2011 to 2013. In 2011, television stories were far more likely (96%) to be narrated by a journalist, while newspaper videos were more apt to turn the storytelling reins over to an interview subject or provide no narration at all. (In three 2011 cases, the videos were primarily narrated by a public relations representative, giving rise to a normative concern, in that narrative power was shifted not only to a story subject but to a subject strongly vested in the story’s framing.) Television’s journalistic narration did not change much by 2013 (90%), but newspapers used journalistic narration much more in 2013 than in 2011. Journalists could be heard 77% of the time in television stories posted to the web in 2011, going down to 60% in 2013. Again, newspaper video changed more, with only 17% including a journalist’s voice in 2011 rising to 30% only 2 years later. A similar shift 10 Journalism

Table 1. Narrative content analysis 2011 and 2013.

Television sites Newspaper sites

2011, 2013, 2011, 2013, n = 50 n = 50 n = 50 n = 50 Percent of stories narrated by a journalist 96% 90% 24% 46% 25%* (* = the percentage when partnership sites are removed from the calculation) The average amount of time a journalist 77% 60% 17% 30% is heard (as a percent of the story time) The average amount of time a subject is 17% 34% 42% 52% heard (as a percent of story time) Average story length (min: sec) 1:27 2:20 2:35 2:28 Average shot length, in seconds 11 34 13* 49 42 16* (* = calculated with outliers removed) ‘I’ or ‘We’ statements 12% 32% 20% 42% 4% 0 4% 4% Process statements 6% 18% 4% 4% is evident in the amount of time stories rely on subjects talking. The average story length is also converging, though the newspaper category, with no program-schedule restric- tions, included some extreme outliers, with a few stories over 5 minutes. Other observations underscored the differences. For both years, a vast majority (82% in 2011, 94% in 2013) of videos posted by television stations are newscast captures, meaning they reflect recordings from a broadcast. This certainly saves time and effort for journalists working for television organizations, in that they are not creating unique web content. But this practice can result in a scripted disconnect regarding time, when a newscaster uses words that make sense in a broadcast ‘tonight’, and ‘this morning’ but are irrelevant or downright confusing in asynchronous web viewing. Nearly all stories with newspaper and television origins were edited, but when video was posted raw, it was more than twice as likely to have been posted by a newspaper organization in 2011, and more than four times as likely in 2013 (three raw stories posted by television stations, 13 by newspapers). These differences are consistent with the organizational tradition. Newspaper photographers and reporters have long resisted the showmanship of television, and the videos they post shift attention to the story subjects. The websites for television stations use the video version of newscast shovel ware, complete with the embodied voices and faces of the presenters. What kinds of story topics were chosen for online video? Table 2 presents the descriptive statistics comparing story topics. Note that the television news sites contained many more crime stories than newspaper sites in both years, reflecting a long-standing tendency. Newspaper sites, while not filled with as many crimes and fires, used video to post features nearly half the time in 2011, but shifted emphasis dramatically to sports in 2013. Sports, particularly high school sports, were identified as a growth area for newspaper revenue and the websites fell in line (Neenaf, 2011). Bock 11

Table 2. Comparing content 2011 and 2013.

0 Television Newspaper

2011 2013 2011 2013 Crime and disaster 54% 44% 24% 32% Sports 2% 2% 2% 22% Features 18% 24% 48% 26% Politics/civics 14% 22% 18% 14% Other 12% 8% 8% 6% 100% 100% 100% 100%

If political and civic stories about local issues are considered to be the most serious or helpful forms of news for the audience, both newspaper and television websites are failing to use video toward that effort. This is particularly interesting given the print culture perception (Bock, 2012b; Klinenberg, 2005; Singer, 2003) that TV news lacks journalistic gravitas. The web videos posted by newspaper organizations coded for this study were no more likely to cover politics or issues of civic concern than their TV–news counterparts. True to tradition, web videos posted by newspaper organizations tended to use a more mimetic narrative form. For sites run exclusively by a newspaper (and hybrid sites not considered), the number of narratives voiced by journalists went down from 2011 to 25%. Newspaper videos were far less likely to feature the voice or appearance of a journalist. They often used much longer shots, allowing a viewer to spend more time taking in the elements of an image. Videos posted by newspaper organizations were usually slower paced and edited with less complexity, that is, fewer layers of sound, image and interview. Authorship was nearly always (96%) clearly from an identifiable journalist in TV-station web videos. For newspaper websites, only 24% of the videos were clearly presented by a journalist. Newspaper organizations favored the subject-driven narrative, with half of the web videos posted using this form. Not a single one of the television web videos used this form in the 2011 sample and only three did so in 2013 by posting raw video from breaking news events. Coders also looked for linguistic techniques that journalists might use to communicate transparency, which we called as ‘process statements’ (i.e. ‘We interviewed the officer on location’) or the use of the first person singular or plural. For the most part, few television or newspaper stories included sentences about how the story was constructed, 18% of the time for television stations and 4% for newspapers in 2013. So while social media have provided journalists with means to become more ‘transparent’ about their work, their video stories online continue to use a discursive form that assumes legitimacy. Television journalists were more likely than their newspaper counterparts, however, to refer to themselves as ‘I’ or ‘We’ in both years. This is in keeping with both the linguistic tradition of detachment in storytelling and the general desire to stay ‘behind the scenes’ for newspaper writers. Television is considered a more conversant medium, and its reporters are usually accustomed to injecting their personae into stories. 12 Journalism

Qualitative findings Members of the research team were encouraged to make notes about a story’s overall quality and problems with categorization. For instance, the first iteration of this study did not include a codebook category for videos that were essentially recordings of a reporter live shot. That category was added for the 2013 study, but the categorization system was still inadequate. ‘Raw clip’, for instance, which described video that had not been edited, needed to be re-defined for some stories that strung together several pieces of raw video without any scripting or sound-bites. In fact, the ‘style’ category turned out to be especially troublesome with web videos such as:

Multiple reporter packages on the same topic in one recording; Videos of talk shows or panel discussions or journalists talking to other journalists; A Skype recording of a journalist interviewing a subject; A recording of sports journalists in a radio studio discussing football.

These variations were at the root of the inspiration for this study, yet with so much experimentation, it may take more research to start yielding meaningful distinctions on this particular question. These findings echo the anecdotal observations from Tu’s (2014) Video Nowproject that organizations with newspaper roots are still experimenting, with an underlying desire to differentiate their videos from those produced by TV news organizations. The margin notes also indicated characteristics of websites that might be problematic for users. For instance, on many newspaper websites, finding the videos proved to be a challenge. Some sites include them on the front page, others on a special page for ‘multi- media’, as though that is a category of news like sports, features and politics. Video is one of the few places that seem to promise revenue growth; it seems counterproductive to hide it. A theoretically important trend that complicated analysis was the growth of hybrid sites, wherein a newspaper organization hosted a website that used videos from a partner- ing television organization. Six newspapers in the more recent sample included stories created in partnership with a TV station, and when these stories were set aside, the differences between newspaper and television sites was just as distinct in 2013 as it was in 2011. Hybrid organizations have a troubled track record (Singer, 2003). The hybrid sites analyzed for this study tended to mark stories as belonging to one organization or the other, distinctions that may be particularly important to the journalists, but not necessarily a news consumer. Another trend that emerged from the qualitative notes was the temporal inaccuracy of many stories posted by television stations. The 2013 content analysis found that 30% of the videos posted by television stations were recordings from newscasts, many of which included tosses to reporters who ‘live’ on the scene – but the story, of course, was often days old. One television station posted a recording from talk show about yogurt; one of the examples of a raw-tape posting by a television station constituted several minutes of silent footage from a helicopter, with no contextualizing information about what was being presented. Bock 13

Some of the videos posted by newspaper organizations were also, for lack of a better word, amateurish. The host of a local entertainment roundup video, whose show-like presentation included a musical open and animated graphics, appeared on camera with his golf shirt untucked. More than one website included raw tape from news conferences lasting more than 5 minutes. Some of the video posted to the web by newspaper organizations would not pass muster in a college-level production class. Examples include a single shot of a car accident that lasted more than 5 minutes, or a single wide shot of a children’s baseball game that was posted without any editing, any contextual language or any graphics to indicate when the baseball game occurred or who was playing. Some images were shaky; others had unclear audio, and while these qualities sometimes imply credibility for their ‘realness’ in war zones or disaster coverage, these stories were from routine news events; the sort that the audience would normally expect a steady shot and clear sound. Such examples exemplify complaints by photojournalists (Yaschur, 2012) that newspaper organizations are pressuring staff to put ‘anything’ on the web as long as it can be called video. Today’s audience is visually sophisticated (Palmer, 2011), and while this study did not examine audience effects, it is hard to imagine the average viewer willing to sit through the entirety of some of these postings.

Conclusion and considerations for further research In some ways, the evolution of news video on the web seems to echo the uneven ways photography was incorporated into news publishing in the late 1800s (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001) but with added complications. This project sought to examine the form of online video news posted by newspaper and television organizations. We found that the video on the web changed somewhat from 2011 to 2013, but remains divided according to the originating institution. Television websites may represent McLuhan’s notion that new media start as containers for the old, but newspaper websites are experimenting with new narrative forms. Factors contributing to the difference likely include newsroom culture, medium-specific traditions, skill variance or a difference in organizational expectations. The study also found that while online video news reflects the print/television division, it continues to use discursive strategies that legitimize journalism. The general lack of process statements about story-production reflects a basic presumption of authority. Newspaper videos’ lack of reportorial presence, whether linguistic, aural or visual, is in keeping with a tradition of detached storytelling. That television reporters are more likely to be seen and heard, more likely to use first person statements and far more likely to use a diegetic script, reflects their own presumption to tell the world ‘that’s the way it is’. The news landscape today contains many variations and hybrids on blogs, talk shows and reality TV. This study was limited to a particular category of news story, the clickable video in the news portion of a website. It may be that another use of video entirely could someday eclipse these stories, perhaps with animated info-graphics or clickable clip mosaics. This study also did not examine citizen journalism clips re-purposed by news organizations, something likely to influence the evolution of web journalism over time. It may not seem surprising that organizational culture is a significant factor in the form of online news. What might strike some as obvious, though, misses a key normative concern: journalists are not necessarily basing format decisions on audience needs. 14 Journalism

As ethnographic researchers have noted, and this study illustrates, newspaper journalists seem especially keen to differentiate their work from broadcast television without evidence that the mimetic form is any better for audience comprehension and engage- ment than TV’s diegetic style. This study also documented the topics of stories posted to websites by television and newspaper organizations. While crime dominated the TV sites and features dominated newspaper sites, political news and backgrounder stories were rare on both. Sports, identified as a potential revenue source for newspaper websites, became a much larger part of the video menu in 2013, yet come under the category of ‘soft’ news. It is possible that the differences will not last, and that 20 years from now, all video on the web will use a similar narrative form, evolving much the way television news stories did in the 20th century. It may be that as newspaper journalists acquire more editing and shooting skills, their videos might become more complex in terms of form and presentation, like the stories posted by television organizations. It might also be that television news journalists will start taking advantage of the chronological freedom afforded by the web, and experiment with longer stories or new narrative strategies. This is, of course, speculation but such homogenization has historic precedence (Boczkowski, 2010; Schudson, 1978). For now, institutional factors seem to be more of an influence on the nature of video news on the web than technology or concerns about public service. Even though the Internet offers myriad formatting styles, interactivity, asynchrony and ever-expanding space, these characteristics seem not to be well-exploited by journalists who post videos. News video will always exist in competition with other video on the Internet, and it is not at all clear whether a thoughtful, background video package about a local civic issue stands a chance of attracting viewers when pitted against videos of piano-playing cats and water-skiing squirrels. Finally, while this study finds distinct narrative differences in form, it does not give any indication as to whether one form better serves news consumers. Which form is better understood, believed, or preferred by users? Which might better attract users to the overall news product? Answering these normative questions will require further research and experimentation – by academics and by online journalists.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. McLuhan E and Zingrone F (1997) Essential McLuhan. London: Routledge, p. 269. 2. In yet another illustration of the relationship between technological capability and narrative form, Thomas Edison’s much larger, heavier Vitascope proved better for filming fictional stories in a studio, giving rise to the entertainment movie industry in the United States. 3. While the scholarship of film and video has traditionally occurred separately in the academy, the two forms share narrative elements, and for the purposes of this study, ‘film’ and ‘video’ may be used interchangeably. Bock 15

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Author biography Mary Angela Bock (PhD, Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania) is a former journalist turned academic with an interest in the sociology of photographic practice and visual narrative. A member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 2012, her most recent project with co-authors Shahira Fahmy and Wayne Wanta, is Visual Communication Theory and Research: A Mass Communication Perspective. Bock is also the author of Video Journalism: Beyond the One Man Band.