Blogs killing journalism is a popular (and stupid) notion these days, but I like ZDNet executive editor David Berlind's thought better: "Blogs will kill journalists, first."
He just returned from the Consumer Electronics Show and covered the huge event by shooting, editing and posting 28 videos, each accompanied by a blog post. Even as newsman for 30 years, I was exhausted just thinking about it. I knew David, a neighbor and former colleague of mine, did not have much left in his gas tank Friday because he asked for a raincheck on a beer. Check out his yeoman's work from CES. It was just him, his camerman, a Panasonic HVX HD camcorder, and Final Cut Pro. David would duck into a CNet trailer in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center to edit the video and write up a blog post. He also offers his views on the future of journalism.
Our man Chuck Murray at CES also did a great job with five meaty posts in his Electronics News and Comment blog. But we make no pretense that we're as advanced at ZDNet when it comes to video coverage (I used to work at ZDNet before CNet bought it around 2000). We're not babes with podcasts, either, but we're also not far down that path yet. However, we have to get there like any other publisher. Stories spliced with podcasts, blog posts and video al la the CNN.com model is the future of journalism. CNN probably does best job of any news site co-mingling text-based stories with video. And they've got tons of professionally shot video and the global infrastructure to spread it around in realtime. Throw in the phenomenon known at Youtube and tell me video's time has not arrived. It has and in a big way. It won't matter whether the videos were internally produced or done by someone else on the web as long as the source is considered credible (or not? Drudge wasn't credible at first…). Professional or amateur? Doesn't matter.
And for our users and readers, they will demand it in the not too far in the future. Exhausting yes, but video is too easy to do technically and in many ways more appealing than all other mediums. Stay tuned.
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