NewTeeVee: “Online Political Video a Winner in 2008″
By Tim.While the rest of the blogosphere is breathlessly covering CES, Jackson West over at NewTeeVee took some time to highlight the incredible work The Uptake and Veracifier are doing, along with other videobloggers like Steve Garfield and Debate Porridge, covering the primary election season, something we wrote about here last week. Our own Marc Boxser is quoted:
“We are probably, for video coverage, in 2008 … what 2004 was for blogs,” Next New Network’s (NNN) Mark Boxser told me over the phone. Boxser, who manages Veracifier for NNN, further pointed out that the site had the second most-viewed channel on YouTube yesterday, with hundreds of thousands of views spread over multiple updates, beating CBS.
A screenshot of Veracifier early Wednesday morning, already the third-most viewed channel on YouTube.
The great angle in the article is the way everyone is partnering to cover the stories, highlighting an example where Steve Garfield wandered around with a Nokia cellphone, streamed stories live, then Chuck Olsen edited Steve’s footage into a story that was both broadcast live on TheUptake’s Mogulus feed and released as a Veracifier “Ground Hounds” report. Jackson quotes Mary Matthews from Debate Porridge: “It’s not a competition with us,” she said. “[Not] yet, anyway… If [online media makers] go the way of television and the advertisers, and be beholden to the money, then it’s just going to be television on the Internet.”
I think it’s a long way off before things get competitive in the way anyone might fear. If the growth of blogs as news media says anything, it’s that featuring the best reporting and commentary, wherever it comes from, and serving your audience above everything else is the way to win online. And many, including the gang here at Next New Networks, would argue that’s the trick to programming good news content in any medium.
