Media/Publishing Issue 3 (85% Of Media Websites Now Use Online Video To Cover News)

(Source: blog.nielsen.com)

As a student who has to juggle between study and work, my time is very limited and therefore, I prefer news that is short. News in print can sometimes be lengthy and when time is limited, the attention span is immediately shorter. Attaining news from multimodal forms however, is a more enjoyable experience for me. Multimodal texts are texts that communicate meanings through a synchronization of modes (Walsh, 2006). They may incorporate spoken or written language, still or moving images, they may be produced on paper or electronic screen and may incorporate music and sound. In this case, we will be discussing about multimodal texts in non-print form.

As the broadband communication continues to increase their reliability and accessibility, the way people consume media, especially news media, continues to change. It is believed that video is the new text, and the Web is a primary accelerant of that trend. Online venues also provided tools for competing with the 24-hour news channels as they allow broadcast networks to keep information up-to-date and offer greater depth than possible when interrupting the regular TV broadcasting schedule (D. Lotz, 2009).

How long does it take you to change the TV channel if something does not catch your interest? As the attention span of the audience drew shorter, it is only expected that the popularity of videos grow. Consumers would rather watch a short news video than read a long news article. They prefer graphics over words. Images have other effects that are different from words, particularly at affective, aesthetic and imaginative levels (Walsh, 2006). They are more attractive and with the addition of sounds, they demand more attention than texts could. Studies of broadcast news show that viewers prefer to view news with as much ‘live footage’ as possible (Schriver, 1997). Another reason why online news video are becoming so increasingly popular is because it enables viewers to become their own news directors and select the stories of greatest interest to create personalized newscasts (D. Lotz, 2009). Viewing from computer screens and portable devices has also increased the audiences’ desire for timely news and the short form of its content. The blend of image, sound and the demand for timeliness is what made videos more desirable.

Adelaine

(372 words)

Reference

D. Lotz, A 2009, Beyond Prime Time: Television programming in the post-network era, Routledge, New York.

Schriver, K 1997, ‘The Interplay of Words and Pictures’, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York, pp. 361-441.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.