The great digital media culling of 2017

Democracy dies in video pivots

A video reporter.
(Image credit: August Columbo / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo)

In recent weeks and months, several digital publishers have executed a "pivot to video," a now-notorious euphemism for "firing most or all of your writers to chase video advertising dollars." Mashable, Vocativ, MTV News, Fox Sports, Vice, ATTN, and now Mic have tried this, at least to some extent. It probably sounded like a sexy and forward-thinking strategy in whatever corporate boardroom it was cooked up in. But as a long-term business proposition, it will almost certainly fail — just as dependence on Facebook traffic did.

There are many reasons why this all-in-on-video strategy is ill-conceived — not least of which is that we have not quite reached Idiocracy-levels of vacuousness yet, and many if not most news consumers still prefer to, you know, read things. There is plenty of good video on the internet, some of it even made by digital media organizations. But not every publisher needs to be in the video business. And the fact that so many quality news sites are canning their writers, reporters, and editors to churn out glorified slideshows in pursuit of those sweet CPMs misunderstands both the audience and the industry. This is a fool's bargain.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.