In the spring of 2014, the Amarillo Globe-News did something new. So new, in fact, that almost nobody — including many staffers, let alone our community — fully grasped the concept.
We were going to keep performing our function as the newspaper of record for the Texas Panhandle, a region with a population of about 450,000, but we would also compete directly with the three television news stations in town. We were pivoting headlong into video, and the first order of business was to scale up our resources, spending thousands on equipment and hiring an arsenal of journalists with television news experience.
I’ll wait for you to stop laughing.
We bought about $100,000 worth of equipment, including fancy frosted glass to turn the newsroom into a studio, two drones that we later discovered we didn’t have the Federal Aviation Administration clearance to use, and billboard advertising prior to launch.
We did hire a veteran TV news anchor to be the face of what was dubbed AGN-TV, our new web presence that boasted a name capable of confusing readers into thinking we had launched a new television station (I was sometimes asked by people what cable channel they could view us on). But much of the work involved in the project would be done with existing staff.
Our photographers became videographers who occasionally took still photos for the paper. The reporting staff were assigned the goal of shooting one video per story, along with still photography to run in print and online. Reporters also became responsible for editing and uploading their own videos. There were quotas, incentives, a bonus structure and a newly-mounted whiteboard in the newsroom to track all of it.
We were not alone in our somewhat blind exploration into the world of video. The Globe-News and many community newspapers were following a trend started by major media outlets. In 2013, The Washington Post created a video “channel” on its website called PostTV, which it still operates, and BuzzFeed announced its major shift to video a year later, leading up to a video-fueled reorganization in 2016.
We were all desperately fighting off declining website advertising dollars and trying to adjust to a perceived shift in the news consumption habits of the younger generation. Advertisers preferred video ads to static print and digital ads, and Facebook, which I will get back to in a minute, said in 2015 it averaged more than a billion video views a day.
But video did not save print media. One outcome of this failure is the misguided notion that people no longer crave longform journalism, the kind that newspapers have always been uniquely positioned to pull off, given their lack of time limits that restrict traditional broadcast media.
Former Globe-News Publisher Les Simpson, who retired from the journalism industry a few months after GateHouse Media acquired the paper in 2017, was a champion of this viewpoint that readers wanted less of that tough-to-get, truth-to-power journalism that matters to a community – the kind of reporting that is important to communities like Amarillo, where in 1961 the newspaper that later became the Globe-News won a public-service Pulitzer for exposing widespread local corruption.
Instead, Simpson and former Globe-News owners Morris Communications felt readers wanted 30-second video clips of fender-benders or the champion speed-eater who devoured multiple 72-ounce steak dinners at legendary I-40-side restaurant The Big Texan.
Our paper’s leadership felt people would pay for that kind of fast food news long after they’d stopped paying for award-winning journalism. They were wrong, and they weren’t alone.
The proof was in the pageviews, and they weren’t great. During its video push, Mic’s story production dropped in half, one of the factors that sent the site’s traffic plummeting by 70 percent between 2015 and 2017. The web traffic at Vocative dropped so drastically that comScore could not detect it by 2017, despite having nearly 4.3 million visitors less than one year earlier. Behemoth Fox Sports also shrank significantly, going from more than 41 million visitors in 2016 to 13.6 million just before the 2017 National Football League season, according to Hitwise.
The draw of video reach on social media, specifically Facebook, was a major part of this shift to video. The disappearing traffic at Vocativ and Fox Sports didn’t seem to affect their Facebook interactions, and Mic officials even pointed to Facebook video views as a reason to discount their comScore traffic reports.
Facebook was sued last year for allegedly lying about inflating its video metrics to make more advertising money. Much of this stemmed from counting any video that played for three seconds as a view. Some experts said this practice inflated those video view numbers by up to 80 percent, and one analysis found that Facebook also overestimates its reach among young Americans by millions. Documents related to that lawsuit show that Facebook knew its numbers were inflated up to 900 percent as early as 2015.
The net outcome of the Globe-News’ video venture was twofold, starting with a drop in quality. Like the rest of the industry, the paper lost subscriptions and pageviews as reporters shifted their focus from writing news to conceptualizing, shooting, narrating and editing videos. Meanwhile, the videos didn’t attract nearly enough views to entice advertisers to purchase pre-roll commercials.
The greatest misfortune, though, was a staggering loss of institutional knowledge. None of the staffers I worked with at the time are still there, except for two sports reporters.
Most of the newsroom left because the job became unbearable. Three veteran reporters who had written for the paper for decades stuck with local journalism by pursuing broadcast media. Our former watchdog reporter, considered one of a handful of experts on the only nuclear arms factory in the country, went from covering the Pantex Plant to selling plants at an Amarillo landscaping store.
The Globe-News staff is a shell of its former self, in part because journalism, the kind that makes a difference and fulfills its constitutionally-mandated role, is no longer a profit center and will never be one again. Our focus on video, which ended up being a flop that was essentially abandoned less than three years later, was one of several radical changes the paper implemented in a few short years to combat the one truth that had been looming over the journalism industry for nearly a decade: the business model for traditional newspapers can’t sustain said traditional newspapers.
Nonprofit journalism is the future of the trade I still love dearly. Despite what Facebook, Twitter and Reddit might have us believe, most Americans want to be informed about their world and know when its centers of power are being corrupted.
And that takes more than a 30-second video clip.
Rick Treon is a writer and former newspaper editor whose first novel, Deep Background, touches on journalism and the rise of fake news. Follow Treon on Facebook and Twitter, and contact him at rick@ricktreon.com.
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