The Video Explosion

Charles Layton wrote an illuminating "state-of-the-art" roundup of the varying quality of newspaper-generated videojournalism for the American Journalism Review, with links to examples of the worst and best:

News video has been around for six or seven years on some newspaper Web sites, but in the past 12 to 18 months it has grown from a significant trend into a near stampede. Call up Web sites at random and you'll find a very large, very mixed selection, much of it disappointing, some so awful it makes you cringe, and some reasonably well executed but trivial... The bulk of online news video occupies a broad, gray middle ground in terms of quality, as the industry stumbles toward a goal it cannot yet quite perceive or articulate... But a small proportion is excellent by any standard...

Those "excellent" videos are especially difficult to locate -- and that's why we created the KobreGuide to the Web's Best Videojournalism!