Krista Roberts

Yes, I admit it. I clicked on it. After all, it was described as the "best five second clip on the Internet." As a journalist, I had to investigate, but instead of great video, I got a prime example of why YouTube won't soon kill off TV news: fluff devoid of facts.

A quick check of the most viewed videos on YouTube for a recent week in August 2007 showed lots of fluff and very little substance. In fact, out of the top 40 most-viewed videos, the only "news" items were six sports clips and one clip of a 1994 C-Span interview with Dick Cheney. In all of these "pseudo-news" instances, the "citizen journalists" didn't even create the uploaded news. They just took it from a TV source. Under that scenario, all it takes to be a citizen journalist is a DVR. Search YouTube for "Minneapolis bridge collapse," you'll find the vast majority of videos listed were simply lifted from TV news broadcasts. Not quite citizen journalism at its best.

Local TV news stations and networks like CNN spend years building up credibility and trust with viewers by delivering real, factual news day in and day out. Looking for your news on YouTube is a bit like the Wild West. Anything goes. It's hard to tell what's real, what's altered and what's just plain wrong-which brings me back to "Dramatic chipmunk." The only thing worse than someone calling this the "best five second clip on the Internet" is that the facts aren't even right. This clip, which incidentally was lifted from Japanese TV, features a prairie dog, not a chipmunk. While YouTube may be a fun diversion, it has a long way to go before it's my trusted news source.

YouTube looks about as much like real news as a chipmunk (right) looks like a prairie dog (left).

It's hard to miss a parade, but somehow mainstream media did.

When I worked in TV news in Knoxville, Tenn., it was the stuff that made news producers salivate: a local connection to a series of bombings in England. We immediately put a reporter on the next flight to London to interview two local teens who were injured. Wouldn't our competitors be jealous? Wouldn't we rule the local TV news market? After a series of high-fives all around, we watched in disbelief as another local station beat us by reporting that the teens were already on a plane headed home.

I hated when our newsroom got scooped on a story. It usually led to a heated debate about what to do next: Should we play catch up? Should we look for another angle? Or since we didn't have it in the first place, should we just label it insignificant and move on?

I think option three is what most mainstream media (MSM) decided to do when new media offered new ways of reaching people. The all-powerful MSM thought they had a lock on getting the message out. Their mantra seemed to be: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

In the beginning, most MSM saw the Internet and interactive media as nothing more than add-ons to their existing brands. Many still do. Those who have seen the light are playing catch-up because what they once viewed as "insignificant" is eroding their customer base by meeting consumers' "on demand" information and entertainment needs.

The situation has lots of MSM dropping big bucks to jump onto the new media bandwagon. The problem is the parade's already passed by. To catch up, it looks like MSM will have to wade through a lot of what the parade's horses left behind.

For the first day of my online producing shift, things went pretty smoothly. James did a great job of leading us through the procedure to get things onto the KUJH site. I do wish that there had been some sort of handout we could follow. We did a lot of clicking on this and changing that, but (writing as fast as I could) I still wasn't able to get it all down. Since Brad & I were both there, hopefully one or the other of us will remember next time.