I read something the other day about internet outlets “pivoting to video” again at some point in the near future. The whole concept of “pivot to video” is something that I’ve gone through at least three or four times since I started writing for the internet as a career 20-odd years ago, and it’s something that feels more and more ridiculous each and every time.
I’m not saying that video is ridiculous, please understand; more that, as has been demonstrated over and over again through the earlier attempts to “pivot” — which is to say, publishers deciding to concentrate on video production and output, rather than the written word — audiences for written stories and audiences for video are different audiences, and one can’t easily replace the other. It’s something that you’d think publishers would understand themselves, because think about it; you yourself, dear reader, know that sometimes you want to read something (or, at least, have something written that you can scan through quickly) and sometimes you want to watch something, and that those aren’t the same impulse at all, as an audience member. And yet.
More to the point, making video is so much more labor-intensive and time-consuming than it is to write a story, something that I’ve come to realize working with Ashley and the video folk at Popverse. It’s also an entirely different skill set; I’ve seen what happens when non-filmmakers try to make video thinking how hard can it be with the answer always being harder than you thought. It’s not just setting up a camera and talking. (At one point at Popverse, we were all asked to make a selfie video for something — I can’t even remember what — and it was so uncomfortable and awkward for me, I walked away thinking, thank God I don’t have to do that daily.) The whole idea of “pivoting to video” suggests that it’s an easy off-shoot of creating written stories, as opposed to an entirely different, arguably more difficult and certainly more complicated, discipline altogether.
The fear with all of the attempts to “pivot to video” from publishers is that it’ll mean that writers lose their jobs before publishers come to their senses; the difference now, I worry, is that we might be looking at a reality where writers lose their jobs and publishers don’t come back after, instead looking to AI to fill the gap. If there’s one thing that 20 years of the “pivoting to video” cycle has taught me in my profession, it’s that there’s little that publishers value less than the writers who create the majority of their output.