Grading Presidential Candidate Videos
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James Joyner | Monday, April 2, 2007 |
Jeff Jarvis analyzes the latest round of presidential candidate videos and is less than impressed: “It’s a sorry lot. As a group, they are still blowing the opportunity to use YouTube to connect with voters in new ways: more personal, direct, informative, fun.”
He likes the Democrats’ efforts best, giving Edwards a gentleman’s “B” and the others a “C.” The Republicans all get “pathetic” appraisals.
My favorite:
Ron Paul — Mind-boggling. The libertarian candidate gives us a 10-minute video — part 1 of 2 — that looks like outtakes from Twin Peaks. It’s weird but mesmerizing in its goofiness: See Ron Paul’s cheesy motel. Watch Ron Paul put the sun visor down.Watch him put the sun visor up. And all this is set to utterly incongruous rock riffs. Grade: F (But this is the paper the teachers hand around in the lounge.)
Amusingly, Jeff puts up a video wherein he reads and acts out the post verbatim:
This is further evidence of the Nick Yglesias thesis on vlogging. Jeff does a professional quality job–he is, after all, a professional–but the video adds virtually nothing to the post.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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Your generation may be gapping, James. The reality of there being a value-added in vlogging may be irrelevant to whether it's perceived that way, particular by an audience below some particular (unknown) age.
Is television news really better than radio? Is radio really better than newspapers? Are newspapers really better than journals? The real, identifiable benefits may be very slim but one medium succeeded the next because, for some reason or other—maybe only the message of modernity, it was perceived that they were better.
Could be. For watching in one's living room, adding video to audio provided valuable extra information with little downside. Radio is inferior to the newspaper in many ways but adds value in terms of brevity, its ability to be a simultaneous shared experience, and its ability to reach the illiterate (including young children).
Video can certainly enhance blog posts. It's nice to have a video clip that illustrates something you're talking about sometimes. If it's simply jabbering on about something that could have been done just as well with text, though, it strikes me as far less valuable than the text. I can simply read the same dialog more quickly than I can digest the spoken version and, as a bonus, am more easily able to retain it.
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