And This Piece of Crap Is In The Washington Post!!!

The above video, if you have the patience to sit through all 4:20 of it, was done by Ian Shapira, a print reporter at The Washington Post who took a video journalism course at American University.

He was either skipping every class or the WaPo should ask for its money back.

It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen.

If this guy were in one of my classes I would ream him a new one in front of the group.

It is just terrible. He makes every mistake in the book.

Besides absolutely terrible shooting, this is nothing but a bunch of soundbites strung together in a sort of incoherent mess with b-roll slapped on top of it.

(Lets skip the technical issues for the moment).

The reporting and storytelling here are .... well, they aren't.

I think that is Mr. Shapira, a reporter for The Washington Post, were to have submitted this in print form - that is, just a string of quotes slapped together, as a print story for his newspaper, he would have been fired on the spot. And with good reason! This is not journalism. It's just garbage.

That he agonized over this is pretty astonishing.

You can read this story here.

That this kind of drivel gets any kind of mention at at all just shows you how low the standards for video in newspapers are... and how far they have to go.

But first they have to get honest with themselves.

The quality of the video has to be as good as the quality of the print.

If a reporter turned in a piece of crap scribbled on a torn paper with a crayon, they would told that this is a newspaper, not a kindergarden. The same standards have to apply to video.

This...is crayons on torn paper.