Videoification

Today I take pen in hand (so to speak) to complain about the videoification of the news. I read the newspaper a couple of times a week, but I check the news on news websites at least once a day, often twice or three times. In the old days, news websites would have one or two video reports, but now it seems that about half of all news stories have that dreaded "video" icon next to them.

I prefer to read the news than watch videos of it, and I'll tell you why. First, a written news piece, as superficial and short as it is, is almost always more informative than a video news report. Second, and more importantly, news websites don't make me watch commercials before reading a news story, but they never miss a chance to hit me with commercials on video stories, and often the ads for cereals, batteries and sports drinks are longer than the news articles that follow!

I predict that in the none-too-distant future all news becomes video, not because it's better from an information density point of view, but because it's better for advertisers.

On a largely unrelated note, I also wish to file a protest with NASA about their increasingly annoying habit of replacing real footage of space doings with crappy CGI sequences. A while back I watched the launch of an Atlas V (the New Horizons launch, if I remember correctly, but it could have been the lunar pair) and almost as soon as the booster ignited, they stopped showing the real booster and switched to bad CGI, with cotton-ball clouds of smoke piling up below the rocket in a less than convincing simulation of an exhaust plume. I've seen the same thing with Delta launches, where instead of showing the frankly beautiful footage of the phased jettisoning of the boosters, they show a CGI equivalent.

Why?

Did I miss the memo that all CGI sequences are to be considered better than real-life?

Replacing good video with bad CGI is about as annoying to me as replacing good news text with bad video.