Text is dead – we live in an audiovisual age

If you attend a news media conference these days, the only thing more guaranteed than a slightly disappointing cup of coffee is that you’ll hear the phrases “the website is dead” or “the article is dead”.

I think this is not seeing the wood for the trees. Because the thing most under threat is text. (I said it was “dead” in the headline, because, hey, who doesn’t like a hint of hyperbole.)

To put it another – perhaps more accurate and less soundbitey – way, we are experiencing an inflection point in the shift to video and audio forms of news consumption.

This isn’t a sudden cataclysm, a “pivot” approved in a boardroom meeting. We’ve seen enough of them and frankly the world doesn’t work like that, moulding itself to an executive’s whim.

Instead, it’s a gradual change in how we create, share and absorb information, a slow unfolding towards a more audio-visual-centric world. The declarations of “death” miss the nuance of what’s truly happening.

The article as a format for conveying information won’t vanish completely. Neither will the website, the vessel that often carries it. Though both may diminish in importance. What’s changing is their default status as the primary mode of communication.

I studied history at university and my natural tendency is to view things in the long term. From that perspective, both video and audio are very new indeed.

In the mornings, I often walk my dog past Alexandra Palace, where a little blue plaque reminds me that the BBC launched the world’s first regular high-definition television service in 1936, less than 90 years ago. In the grand sweep of human communication, from cave paintings to the printing press, video is an infant.

This evolutionary pace is crucial to understand. The shift from a predominantly text-based information economy to one where video and audio play the leading role isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s more like the slow turning of a tide. We are now at the point where it is clear that the tide is moving up the beach and there’s no stopping it.

The reason is portability. Previously, video was restricted to cinemas or, more relevantly, to a big heavy box that was stuck in a room of your house. Now, you can reliably stream video, live or recorded, to your phone almost anywhere in the world. It has shaken off the physical limitations that bound it for most of its first century.

And it is clear that people really, really like video, and to a lesser extent audio content.

The Reuters Digital News Report is always keen to point out that, overall, people still prefer to consume news via text rather than other formats. But that has a large generational component – older people remain readers – and is changing fast. In last year’s report, they noted that two-thirds of survey respondents said they accessed a short-form news video on a weekly basis. I’m sure that number will be higher, as it already is in countries with younger populations, when this year’s report is issued in a few weeks’ time.

Podcasts are often the audio format that gather people’s attention – and they continue to grow – but I think a more pervasive audio format in the next few years will be voice-initiated chatbot queries. The reason is simple: why type when you can talk?

This is the problem facing text: ease of use. Both for the user, who needs to really think about what they are reading, and the writer.. It takes time to put your thoughts down in written words. And, having edited plenty of text in my time, I know it is not a skill that everyone has. Some of the best journalists I have worked with were certainly not writers by any stretch of the imagination. They were great story-getters but that’s a different skill.

So the growth of video and audio may ultimately be more democratic. They are not “easier” per se, but certainly they lower the barriers to entry to communication. I think that can only be a good thing – and I write as someone who has made a living from text, and definitely prefers it as a medium to all other forms.

So, what does this mean for publishers, those traditional custodians of the written word?

For too long, many publishers saw digital primarily as a new distribution channel for text, perhaps with a few images sprinkled in. The imperative now is to think multi-modally from the outset. Too often video teams talk with dismay about how they find out about stories from their colleagues either shortly before a crucial interview is taking place, or afterwards. This will no longer stand.

We need to put video and audio into the heart of the commissioning equation. How can a story best be told? Is it a long-form written piece, a short explanatory video, an immersive audio documentary, or a combination of all three?

Publishers have the journalistic skills to make this shift. That’s the good news. But they need to invest in new talent to take full advantage. A few traditional text journalists have mastered new formats, but not many. Publishers need to hire video producers, audio engineers, on-screen and on-mic journalists and pair them with their existing teams.

Yes, this will involve investment at a time when budgets are stretched and the economic headwinds are against us, but this is an existential challenge that cannot be ducked.

As for poor old text, my dear friend, what does its future hold? It won’t go away. Of course, it won’t. However, its predominance, its position as the default for so much of our daily information diet, will likely fade. It will become one powerful tool among several, rather than the tool.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory and of Tomorrow’s Publisher