I- Post
What news organization hasn’t gotten wind of “user-contributed” content yet? From CNN’s I-Report to Wikinews, regular citizens have been testing their news gathering capabilities for a couple of years now.
But is this new wave of “citizen journalism” enough? Can I-report tell the same stories as seasoned journalist? Minnpost editors seem to think so.
In fact, besides the arts-related videos on a subset Minnpost website, (3- minute egg) there are hardly any MinnPost generated videos on the site.
Rather, Minnpost editors have decided to let their readers submit refurbished video content from other news sites that somehow relate to Minnesota news. The site, cleverly entitled MinnClips, is a complication of video clips that relate to Minnesota news and culture and is submitted solely by Minnpost users.
According to the MinnClips page:
MinnClips is a space to watch videos with a Minnesota connection. Here you will find a wide collection of video clips – plus links to related content on MinnPost. New videos will be added frequently, so be sure to check back often.
Video content on the site range from the political “Bachmann slams Pelosi on health care ‘Slaughter Solution’ to the quirky “Say ‘no’ to green beer and ‘yes’ to a ‘Merry Irish Woman’” to the insanely boring “A 1942 Technicolor tour of Minnesota’s ‘Land of Plenty’” to the “wow, this is kinda cool “Why there are so many potholes”
The video content is anything but original and most of the posts seem to steam off of You tube post, but the question is, is it working?
Do the readers of Minnpost want to see what other people think is newsy or amusing, or do they actually want the pros to tell them what to watch and what to think?
You could look at this in two ways:
There are hardly any comment posts on any of the videos uploaded in the past few weeks. You could take that, and make the argument that people aren’t really watching these videos and that this refurbished content is really just taking up space on the website. Perhaps users want more? If they wanted to watch You tube videos, wouldn’t they just to You tube instead of Minnpost?
Or, one could make the argument there are 50 plus pages of archival videos that have been submitted by readers and posted on the website. The videos seem to be posted nearly every work day, which means there is someone, somewhere that is fishing for video material to go onto this site. Albeit, the material isn’t original, but perhaps that’s what makes it interesting? By wadding through daily news content and finding video snap shots of things that relate back to Minnesota, could MinnClips be creating a niche within the nice website?
Both arguments are valid, and perhaps it’s not meant for us to really know how MinnClips is doing as a valuable part of MinnPost. Maybe time will tell, or perhaps time has already told. It’s an issue that certainty can’t be resolved through my blog alone, but I-Post about it.
