David Zita
@DavidZita1
Keeping up with the Khans – The Donald Trump Debacle
The latest in a long line of WTF moments allows for a light-hearted look at the utter douchebaggery of Donald J. Trump
REFLECTION (this video, and subsequent reflection, was done as part of an assignment for RMIT Melbourne – Journalism Technologies)
YouTube has and probably always will be geared towards entertainment.
From Charlie Bit my Finger to Gangham Style, there exists, regardless of the category, a desire for pure entertainment.
Pure news, on the other hand, is something that always has and will struggle to find a home among the red and white army.
The intentions of a Nine News will always be ill-advised due to the propensity for a straight telling of the facts.
However, have one seagull trot along in the background, and the viewers will come in droves.
It’s these moments of hilarity that were very likely the first signs that news could be told effectively on YouTube, so long as there was almost always something lurking in the frame to provide the entertainment the majority of viewers crave.
The undisputed king of YouTube news at the moment is John Oliver.
In fact, when considering how to tell a story on YouTube, it was John Oliver that this journalist went to first, almost on instinct. Oliver presents the news with a myriad of graphics on the left of the screen.
Rather than have them as mere aids, however, he directly references and uses them in order to deliver one of his many jokes, or one of his damning statistics or quotes.
For myself, it was incorporating these sorts of graphics and references that went to the top of my priority list, only slightly behind conveying the actual situation regarding the latest Trump fiasco.
Oliver’s videos enlightened me to another fact: news presented on YouTube does not have to be news as it happens.
Sure, YouTube Newswire allows for this sort of content, but it feels out of place with YouTube’s core value, which is entertainment.
The presentation a journalist normally considers right is thrown out the window. YouTube favours the informality of presentation, preferring a flow of colloquial content rather than bulletproof, by-the- book reportage. First in best dressed is no longer the priority.
I mean, Oliver’s show is called Last Week Tonight for crying out loud. The very title doubles as an admittance the news covered will have been broken long before.
Yet Oliver’s video on Donald Trump has gained over 28 million views. It was released well into Trump’s presidential campaign, at a point where everyone already knew of the type of person the presidential candidate is.
But it was done in an entertaining way, and that’s what counts. When doing my video on a topic that happened a week earlier, I wasn’t fazed.
It was because Oliver offers a microcosm of YouTube as a news telling practice: the YouTube viewer would rather you be second to the story and entertaining, than first to the story and not so.
