Editor: I saw that. I saw that. I’ve got one question for you, though: Where is the video?
Journalist: The video?
Editor: See, you’ve sent me a lot of text, but I don’t see a video attachment.
Journalist: I… don’t have a video for it.
Editor: Well, then we have a problem. No one reads news articles for text nowadays. They want a motherfucking video. So where is the video?
Journalist: I’m not sure the piece needs a video. If you read it, I think everything is there—like, in the text.
Editor: [takes off his glasses] People don’t want to click onto your story and just see goddamned words. They want an auto-loading video to show up and immediately push the words down. They want preroll. They want an ad jingle. They want a video that covers a huge chunk of the text and they want to wait for it to play through—just sitting there staring at it. Then they want to scroll down a few inches and see another video. They want videos in the sidebar. They want the related videos to have related videos. And do you know what they want when they get to the bottom of your fucking Stephen King novel of a news article?
Journalist: A video?
Editor: THEY WANT A FUCKING VIDEO.
Journalist: Well, I didn’t take a video of the meeting, so there is no video for this story.
Editor: See, that’s where you’re wrong. We have a policy of including videos on all stories we run, regardless of whether they actually have anything to do with the matter at hand. In fact, our policy is to embed a short video about Kate Bosworth in all stories that don’t come with a special-made video asset.
Journalist: Kate… You mean the one from Superman Returns?
Editor: KATE FUCKING BOSWORTH. Yes. Have you seen this video? It’s amazing. She throws a milkshake at a seagull. It’s ace content. It’s our all-time most-viewed video.
Journalist: I don’t think—
Editor: One word for you: PULITZER.
[Angry seagull noises come from the editor’s computer.]
Editor: And I’ve got even better news for you. Your piece is running with our Charmin ad package.
Journalist: The toilet paper?
Editor: Thirty seconds after the user loads your story, those fucking Charmn bears are going to come dancing onto the screen. You know them—the ones with toilet paper stuck to their dirty fucking asses? And they keep dancing their asses toward the screen, and the user has to click all the toilet paper bits off their butts or they won’t go away.
Journalist: [stands with mouth agape]
Editor: I don’t want to hear any fucking complaints about it, neither. Those dancing bears and their dirty fucking shit asses are sending Bitsy and LaDonna and the rest of the new media team to SXSW this year.
Journalist: Did you read my piece?
Editor: Sure, seemed great.
Journalist: Did it have everything in it that it needed?
Editor: [snorts] You wrote it. You tell me.
Journalist: Have you seen Enid? I usually get copyedits back from her, but she’s not picking up her phone.
Editor: Canned her.
Journalist: What? You fired the copyeditor?
Editor: No, I fired the assistant to the video editor. We moved her over to the video team. Thought she might be productive there. Did you see the videos she made? Garbage. Fucking garbage.
Journalist: Well, she’s a copyeditor so—
Editor: They only got 50,000 views. Absolute fucking garbage. We fired her on the spot—and then broke her fingers to make sure she got the message.
Journalist: I think I’m going to go home.
Editor: Periscope it. We’ll put it on the main page.
{fin}
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