Hear hear!

... a key element that is missing in a lot of these attempts to do new things at newspapers -- perhaps too much effort is being spent on putting out stuff that assumes the audience consists of a bunch of YouTube-watching idiots.

This from Mindy McAdams today. It's an extension of the discussion about mobile journalists. She's saying while they are always out in the community with an ear to the ground, maybe they're not picking up the right sounds. They're choosing to cover stories that "dumb down" the paper and web site.

I feel this way also about multimedia, and the whole quantity/quality debate. If the major emphasis is on pumping out videos at a break-neck pace, you're going to end up with a lot of superficial content that "dumbs down" the site. Multimedia has such potential to tell complete, important and powerful stories. Sometimes it allows people to understand and feel a story in a way that's not possible with print.

A policy that only calls for a bunch of 30-second snap shot videos isn't using the power of multimedia. It is assuming "the audience consists of a bunch of YouTube-watching idiots."