Over the past week, I’ve been reading what newspaper photographers and videographers have to say on the touchy topic of how their sites use web video.

Seems to me there’s a consensus that less IS more, which is exactly my point.

G.J. McCarthy, a photographer at the Dallas Morning News, posted this comment on sportsshooters.com’s message board:

There was a time here, at the DMN, that there were almost as many video assignments on busy days as there were stills. Maybe half to three-quarters, but that’s still a high number. We were throwing video at tons of stuff. Some things stuck, others didn’t. I think that’s the nature of new media — you have to test as much as possible to see what gets the eyeballs interested.

Nowadays, there’s probably only a couple videos per day, and it’s usually things that lend themselves to it, or topics that always draw attention in this town (Cowboys, DISD, Parkland Hospital, etc., etc.).

Similarly, from Chuck Fadely, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer at the Miami Herald:

I’d hazard a wild guess that less than .1% of our stories have video with them.  We post four or five videos a day.  I don’t know our story count but it’s easily in the hundreds per day.  Yet we had seven million video streams last year.

Chuck sent me that comment via email. At his request, I’m posting his full remarks, as a response to this post. Thanks again, Chuck, for taking the time – but I do have a bone to pick with you. You seem to have interpreted my call for a more judicious use of video as a sign of “the mindset that video and new media [are] a sideshow to the real deal of journalism,” that I “appear to be in the category of news execs and out-of-touch educators who don’t get it. … If you’re teaching your students with this mindset, you’re committing malpractice.”

Oof, harsh! But wrong. I’m completely on board with the idea that some stories are best told with video, some with photos, some with audio, some with graphics (interactive or otherwise), some with the written word. It’s wonderful to have so many new choices, so many new tools. Some stories may benefit from using most or all of them, as in “Top Secret America” at washingtonpost.com, for my money one of the most important pieces of journalism in recent years.

At Stony Brook, we train all our students to become multimedia journalists. Everyone learns to write, to shoot photos and video, to edit video with Final Cut Pro, to use journalistic judgment in stories on all platforms. Two days ago, at our annual Fall Internship Panel, two seniors, who had interned at Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics last summer, told 50 sophomores and juniors that their knowledge of Final Cut Pro helped set them apart from the other interns at those magazines. We hear this all the time from returning interns and visiting alums who have become working journalists.

Personally, I’m a word gal, a print person, a lover of paper, a newspaper fiend, a book collector. I admit that I have never watched much news video on television, online or on my phone; I’d rather read. I don’t have an iPod or an iPad, either. So call me a curmudgeon for my personal tastes, but as a journalism educator, I fully endorse teaching visual journalism on an equal plane with written stories. I’ve advocated this approach as a member of a committee reviewing our curriculum now that we have completed our first five years as a j-school. Each spring, I co-teach a Senior Project class with Marcy McGinnis, our associate dean and a former senior vice president for news at CBS News. Every senior creates a multimedia piece with a written story, at least one video, photos and interactive elements. You can see some great examples here, here and here.

Now, back to the question of what how video can best serve news consumers—I won’t say readers—who visit newspaper websites. Eric Seals, a photographer at the Detroit Free Press, sent me links to two very different video pieces, one longer piece on a how the community of Fennville, Mich., dealt with the death of a 16-year-old athlete felled by a heart attack right after his team won a basketball game, the other a short, fun piece about “Mud Day” in Detroit.

Of the Fennville piece, Eric wrote that he spent five days planning, shooting and interviewing and another four days editing. “The piece was received really well and had thousands of hits, and the pictures and story in the paper had impact as well,” he wrote in an email. (You can see the full text of his email following Chuck’s.)

Of the minute-and-a-half Mud Day piece, he wrote:

Readers want and need to feel like they are a part of it.  We need to make them say, “Wow, that looks like fun, I gotta do this event next year with my kids.”

Here’s a piece by Chuck Fadely that brings home the frustration of the unemployed. The emotions that pass over these faces tell the story perfectly.

But what about this Oct. 10 video report on a fatal crash between a car and a taxi? The taxi driver died, and the other driver ran away. A cop chased him, he stole the officer’s squad car, police shot and killed him. It’s a good story. But the video captures none of the drama.  It’s all very static: a damaged car, a highway underpass, cops milling around, parked squad cars, a police spokeswoman giving a statement in a monotone that forms the sole audio for the segment. I’d like those two minutes of my life back, please.

Sorry, Chuck. It’s just that I think a fine visual journalist like you was wasted on that story. The money the Herald spent for your time? It could have been used to much better ends. There are far too many after-the-fact videos like that on newspaper websites: the burned-out house behind the yellow tape rather than the flames leaping from the window, the politician droning rather than the people he wants to help living with the problem he’s purporting to fix. If you’re too late for the shot that tells the story, don’t bother going to the scene.

To sum up: I’m all for video, on newspaper sites and elsewhere in the new news ecosystem, so long as video is the best medium for a given story and so long as a given video is compelling. I’m equally opposed to boring written stories: Don’t waste my time!  It’s up to the visual journalists to figure out which stories need moving pictures and which don’t and to fight for the proper deployment of newsroom resources. To follow one debate on this topic, check out this Carnival of Journalism discussion. Here’s the original question: What is the role of online video in the newsroom of the future? And here, a roundup of the answers.