My name is Lloyd Armbrust, and I started the YNT video department back in 2006. To our defense, when we started we were focused on quality, but found that was not what people wanted.

Here are the first two video reports that we ever released (archived on my site as they are no longer online):

http://lloydmedia.com/archive/york-news-times-bre...

http://lloydmedia.com/archive/york-news-times-bre...

These were shot on the day that our XL-2 arrived. We had a huge fire that burned about 1/4 of our main downtown area, so we unpacked the camera and shot these video.

Now, I learned to edit at a public access back in the days of straight-cut linear video editing, but have changed my ways and have switched to the digital NLE's. Also, I had previously a lot of experience with the XL series, so it's not like I was figuring the thing out while shooting this video.

Like Eric Eckert mentioned in the article rabove, we used Sony Vegas to edit our videos, and both of the above videos were digitized, cut, and rendered in LESS than 35 min, after about 15 min of shooting–so a total time of somewhere under an hour from shooting to posting. I'd say that's pretty decent quality for the time spent, but this story had a lot of visual elements that were easy to shoot and edit.

Here is a follow up video to the videos above, and keep in mind that was shot and edited in under one hour and 15 min:

http://lloydmedia.com/archive/york-news-times-new...

Also, I don't think you could say this is poor quality. I've seen worse production value on the 5 o'clock news in Austin, TX.

We also did a lot of feature stories back in the day, and here is an example with plenty of natural sound to help our viewers "dissect the scene."

The following video took about 35 min to shoot and about 40 min to edit.

http://lloydmedia.com/archive/york-news-times-new...

Never mind the copyright violation!

All in all, the production value on these videos is pretty good. So, why did we switch? A big reason is that we bought by GHM who forced us to use YouTube to display our videos–which lowered our quality anyway. Compare YT's flash quality to the above videos.

But the other reason was simple: people didn't care.

They just wanted the information, they didn't want it to look pretty. And by doing this, we could decrease production time from around one hour to UNDER 15 min. Speed became the factor that people cared about, and its how we grew our traffic from under 200,000 to over 1.2 million page views in less than a year.

To give you one example: we had a bank robbery in a York. Within 25 min, including drive time, shooting, editing, rendering, and posting video, we had the story, with just under 100 photos, posted online. And that's what our users cared about: speed.

So, it's not because we couldn't produce, or even that we didn't want to produce, high production-value videos. It's just not what our users wanted.

In the end, we put our users needs over our egos.

Again, thanks for the comments, and I hope that explains some things.