That’s the conclusion of Kurt Anderson in an article on the New York Magazine website. My first-read take-aways:

“The lessons seem obvious: Don’t do Web video if you don’t have anything interesting to show, and don’t compete with TV unless you can do something they can’t or won’t. In other words, use the medium.

The passionate, improvised, innovative reinventings, as opposed to the final, fully professionalized reinventions, are often the coolest moments in cultural history. Think of movies in 1920, TV in 1955, or public radio in 1980.”

A few years ago I was concerned that newspapers could so easily incorporate audio on their websites. It didn’t occur to me that they’d jump straight to video.

At the Columbia University School of Journalism, they’ve been thinking about how to better reflect the Internet in their journalism curriculum and have come up with three “flavors” of Internet-related jobs that students or alumni are or will be doing.

“Continuous News” – Entails providing multiple stories of varied lengths at deadlines across the day. The all-too-familiar wire service style of reporting upon which many journalists have cut their teeth for decades.

“Editor-host” – The journalist works inside the newsroom most of time. This job is about synthesizing, analyzing and displaying (in timely fashion for online audiences) content from myriad information sources: newswires, the Internet, video, audio. This is very much an editing role; some have likened it to a typical newsroom copy desk role.

“Webified Reporter” – A kind of one-man band, the Webified reporter is able to apply multiple Web tools — from reporting to videography to Flash — to create original content that takes full advantage of the medium’s interactive multimedia capacities. Not only does the Webified reporter knows how to use these tools, but also when to use which tool for a particular Web story.