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Comment by hatethissite42 | Hacker News Reader

> who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview. Give me information that can't be expressed in video and that isn't 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery language.

Me. I am exactly opposite on this. I don't want to watch a video if it could have been an article. I don't think this is uncommon, either.

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100% I hate the videofication of the internet. So much content is locked behind a video that is vastly more difficult to pull detail out of and search and just text. Videos are a great supplement to most text, but rarely do they make a good primary source of information.

Sometimes me. But 99% of the time, my preference is for a competent journalist distilling the interview into an article. Thus sparing me all the ways that politeness, chit-chat, and long-winded stuff can turn a 1,000-word article into a 4,000-word interview.

I'd prefer the other way around. Reading the raw interview instead of the biased report of a journalist. I want to see all the quotes, not quotes out of context, summaries of answers or stuff like that.

To follow the gist of the leading post on this thread, we should easily have access to both. I'm perfectly happy to read a summary; Then then journalist's take; And ideally the quotes would link to the transcript of the full interview, and ideally those would timecode to the audio / video of the full interview.

In modern times there's no reason we can't have all of these things for all our news.

Ideally, you'd have both. Gimme a transcript of an interview but a well-written article in front of it with additional context and a better narrative.

A lot of detail readers might want makes for shitty interview questions and/or the interviewee(s) may not be the best source(s) for that.

There is no such thing as a 'raw interview' unless you're sitting right there with them. Every printed interview is edited for 'concision and clarity', and the interviewee for the most part knows what questions are coming. Journalists also quote interview responses verbatim, so where is the bias if they're printing what was said?

Radio and podcasts actually. Politico does this, and cpr.org (my employer) does it too. They'll have a blurb about the topic, a link to the podcast, and then a printed, edited version of the interview. I love it.

> I don't want to watch a video if it could have been an article.

Same for me. I can read a transcript of a talk in 5 minutes, while it would take an hour to listen to the video.

Not to mention that I often find myself in places where a video might get 5 seconds in and sit buffering forever, but a blob of text would load fine.

If it is important, I want to read it. If it is merely a curiosity, I want to listen to it while doing something else. The newspapers deliver mostly curiosities.

I used to be this way, but I've started to err on the side of video because there's a lot that's unspoken/unfiltered through the journalists biases if you watch someone in an interview. Body language, what they leave unspoken, answers to questions that seem conflicting or irreconcilable with previous answers.

If I can watch/listen at 2.5x speed, I might prefer that over reading. It's a question of bandwidth and comfort.

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