Newspaper Research Journal 2015, Vol. 36(2) 212–224 © 2015 NOND of AEJMC Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0739532915587291 nrj.sagepub.com Article Longer, Higher Quality Videos Preferred by News Viewers by Peter S. Chen, Nicholas Wilson, Gina Masullo Chen and Chen-Wei Chang Abstract This study reports people prefer longer, high-quality videos to any other type on newspaper websites and poor quality videos can harm the news brand. Editors should be much more critical of the videos they post and journalists should have multi-media training. Keywords online news, video, news websites, multimedia, training, digital news content T he conventional wisdom for online news is that shorter is better. This view is fueled by evidence attention spans are dropping—particularly among the young. 1 People raised in a digital age, the thinking goes, are so used to zap- ping through ads and clicking through links they have developed a “screen-based” 2 reading behavior where they browse, scan or skim content, reading only a few words to deal with the plethora of information online. 3 Statistics gleaned from websites’ Chen is the print media adviser for Texas Student Media at the University of Texas at Austin. Wilson is a master’s student. Masullo Chen is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Chang is a doctoral candidate. Wilson and Chang are in the School of Mass Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern Mississippi. Masullo Chen is the corresponding author: gina.chen@austin.utexas.edu. 587291NRJ XX X 10.1177/0739532915587291Newspaper Research JournalChen, Wilson, Chen and Chang research-article 2015