The old model of news – where people were “told” the news they needed to know in a one-way dialogue – is dead. The Old Spice videos are a great example of how to engage your audience in a two-way dialogue, and that’s why they’ve gone viral.

In any event, should Old Spice decide to drop Isaiah Mustafa, he could still have a great career teaching public speaking and presentation skills. Check out: Public Speaking Lessons from the Old Spice Guy. http://wp.me/pwfa1-YW

Then why doesn’t every news org fire all its staff, hire that Shane tool from Youtube, and give us all what Megan Garber says we really want — empty videos that “play out in real time”!

Oh yes, Megan, Old Spice has taught us all a valuable lesson about “the future of news.” No one will ever read a police blotter or a solidly-crafted enterprise piece again, as long as they have a steady stream of new content from Isaiah Mustafa.

This is the kind of stupidity we get from supposedly high-minded journalism institutes now? I suppose it’s only natural when you hire people who go directly from school to media criticism without actually doing any journalism in between.

The 4chan name-dropping is also hilarious. The Anonymous of 4chan have an attention span of about a day. Let’s all take our journalism cues from a series of web shorts for a deodorant company, because the web’s foremost troll community was amused by those shorts for a few hours.

Maybe by 10 p.m., when 4chan moves onto the next meme, the Washington Post can revolutionize news with a series of 15-second Youtube shorts about Line Trap, Brian Peppers and Goatse.

I’ve gotta run — I’m gonna call the sports department of my local newspaper and tell them readers want grainy cell phone camera video of the Yankee-Tampa game shot from the mezzanine section, and not informed analysis from their 15-year beat writer.

By the time that dinosauric beat reporter files his story 35 minutes after the game ends, I’ll already be distracted by videos of a 19-year-old girl from California lip-syncing to Owl City songs. Because, OMG they’re immediate, which = THE FUTURE OF NEWS.

BTW, if anyone from Gannett, NYT Co. or McClatchy reads this, you should immediately fire your executives and replace them with Megan Garber, who has identified THE FUTURE OF NEWS and can help you move into the 21st century by giving readers what they’ve been begging for — viral parodies of the Dos Equis commercials. GO GO GO!

TV is what’s really driving the campaign and subsequent views on the internet.If these ads weren’t on TV to begin with, we wouldn’t be talking about this dude.

How is that relevant to the news business? It all comes down to value: Was I informed? Was I entertained? Did this content *justify its existence in my world*? Had these clips employed the same production value without the humor, no one would be talking about them.

You’re right, when I wrote about “low-quality” production values, I was focusing on simplicity: I was talking about the overall sparseness and, yes, simplicity of the production. I wasn’t talking about the video equipment itself; I was addressing the comprehensive scale of the production effort, which allowed the ads’ creators to produce their videos nimbly and, above all, quickly.

This isn’t Flipcam-level stuff, and I think the real reason why it won over the web was because there was a professional-level TV crossover. The internet is now being acknowledged, and in its own sense of humor, by a –yes, slick — campaign.

I think you’re mistaking low quality for simplicity.

I have produced dozens of casual videos in a professional context in the past five years, and while I would say, yes, grainy, rough video is important to the future of news and deserves a place in the gathered media collection of a story, the slick, quick, achingly handsome OSM videos aren’t that example–