Twitter is good for the who and the what of journalism. It’s good for “takes” in all their occasional insight, comforting outrage, or snark. And, through the rise of live streaming, it’s become good at raw, unfiltered video—within mere minutes of the fatal car attack on Saturday I was seeing horrifying clips of the incident from 5 different vantage points. Twitter is the hive mind, and it is terrific at unleashing a river of perspectives. What it doesn’t do is tell a story.

 

It’s hard to beat video for crafting a story, to contextualize an event, its progression, and its implications. It’s good at imbuing that information with a sense of presence—by seeing and hearing the actors in the drama relate their impressions in the first-person, and watching them experience events as they happen. Despite this, what I don’t do, and fewer and fewer people under 60 do when fast-breaking events occur, is turn to the traditional home of video journalism, cable networks.

 

I think the case against cable news is pretty well understood, so I’ll refrain from litigating it here. Suffice to say, it very rarely does the positive things I mention above. That’s why I have regarded Vice News as an oddity till now. A nightly half-hour news program on HBO, it is a program I never watch despite being an HBO subscriber. Why did Vice, one of the most prominent media companies to emerge from our digital era, want to compete with CBS news? What’s the point of copying old-world media, when old-world media is broken?

 

Sure it’s dangerous to make too many assumptions about a show I have just admitted to not watching, but my impression has been that Vice News is a hip and edgy 60 Minutes, with all the complimentary and desultory connotations that implies. That seems sad, especially considering the larger backdrop—a truly remarkable renaissance in video journalism emerging from digital-first outlets. From the wonky insights of Vox Explainers, to the bite-sized human interest pieces of Great Big Story, we’re seeing a profusion of terrific work made for the web. The much derided “pivot to video” has been paying off in new styles of cinematic storytelling in journalism, heavily influenced by documentary filmmaking. 

 

These pieces though tend to be “evergreen”— they are usually niche, or even fluffy. When it comes to the “hard news”, important stories on current events and which require skill, access, and resources, digital video efforts still tend to be dominated by pundits and other talking heads. 

 

That’s not Charlottesville: Race and Terror. This episode is an incendiary and important portrait of a movement of hate on the cusp of its moment, inspired and emboldened by the most powerful man on Earth. It has the aesthetic quality of a festival doc, the depth of a Frontline episode, and the urgency a correspondent’s dispatch. To be able to turn around this episode to air Monday night—less than 48 hours after the events depicted, is a marvel. It is immediately a vital and necessary part of our ongoing conversation. It is very hard to cling to academic arguments around free speech, the kind of “both sides” talk that Trump is fond of reciting when confronted with the visceral imagery on display here. The raw testimony of the racists and their resistors strikes you at a sub-intellectual level that is really important to feel, not grasp. Twitter did not achieve this for me. 

 

Not to be grandiose, but this episode/film/video (does the label matter?) is the culmination in my mind of what is good and exciting about digital video journalism today. It is the innovation within the medium, married to the reach and resources of a digital first company that has reached maturity in even the old-world sense. HBO and Vice recognize this too, which is why the episode has been taken from behind the paywall to be distributed free on YouTube and Facebook. The buzz has grown quickly for it, and at the moment has over 25M views online, a number exponentially larger than the nightly audience of the big 3 cable news networks combined.  Digital media is mainstream media now without a doubt, and I think we’ll remember Charlottesville: Race and Terror as a moment when the promise inherent in that idea was made clear.