I also hate video news stories. But oddly enough, I generally find Onion’s “print” stories to be sophomoric and unfunny. Their video stories, on the other hand, frequently leave me in danger of needing to run home to get dry pants.
It’s interesting that if you read the comments on some of those videos that you don’t realize are videos until after you click, many of the commentors also hate them. It surprised me how often that happened since in my experience the commentors are often idiots. So even idiots hate videos.
I read a lot faster than a video will move, so I find news video boring. But I am aware that there are people who find reading a chore, due to eyesight issues or otherwise.
I also hate them. I often want to catch up on the news in locations where video, or more particularly audio, would be a nuisance. Such as at work, or at home while my son is taking a nap.
The thing I dislike about these is that not only do you pay a disproportional advertising price (30 sec ad) for such short news videos, but they almost always show the same stupid ad for each video.
And videos on auto-play put that site on my blacklist forever.
That’s because you’re trying too hard, Colophon! 
Your typical on-line news video watcher, I suspect, is a semi-brain-dead, intellectually lazy viewer who just kicks back, relaxes, and watches all the colored moving pictures as they tickle his retinas. Such a viewer probably doesn’t even notice the difference between the news, the pads ads, or a mindless MTV video.
Sure, if you’re actually trying to pay attention then you’re right.
My suspicion isn’t so much lazy website visitors so much as it is lazy website operators. A large number of news sites are websites operated by cable or local news networks–they already have the news video from when they broadcast it, so they can just slap that up with little effort. Having someone write up an article on the same subject is probably just considered not worth the effort.
I hate them, too. Gimme a damn article I can quickly scan if I want to (or even ctrl-f a key word to see if it’s actually relevant to what I was searching for).
Since CNN is one of the worst offenders IME, I figured the trend was due to laziness on their part, not visitors’: they have to film for a 24/7 news network anyway, so why not just throw video segments up on the web instead of having to film for tv and then write an article? Jerks.
I highly, highly doubt that it’s got anything to do with laziness. I always feel like I’m too lazy to deal with a video. Text doesn’t make people think more…have you ever heard of Twitter?
My suspicion is that it’s 100% about money. Easier to force people to watch video ads than it is to promise advertisers that people are looking at their ads around the article copy. Advertisers will pay more for ads in videos, video ads are harder to block using ad blockers, why wouldn’t a news outlet - who makes no money off people browsing, just from the advertisers - choose video over text?
Follow the money.
That strikes me as the most plausible explanation. Advertising is king, and forcing someone to watch an ad before they can get to what they want, is is surely more effective than passive ads which most folks probably skip right over. I also wonder about the comparative costs of packaging a video vs. producing a transcript.
In addition to pretty much all of the above complaints about videos, what pushes my buttons is not being able to clip a paragraph here and there to add to my files or post for discussion elsewhere. Some website companions to broadcast news channels have taken to putting up partial transcripts of what they deem to be the highlights of this program or that – but which inevitably skip over the part that I was trying to capture.