Ask any of my close friends in the bidness and they’ll tell you that for the past two years, I’ve been telling every reporter I know that they better learn how to use a videocamera. Soon. Sunday, with a big-time rollout of online video, the Washington Post offered a compelling reason as to the why.

A quick visit to Sunday’s Washington Sketch video from D.C. reporting vet Dana Milbank shows how powerful off-the-cuff video can be, pairing the rich (looks like HD) visual images with the deep background and snark of a beat reporter. You feel like you’re sitting in the back of the room with Milbank, listening to him rip apart the pomposity of official Washington in a way you just can’t do on the front page of the print edition.

After ribbing Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., for invoking Dragnet, Milbank then starts his chainsaw on poor Kyle Sampson, the bullet-taker for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the fired-attorneys fiasco. With dry humor as good as anything the Daily Show can dish out, Milbank worries that six lawyers aren’t enough for Sampson before noting that “the man on the witness stand himself is well-coiffed and gelled… ” Enjoy the rest here.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV, whose blog alerted us to the WaPo’s video-heavy redesign, promises more in a video interview to be aired sometime soon. But another big newsprint giant making a big move to video (following the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) just about solidifies the shift.

Clearly, to play in the big media leagues video must be a reportorial component — though we here in blogland would like it better if the WaPo would expose the wonderful embeddable code from their Brightcove-powered player. But hey, they’re just getting started, so maybe it will be a bit before the Post sees the light like the Journal has. But the bottom line, for all the wannabe “news” videobloggers is: The big kids have shown up on the court. And yeah, they get it.

And it’s not just politics! If you are a fan of Pardon the Interruption, here’s a 10-minute plus dose of Wilbon and Kornheiser, shot in true vlogger fashion in a terrible setting, a handheld timer to mimic the PTI time limits… street cred! And no commercial breaks! All of a sudden, the online video game just got a lot more competitive.