New York Times video, unexpected subjects
“The New York Times is doing all this video for the Business section. If you never look at their Business section online, you’ll never find it.”
My friend Ehrin and I were somewhere in Hanoi, eating pho cuon at a table on the sidewalk, when he told me this. He said the Times has been hiring a friend of his, a freelance photojournalist, to shoot video about Business stories. I went browsing for it tonight, and sure enough, there’s a bunch of it — like this story about my favorite Southeast Asian fruit, the mangosteen. Informative stuff about importing exotic fruit to the U.S. Nice pictures. Several interviews. Slick, professional work. Not drop-dead fascinating, but well produced, and not bad.
I discovered that on the Times’s big video index page, you can open a lovely index to solely Business section video. Look for the listing (”Channels”) on the right side, below the featured video itself. Energy drinks, DVD sales, fertilizer in Iowa — these are recent topics in NYT Business video. A mix of narration and interviews, with a bit of natural sound too. Classy shooting, smooth editing.
The fertilizer video seemed a bit long to me, and it sure could have used some charts and graphs to help me through the numbers. But it was watchable. And it made me wonder about how this video is being received. I wish I knew how many people are watching it.
I tell students and journalists that video ought to be interesting to look at, and not many online videos can hold someone’s interest for more than 2 mnutes or so. These videos break both rules.
Is there an audience for these videos? I’m going to watch and see whether the Times continues producing them. A romp through the index indicates that maybe this is a new idea — a lot of past Business videos are straight interviews with newsmakers, or reporters mostly talking at the camera.
It does seem to me that the NYT breaks some rules I usually get for online journalism. Long videos is one. Long stories is another. Even the way the NYT shoots video is different: they have reporter standups and voice tracks, much like TV but more documentary style.
But NYT is the best one of if not the best Web site’s out there…so kind of conflicting for the rest of us.
June 13, 2008 at 11:21 pmI for one don’t mind a good long story be it written or visually driven. I applaud the NYT for taking on video based stories that don’t fit the “under 2 minutes or we loose their attention span” model.
One of the things that I don’t understand is how organizations that don’t have, in the case of the Mangosteen story, 7 photographers, a videographer, writer, narrator and maybe 3 producers at their access to tell a story like that. Most of their stories listed 3 or more photographers/videographers alone. In the era of shrinking staff and budgets does this produce a “video divide” between news online/printing giants (NYT, Washington Post and Dallas Morning News) and every other online news organization? News magazines aren’t close to being competition to the above, for instance the video on Time.com are painful to watch.
What does this mean for your mid sized new pub with a daily circ around 50K with 5 staff photographers? A slow or an instant death due to the video divide? There is no way for them to produce video remotely as polished as the Giants. With the awards going to the slick big budget productions should the local/regional online pub even bother with video?
June 16, 2008 at 11:11 am[...] New York Times video, unexpected subjects (June 13, 2008) [...]
July 18, 2008 at 12:20 pm