Washington Post does video
You have to hand it to the Washington Post. They’re not sitting around on their hands waiting for their newspaper to slowly wither away, they’re experimenting, and I think their latest experiment is fantastic. It’s called OnBeing, and it’s a series of video vignettes of ordinary people with stories to tell — not news stories necessarily, but interesting stories.
The first four include a young woman who has become a nun, and a gay man who is a Mormon, and each involves the person simply talking into the camera with a white background. Very simple, and very affecting. And the layout and design of the feature — which is apparently one of the first projects from new hire Rob Curley, a digital media whiz-kid (who I wrote about here) — is also extremely well done. It is clean and easy to navigate, with Flash controls that pop up when you mouse over them but then go away again. All in all, it has a very iTunes-like feel. Totally un-newspaper-like.
Not everyone is as taken with it as I am. DCist says that it “misses the mark,” and that while the design is nice the stories themselves are a little lightweight — and perhaps they are. Not every one is going to be a gem (Howard Owens has some questions for Rob Curley along the same lines). But I still think is a worthwhile project, and extremely well executed.
Update:
Steve Fox has a post about the new feature over at Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment. And Howard Owens posted a comment here to let me know that Rob Curley responded to his questions about the feature — well worth reading. My favourite quote:
“We just wanted to try something different. There were no surveys done beforehand to see if folks wanted something like this. There were no test audiences. We just did what we thought was right.”
Thanks, Howard.
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(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 12:18 am)
I don’t think I’m being critical in my questions … Rob promises an answer, btw.
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 8:29 am)
Thanks for the comment, Howard. I didn’t mean to imply that you were being critical, although that may be the way it came out. I thought they were very good questions.
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 11:34 pm)
Thanks … FYI … Rob answered the quesitons … good answers, too.
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 9:18 am)
And they’ve been doing video for years. They were really the first and it’s all right here, hours of documentary video:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/special/4/
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 10:32 am)
Thanks for that, Jeff.
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 5:23 pm)
[…] Courtesy of Lucas Grindley’s blog comes a comment from Rob Curley, the digital media whiz-kid behind the Washington Post’s great new OnBeing video feature, which I wrote about here. In a comment on Melissa Worden’s blog, Rob responds to questions about how the new feature can be monetized: I’m going to say something that I’ve never said in my 10 years as an online journalist: I don’t care how it’s monetized. Don’t get me wrong: I love capitalism. I want our newspaper to make money hand-over-fist so that we can continue to do journalism that matters, but … […]
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 1:11 pm)
[…] As the word “paper” becomes less and less a part of the newspaper world, things like video are becoming more and more common. While there are some exceptionally well-designed video efforts out there — such as the Washington Post’s OnBeing, which I wrote about recently — there are also some that are, well… underwhelming, if that’s a word. […]
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 8:29 pm)
[…] As the word “paper” becomes less and less a part of the newspaper world, things like video are becoming more and more common. While there are some exceptionally well-designed video efforts out there — such as the Washington Post’s OnBeing, which I wrote about recently — there are also some that are, well… underwhelming, if that’s a word. […]
(On Feb 9th, 2007 at 4:43 pm)
[…] Paul Kapustka, one of the writers at Om Malik’s NewTeeVee, has a great look at the Washington Post’s increasing use of video, which started with the great OnBeing feature (the brainchild of multimedia wizard Rob Curley) and has grown to include video reports from the field and all kinds of great content. As Kapustka says of the video report from Dana Milbank in Washington, who was at a congressional committee hearing: “[It] 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. […]