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OPA: NYTimes.com exec talk web video

Posted: 09/03/07 By: Oliver Luft

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NYTimes.com last month launched its inaugural video obituary. The 'Last Word' is the latest in an increasing range of video products offered by the Times.

Vivian Schiller, general manager of NYTimes.com, talked to Journalism.co.uk about the new film and how the publication handles its approach to video journalism.

"The idea is to video extensive interviews with all types of notable people while they are still alive with the understanding that everything they say will be embargoed until they die.

"What we are collecting is something that will be this rich repository of first-person testimonial or autobiographies.

"It's a very long term proposition and we're hoping that we don't get to use them any time soon.

"As fate would have it the first one was Art Buchwald who died about a month ago.

"We did not ask him to do it but he looked to camera and said: "Hi, I'm Art Buchwald and I just died." It was just an amazing moment that he thought up himself and then he went on to talk about his life.

"We're recording lots of notable people from around the world; statesmen and artists who will become part of our human archive."

A year ago the Times started producing in-house videos for its hallowed wedding section. But last month it took the decision to throw the site open and take its first foray into user-generated video by asking couples to send in short films about how they met and fell in love.

"We very specifically don't want to tell them what to do and how to tell their stories…I really can't wait to see what our readers send us I think it will be a really diverse and interesting experiment."

She added that the Times would now be looking for areas in which it could get more user-generated video onto the site to complement the 25-30 videos, a mixture of lifestyle videos and hard news pieces created in-house solely for web publication, that it produces each week.

"The interesting thing is that our viewers have responded to all of it. It's not like they are leaning one way toward the feature content or just toward the hard news content.

"In the top ten of our most popular videos we have both a piece about these kids that built a skate board ramp in their back yard which became an attraction and we also have a piece from Chris Chivers, our correspondent in Russia, about atrocities in Chechnya that included some cell phone footage given to him which he built a package around - you can't get more hard news than that."

A mix of video designed specifically for the web, Schiller added, faired better than more traditional broadcast news transferred online as it fitted better the conventions of the medium and did not require the polish of television.

"We produce everything with an eye toward web users and that has a completely different set of requirements. I come from television and when I moved over to the web I had to unlearn things I knew about how to produce good television.

"The fundamentals are the same, story, character, journalistic integrity but the idea of close ups and fast cuts are gone - you don't want fast cuts on the web.

"On TV talking heads are verboten but on the web people like it, even if some of our reporters have faces made for newspaper - they are not pretty people God love them."

"You get the real deal, you get authenticity and I'd like to think we have a sense of humour about it."

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