The Washington Post, long a pioneering publisher embracing online video, revamped its home page today to feature video in a very prominent way. Despite producing acclaimed videos since 1999, there was never a regular spot for video on the home page. This should solve the problem of visibility for the paper’s award-winning work. Here’s the company press release.
A new, sleek, black media player, spanning nearly the entire width of the page, has three windows with featured videos. The player can be "pushed" to the right to see more videos and multimedia offerings. This all seems to load quickly and the quality of the Flash is very good.
Video has become an increasing part of the online offering of newspapers. The New York Times has had a video player on its home page since last year. Wall Street Journal has beefed up its video offering and navigation to its clips in recent months. Pushing these revisions are reader interest and advertiser demand.
I was in Washington early this week to interview Jim Brady, Executive Editor of the washingtonpost.com. We are editing some very interesting interviews. Also, while I was in town, I swung by the White House to shoot footage of the magnolias in bloom! This will all be coming to Beet.TV next week so stay tuned. (Update 4/3 — see my interview with Jim.)
Update 3/30 – Dana Milbank, the New TV News Star on Capitol Hill!
I’ve always enjoyed reading Dana Milbank’s Beltway insider accounts in the Washington Post. It’s pretty impressive to see what he can do with a video camera. I think that his segment on yesterday’s Senate grilling of former Justice Department Kyle Sampson is very well done. It’s all Milbank — smart, acerbic and entertaining. It’s been shot and edited very nicely.
It’s exciting to see how print journalists like Milbank and the Times’ David Carr are defining a new medium of video journalism. Way to go. Could Maureen Dowd be far behind?
Online Journalism
Washington Post
Online VideoPosted on 03/29/2007 at 7:22 PM by Andy Plesser
