WashingtonPost.com Exec Editor Mulls YouTube for Video Distribution: The New York Times Grabs Smart Dartmouth Grad for New Blog

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

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Andy Plesser: Some newspapers are beginning to solicit video from their readers, actually, or users or whatever you want to call them. What are your thoughts about soliciting and using video from your readers?

Jim Brady: Well, I don’t think there’s any question we will get into that and pick our spots in doing it. It may be around the cherry blossoms, it may be around the Redskins. It may be around, protests downtown. I don’t know what it will be about but we definitely want to get citizen video or citizen submissions in certain areas. We’ll probably be getting into that in the next couple of months.

But I think it’s a part of every site. I don’t think – it’s never going to be the dominant thing that WashingtonPost.com is but what we really focused on a lot of the reader engagement; providing all sorts of forums for readers to talk to us whether it’s through comments on articles or live discussions or making it easy to send email to reporters. Actually providing access on our own pages to ____ blogs that are writing about our articles. We feel like that’s something we’ve done really well, which is give people an opportunity to go deeper than just what we wrote. Write about it yourself. See what other people are writing about it. Contact the reports.

Andy Plesser: So the Washington Post has had video for a long time. You guys have sort of retweaked the home page by bringing video onto the home page in a very prominent way. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts behind that development.

Jim Brady: We brought video to the new homepage primarily because we needed to really signal the people that this was the central part of the site, that over the past couple of years, we’ve continually heard in focus groups and in other places ‘I didn’t realize you guys did video’. So a lot of the reason we’re doing this is we really need people to see that we do it. We need to get them into video and we need to get them to watch more video which is obviously good for us from a business perspective.

But when we tested this homepage out on people over the last couple of months, the one thing everybody noticed because we had that big multimedia strip on the home page, and some people said, ‘oh, I probably wouldn’t click on things in there’ but they all saw it. And I think that was a key for us because it really – this homepage signals better than anyone we’ve had what we’re about if we’re focusing on a couple of core items and making sure people can find them on the home page.

And with the Braco player on top of that, it’s now an opportunity to drive people into vide and then once they’re in video, we’ve presented them with a much better experience and a much better chance to go to more videos. So we think there will be a pretty significant impact on traffic.

Andy Plesser: Jim, let me ask you, most people experience the videos – well, let me just ask you about how the video is watched and where it’s watched. I assume it’s pretty much watched on the WashingtonPost.com. Will you have that content syndicated? Will it be downloadable? Tell us a little bit about how folks experience now or might experience these video clips beyond the confines of the WashingtonPost.com.

Jim Brady: If you look at kind of the phases we go through with video right now, and Travis comes back with this piece from Chad, we blow it out for like three days on the site.

But after a week, 10 days, that story still resonates and is still as powerful as it was the day we launched it but it’s been pushed out of the way by all these new things we’ve put up on the site since then, whether it’s the 100 stories we get from the newspaper every day or more multimedia projects we do.

So at some point, promoting a piece like that on the site aggressively becomes a lot more complicated so why not, when that second phase hits, not turn it around and say, let’s put this up on YouTube or let’s make ____ embeddable somewhere. Let’s figure out how to get this on as many platforms as we can now to give it a second life, for lack of a better term.

In terms of video podcasting, we do a ton of video podcasting. We literally bought the video iPod the day it came out and had our first video podcast out 24 hours later. So we embraced it quickly. And we actually have more people downloading video now via video podcast than we have watching video on the site. And so it’s been huge uptick for us.

Now, that’s apples to oranges because all we know is they’ve downloaded it. We don’t know that they watched it. We know people on the site watch the video. So I’m not saying more people watch video on iPod than on the site but the fact that that many people are downloading it is great for us. And so we’re going to continue to explore any avenue we can to get our video content out there, whether it’s an Apple Set-Top Box or whether it’s working with broadcast organizations to try to get stuff on network TV. We’ve done some stuff with Frontline in the past and some stuff with local TV.

So there’s no platform that we would not be willing to put our video.

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