What The New York Times Video Site Offers Millennials

The New York Times is a ground-breaking newspaper not only in the United States, but also all over the world. But the word “newspaper” is no longer appropriate to describe the type of journalism that The Times stands for. The journalism shift to digital world has changed the way media organizations produce the content. When newspapers first launched their websites they simply reposted the same stories and formats they were doing in print. However, news outlets online need to craft their stories in an appealing manner for the audience.Viewers in this day and age are fed up of reading. They look for visual and immersive content, video, images and stunning interactive infographics.

Today, The New York Times Company describes himself as “a global media organization dedicated to enhancing society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news and information”. Although the company is still preserving its excellence in journalism, The New York Times is focusing more and more on cutting-edge technologies like 360º video and virtual reality. Thus, video storytelling is now a staple. This is how The Times Video site looks like / The New York Times

The globally known daily newspaper took a chance on video some years ago, and nowadays video is basic for a news organization with presence on the Internet. While newsroom jobs are going down, investments are shifting to the video team. The New York Times operates in every single platform where people looking for news would like to see videos rather than text: YouTube, social media such as Facebook or Instagram or the smartphone app. Videos used to be the best partners to print stories, but they are not anymore. Now videos are the attention-grabber, while text is second.

The New York Times has two different sites where it updates video. Times Video is where the news outlet places all the footage. In every channel we can find videos related to different topics, such as U.S. & Politics, International, New York or even documentaries. The clips normally range from 1 to 3 minutes, which is a very appropriate time for the web.

But the concept of “video” is currently going one step further, with the advent of 360º video and virtual reality (VR). And The Times is going all in with it. Last November, it unveiled The Daily 360 in a partnership with Samsung, where it puts up 360º videos. But The New York Times actually began its push to VR last year when it rolled out its NYT VR app and gave away a million Google Cardboard goggles to Sunday print subscribers.

This is the first video that The Times posted to The Daily 360

360º videos offer an immersive experience to the viewers. They make them feel they are on location experiencing the event themselves. They can look to any side and see what is going on around them. Using the goggles, the adventure becomes even more exciting and realistic.

Social media is also a very important environment for media, because the number of Internet users looking for news on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is pumping up. The new York Times Times is taking advantage of the new features that both Facebook and Instagram have incorporated, clearly backing up Facebook Live and Instagram Stories to engage with a wider audience. 360-degree videos are also streamed live from The New York Times Facebook Page. Videos on Facebook posted by media outlets usually include some text that backs up the footage.

The New Era of Video Storytelling

Video is currently one of the preferred ways for journalists to tell stories, or at least to back them up. Audience is currently fed up with reading. People are looking for visual content such as graphics, interactivity and video. That is, content that draws the viewers’ attention into a site and persuades th

Taking what is on the print and put it down on the screen is not a good idea, at least not anymore. In a shifting journalism world, people working in the news field have to adapt and reshape the business as many times as it is necessary in order to meet what the audience is seeking.

Video is a versatile form of journalism. And it has become more accessible since cheap digital video cameras and free video-editing software has ushered in the video age. Journalism majors are being taught how to shoot and edit video and the importance of multi-tasking journalists is arising.

Uploading video is fine even when the quality is not the best one. Mara Schiavocampo in   A Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Journalism (Mark Briggs) says that “shooting video that doesn’t look like the usual network story is not bad news video, it’s vérité style, which lends itself very well to the tools we are using”.

However, regular video are now facing competition. Even though of the cuff videos usually work out, a new manner of video recording is boosting. 360-degree video provides a completely renewed experience to the audience and takes viewers right into the event. The main purpose of a story in the news media is to let people know about an event and try to describe it as accurate and transparent as possible. Video is a great way to accomplish so. But 360º video provides a completely ground-breaking  form to achieve this goal.

Not only videos, but also images can be shot in 360º. The following 360º picture from Flickr belongs to Nick Hobgood:

The advent of 360º video walks hand in hand with the arising of virtual reality (VR), but they don’t share meanings, unlike most people tend to think. 360º videos capture the entire scene around the camera. What you see in 360 degree-videos and photos is real footage, not animation. And the immersive 360º experience can become even more realistic when viewing them with the cardboard. VR, on the other hand, offers interactivity and depth, you can travel within it. It is volumetric and responsive. That is, you are not limited to what cameras can record.

News organizations such as The New York Times are taking a step forward in terms of video news and adopting renewed ways to show content. 360º video is growing as a form of video visualization and it is reinventing the concept of how we watch videos. Platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are already hosting this increasing manner of presenting videos. The NYT introduced The Daily 360 at the beginning of November as a “new way to experience journalism”. In a post unveiling the new feature, the newspaper points out that “these immersive videos put you at the center of the scene, allowing you to look left, right, up, down and behind you”. Besides, tit is available on the phone, tablet and computer.

The New York Times placed a camera during the 2016 NYC Marathon and this was the result:

There is no doubt that both virtual reality and 300-degree video enhance the viewer’s experience and widen the possibilities for news media to craft appealing stories. These two forms of video recording are a big leap forward in video storytelling. Now it is time for all news organizations to keep up with development if they want to lead the change, just as The New York Times is doing.

This is how the NYT 360º video site looks like / Source: The New York Times

The New York Times in a Twitter-Based, Multimedia World

FutureTwitter is the most popular microblogging service. With 313 milion active users and aproximately 500 milion tweets per day (check out how many tweets are being sent every day), it was launched in 2006 as a short, text-based communication social network.

As the journalist Mark Briggs points out, “in the past, a user had to wait for a news organization to publish a story on a breaking news event”. However, he says, “with Twitter, users on the scene start spreading the word immediately”. Its simplicity and flexibility -we can send tweets with images, videos, GIFs and links- has turned Twitter into the favorite social network for media companies. Nowadays, if you are a media outlet and you are not on Twitter, you will be deemed old-fashioned.

Making the most of Twitter is not just about attaching the link of the same stories that are available on the website. Using Twitter as a place to pour links prevents media from engaging in the community conversation, which is one of the main purposes of this social media. Tweeting entails asking for feedback, getting to know your audience and paying attention to what your followers say. “If I send out a link it’s because I did it myself”, says Tracy Record, founder of the West Seattle Blog. This is how Twitter works, we have to be a human presence and publish only our own material. In order words, turning off the autopilot.

The coverage of breaking events is thought to be the primary use of the social network represented by the blue bird. Almost every unexpected news, such as terrorist attacks or accidents, are first released on Twitter. Thus, citizens are no longer viewers and have become also publishers. This is one of the keys of current journalism. Not only journalists, but also people take part in the news production. And journalists have to pay attention to that and take advantage of this new concept of citizen journalism.

A ground-breaking newspaper

The New York Times is a great example of a newspaper that has adapted perfectly to the requirements of the new journalism (still evolving). A Twitter-based multimedia world compels outlets to create a wide range of contents. Printed papers are no longer enough. They have to exploit their websites, their social media accounts and complement the reports with blogs that go into details in some specific topics.

The American newspaper is one of the most up-to-date media. If you look up “the new york times” on Google, the first result will be “The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia“. I would bet that the last word -Multimedia- was not there some years ago. Indeed, multimedia content, essentially videos, is one of the strengths of the daily newspaper. There is no doubt that The New York Times reporters strive very hard in order to enhance and stand out the multimedia world. This is how the “Times Video” interface looks like:

Try to find a media with no Twitter account. That seems like a hard challenge to fullfil. Every newspaper and media company has at least one account on Twitter. Being on this social network is a must for those that base their work on producing and publishing news. Some of them even have different accounts for each field of information or each edition.

The New York Times is an enormous newspaper with more than 750 members on a Twitter list called NYT Journalists. Its Twitter feed has a great deal of traffic every day. The vast majority of tweets include the headline of a story, with the link to the website and the pertinent picture. The journalists that work for The NYT also have their personal accounts, which they use to share or retweet stories, quote and comment others tweets and post thoughts. Emma Cott and Samantha Stark, for example, are reporters for the American newspaper. Both of them, as we can see from the embedded tweets, use their personal accounts to publish thoughts and concerns, but essentially to attach and recommend content available on the newspaper they work for.

Did you know that The New York Times makes documentaries? Watch this! http://t.co/fs88g5ojoD @abbygoodnough @johnmwoo @justinesimons

— Emma Cott (@EmmaCottNYT) June 22, 2015

Please take a moment to watch our film! https://t.co/M3n76NhWuM

— Samantha Stark (@starksamantha) October 3, 2016