Streaming Media East 2007: For The New York Times, Video Now Just as Important as Print

"For some of our video, we work with AP and Reuters to use their video sources, then do analysis alongside that," said Nisenholtz. "For our own content, tagging and indexing is also important. We’ve archived back to 1851 for print, tagging it properly, and we’re doing the same to the videos we create now."

Thinking Video from the Beginning
The Times, according to Nisenholtz, is also moving toward the point where it is thinking through how to work the story from the beginning to include multimedia. A point person—typically the producer—is assigned to address tie-ins between print and video, plus graphics, web and other elements.

"We’d like to see all the desks—the whole newsroom—move this direction," said Nisenholtz, "but for now we’ve got about 20 people directly involved in the process of capturing and editing video.

Examples that were shown of various types of content included David Pogue’s "Blackberry Surprise" (one of Pogue’s humorous weekly product reviews) and Manny Fernandez’s short piece titled "Johnny’s Cave"—a story about a homeless man’s "cave" that includes video both outside and inside his temporary dwelling.

Time is one essential lacking during the middle of the day, according to Nisenholtz, as the average video clip of just under three minutes competes with the average time someone spends on the Times website checking up on the day’s headlines.

"We must distribute our video beyond our own website," said Nisenholtz. "We began using RSS for print, which provides the headlines for blogs and other sites, which in turn pushes the reader back to the NY Times site, allowing us to monetize our content. For video clips, though, we need to push the whole video out, so we will continue to work with bloggers as we continue to explore ways to move forward with video."

Bloggers have put The New York Times at the top of the most-blogged sites on the net, according to Technorati.