On onBeing

Posted on February 7, 2007 by Melissa Worden

Links to washingtonpost.com’s “onBeing” project flew through del.icio.us today. And right fully so.

The presentation and video are beautiful, and content is compelling.

The bar has just been raised, my friends.

Wow. And HD, too? See … it gives something a P&S just can’t. I tell ya, readers will get spoiled by this and won’t like the lower quality.

It won’t happen tomorrow, but in an industry that’s usually playing catch-up, why not prepare for the future?

Maybe it’s just me, but at first I thought the videos only were the 3-second or so previews played on the mouse rollover. I didn’t realize that you had to click on the video to play it. Whew. I’m glad I was wrong!

Also, I wonder if this feature is crazy popular tonight. The video is choppy, and it wasn’t this afternoon.

Comments

5 Responses to “On onBeing”

Patrick B on February 8th, 2007 8:43 am

Curley tipped us folks in Roanoke off to this project on Tuesday.

I think this is by far one of the best video efforts by a newspaper Web site.

What makes it good is the human element (like NPR’s “This I believe” project), and the snappy editing for each of the videos. The design is very intuitive, and everything feels very tight.

I didn’t care about HD — I won’t until I buy a new computer, which might be awhile — but the re-sizable video player was sweet.

Also notable were the comments that appear after each video concludes. And I love how Jenn (the journalist) posts her comments! (A journalist interacting with users, what a concept!)

But I do want to know one thing: How are they going to monetize it?
Rob C. on February 11th, 2007 11:54 pm

Thanks for the kind words about “onBeing.” I can tell you that from the moment we first saw Jenn’s initial videos, our team knew we wanted to do something with them.

And then after we talked about what we all thought the design of the project might look like, our team’s designer, Jesse Foltz, then started to blow us all away with his execution.

And then by the time that our programmer, Deryck Hodge, had worked with Jesse to not only implement a django-based comments system that also could tie into washingtonpost.com’s existing registration system, I knew there was something special brewing on a lot of different levels!

As for Patrick’s question as to how we’re going to monetize “onBeing,” I’m going to say something that I’ve never said in my 10 years as an online journalist: I don’t care how it’s monetized.

Don’t get me wrong: I love capitalism. I want our newspaper to make money hand-over-fist so that we can continue to do journalism that matters, but …

Why are online journalists treated so differently at most newspapers than the print journalists are? I mean, if a print editor was planning a huge enterprise project that was going to be really special for the newspaper (and would take some resources to do successfully), would people ask that print editor how he or she was going to monetize it?

Never.

At least not at any newspaper I’ve ever worked at. But for online journalists, we hear it all of the time. And, to be honest, it kind of pisses me off.

All that being said, there are three ways that “onBeing” could be monetized. And I know I’m going to have to shower after I finish explaining them. Here goes:

* Pre-roll at the beginning of the clips. We really, really didn’t want that to happen, and we talked lots about it beforehand with folks throughout Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. What sucks is that even though we talked and talked about it, it still could happen.

* Then there was our preference for advertsing on this project: Kind of a sponsorship model, or even a PBS-like “underwriter” type of ad integration. One advertiser would have been tastefully integrated into the player’s design (and clicking on the advertiser’s logo would have launched a video ad for the advertiser); all of the e-mails that were associated with “onBeing” (send-to-a-friend, as well as the weekly e-mail updates) would have had the advertiser integrated into them; and all of the promotion and links to “onBeing” would have had some level of integration of the advertiser. We even thought all of the videos on the site would have had some specially developed kind of post-roll for the advertiser. And all the “downloadable” clips would have had pre-roll commercials, but the clips that loaded directly into the player wouldn’t have.

* And the third type of revenue-integration for a project like this actually will be coming soon. We’re tweaking the “onBeing” player right now for another one of WPNI’s sites. When this special project launches on that site, the new version of the player will include pre-roll on all of the videos and have traditional banner-type ads integrated into the overall design.

Boy, I’m guessing Patrick never thought in a million years that one sentence on the end of his post would get me all riled up like that.
:)

Anyway, thank you for all of the nice things that people are saying about “onBeing.” Some really talented people put a lot of work and thought into it, and I tried to stay out of the way as much as possible.

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Damn, that was a seriously long ramble. Sorry about that.
Patrick B on February 13th, 2007 8:58 am

Boy, I’m guessing Patrick never thought in a million years that one sentence on the end of his post would get me all riled up like that.

No, not from you Rob! :)

I can definitely relate to your comment about online journalists being treated differently in regard to the business model than print journalists. I was besieged with demands from advertising (and marketing) all of the time as an online producer here in Roanoke.

But since my transition to the development side of the operation, I see an increasing need for anyone with their hands in the code to be aware of how their work affects revenue.

I think online journalists will become less involved in the other duties of the business when print journalists transition away from their medium-specific title (ie. when journalists are simply journalists). They won’t be tasked with Web design or development duties like they are now. They will simply be focusing on the content.

That said, I don’t think pre-roll ads are the answer for onBeing or any other Web video project. And there are many that agree with this thought as well.

It’s the same problem we have with other online advertising — Flash banner (skyscraper, bigbox, etc) ads are tuned out by users, or blocked entirely.

I don’t know the answer here. But I think it’s something we’re all going to have to think about if journalism is going to survive in the long-tail media landscape of the coming years.
Rob C. on February 13th, 2007 12:48 pm

Please forgive this cross-post, as I first posted this repsonse on Howard Owens’ blog … (And please forgive any typos or other goofs in my post because when I wrote it this morning, I was trying to get out the door for a big meeting at WPNI, but I didn’t want to wait until I got to work to write something.)

+++

You know one thing that I’ve noticed as some folks have quoted what I said on Melissa’s blog, is that it feels like some people think I don’t want these projects to make money — which couldn’t be more incorrect.

When several of my peers were leaving the newspaper industry in the late 90s to jump to dot-coms, I stayed with newspapers, and I did that for a reason. I believe in the power of newspapers, and I hope I can be at least a small part of our industry’s evolution.

And that means making more and more money online, and in other new-media driven ways.

I want to build things that attract local audiences so that local advertisers will want to be a part of what we’re doing.

Don’t misconstrue what I meant in my post on Melissa’s blog.

One of my points was to ask why online journalists (at least at many newspapers), often are expected to build web-exclusive content, dream up innovative new things, grow audience, *and* come up with the revenue model?

All that being said, in my post on Melissa’s blog, I did give three options for making money on something like “onBeing.”

Clearly, the second of those three options is the one I would lean toward, and here’s why: I think it would do a much better job of giving the advertiser something unique that could catch a viewer’s attention more than a standard IAB unit would, and you could sell it for a flat-fee instead of CPM, meaning you would actually make much more money on it.

To me, that approach works on a lot of different levels.

One of the reasons the new-media staffs at the smaller newspapers I worked at were bigger than other newspapers of similar size was that I always have been cognizant of the revenue and how it related to what I was building.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that if the money is coming in, then I got more people to help build cool sh*t!

But sometimes I really wish I could just worry about the journalism and figure out how to make new connections with our audience.
Patrick B on February 13th, 2007 10:43 pm

It didn’t take me long to figure out that if the money is coming in, then I got more people to help build cool sh*t!

Amen to that!