Ann Derry on the New York Times Columnists' Video Creation

Ann Derry, who heads of the editorial side of video operations at The Times. In this interview, she explains how Times reporters and columnists are developing personal styles in creating video.

Ann Derry on the New York Times Columnists' Video Creation Ann Derry: Well, we started almost three years ago with a small number of video journalists, a small unit and we’ve now expanded. We have 15 video journalists in the newsroom. They write. They produce. They edit video. They work very closely with the reporters and they often call report stories. At the same time that we started with our people who actually had us gossip, we started training people right away in the newsroom, photographers, reporters, graphics people, people who came to us wanting to learn video and/or people who were in locations where we thought it would be valuable to be getting video out. So, we trained. We have people in Baghdad, both photographers and reporters who we train. We have people in Africa, people in Moscow. So some of them are organic process, we kind of and people come to us. We have editors who come to us and reporters and just say, “Look, I’d really like to learn. I'm going to go to Nikush. I'm going to go to Berlin.” And when they post in Berlin, I’d love to learn. I’d love to just take a small video camera and I’d love to learn video. [Demonstration] In general, it’s almost always tied with a text story. What we try to do is head at the complimentary so we don’t do the same story in video that you’re doing in texts. You take. You break out the characters for example. You break out the action for example. It has to stay on its own because our video scene, we never assume that anyone is going to have read the story. Some of it do are kind of mini documentaries. Walt Bogdanich: For Long Island Railroad, it’s a commuter train system that transports millions of people a month between New York City and the Long Island suburbs. Ann Derry: Probably that was a more intimate experience with web video and so what we’ve been working on is in different ways putting the reporters and the reporting, giving it a little more character and the examples, I mean you may have a straight report of the documentary like the Long Island Railroad piece that we did a couple of weeks ago. But we also are doing a lot of trying to cultivate reporters and their voices just on extent in some of the pieces that we’re doing. Male: In Puerto Rico, we call the shave ice beat ice wash and so that’s why this project is called Pimp My Piragua. Ann Derry: Kurt Kagiana and who is a new metro reporter who has been writing for Metro Four. Several years, he has a very distinctive voice and he’s always been very distinctive in his writing. We gave him my video camera and trained him how to shoot video and now his videos have that same kind of coy, Calcanean voice. And that’s not so easy because you don’t wanted to be so self-referential that’s all about the reporter. But you want a little bit of the reporter in there. Kurt Cagiana: I was in the museum the other day when the car caught my eye. The gal happened to be working on the club at the time. He said he was a porter written born artist now living in Brooklyn and making art with the dresses Latino culture in New York. Ann Derry: So there are a lot of kind of Times brands. You know Mark Bitman and they’re also with different styles most definitely. And we thought a lot about this when we first started, we say, “What would be the Times style?” David Carr: Hi, my name is David Carr. Ann Derry: And then we realize there is not one time style for writing. I mean there are different kinds of writing. There is feature writing, there’s news writing, there are announces and so similarly there would be different kinds of video style depending on the kind of material that you're tackling. So we’re still defining what those are. [Demonstration] The value of video is that there are stories that are told kind of better in video than any other way and so I think the best, that’s the basic value of video. Something and anything is character-driven, there is great visual material. For the Times reader or viewer I think people come to expect video on new sites. Our competition and the new space isn't just southern newspapers. It’s also all news organizations. It's NBC and CNN and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. So all those organizations have video and I think we need to be in that space. I also think people are looking at multimedia, all kinds of multimedia so it’s a straight video story. It's interactive graphic where you click on something and you see your video. I think viewers and audience are expecting to kind of see that more and more. So I think in that way that’s the value that we’re providing.