Digital Publishing News for July 29, 2013
The Wall Street Journal has started to produce new first-person interactive videos, reports Journalism.co.uk. The first interactive video to be released details the “changes to the US healthcare system under the Affordable Care Act”. Author Sarah Marshall reports, “told from a first-person perspective with a headcam providing a point-of-view (POV) shot, the video allows users to click and explore different aspects of the story, such as related graphics, articles and videos.”
Neale Mann, multimedia innovations editor at the WSJ talks about their approach with this style of video story telling:
“One of the reasons we approached this in the way we did was the traditional news format doesn’t suit all the types of stories we have now, particularly when we have the internet at our disposal. And that’s something we are going to continue to pursue to try to tell stories in a different and engaging way and ultimately to get the viewer to the end of a video and have them understand everything they’ve just seen.”
Mann also adds how they’re looking closely at how they design videos, saying, “we are now working out how we can take videos, redesign them and get people to engage with them, share them, be able to watch them and get the most out of them on every different platform, no matter the size of the screen they are looking at.”
Video storytelling with interactivity isn’t new, but if anyone can effectively take it mainstream to enhance traditional publishing, it’s WSJ.
Can You See The Ads Now?
World News Publishing Focus has a continuing report on an alarming study by comScore that found more than half of display ads go unseen.
In the article, they cite an Adweek report on the warning that Media Ratings Council gave publishers to stop promising visibility of ads to advertisers until the tracking technology gets better.
The post goes on to cite a couple more articles from Adweek and also mentions how The Wall Street Journal is combating the visibility problem with the creation of their “superview” ad unit which follows users as they scroll.
Penton Takes Flight
Penton has purchased Aviation Week from McGraw Hill Financial “in an all-cash deal,” reports FOLIO Magazine.
“Penton CEO David Kieselstein tells FOLIO: that the company has had its eye on Aviation Week for some time, and that the privately conducted sale process is a method that’s worked well for Penton. “It was equal parts persistence and patience and [McGraw Hill] understood we were the best possible home,” he says. “We were both much more interested in going through that in the right way in a private manner rather than the way everything kicks in with an auction process.”
Aviation Week should find a nice home in Penton’s existing Aviation Group.
Women’s Health gets a Facelift
In more website facelift news, Women’s Health magazine has a new website design, reports Mashable. “The Rodale-owned title recently took the wraps off a new site design at womenshealthmag.com. The site is cleaner and simpler, with bigger images and better navigation. It’s also newsier, ripping out the tiled format favored by many other magazines in favor of the vertical newsfeed format long championed by blogs.”
A redesign of the mobile version of website is expected to go live in August.
Boomers Take Action
The AARP joined forces with Google and Ipsos MediaCT to produce a study to discover the online habits of the 50+ age demographic, reports FOLIO Magazine. The most intriguing finding is that, “75 percent of Boomers and 68 percent of seniors take some form of action after watching a video, such as:
- visiting a retailer/store (57 percent)
- calling a business, store or organization (37 percent)
- searching online for more information (35 percent)
- forwarding a link or video to someone (41 percent)”
Just one more reason for the video boom, and why publishers (like WSJ, above) are adding more video into their websites and marketing strategies.
