29 Apr 08 Online feature: Las Vegas Sun, ‘Bomb Demonstration’
I’ve been incredibly impressed with the online presence of the Las Vegas Sun. There’s something about the site that just breathes and feels welcoming. One area where they are shining is their multimedia offerings. Like I mentioned in a post yesterday, they include a multimedia link as an integral part of their navigation.
There it is, right there at the top just screaming ‘Click Me!’
One of the pieces they ran recently was a video piece bomb testing and demonstration held by the Las Vegas Fire Department in the Nevada desert. What I liked most about this was that when you go to the video it is large and in your face with excellent quality. It’s big, loud and begs you to ‘Watch me!’ (Yes, I’ve managed to anthropomorphize Web pages, back off!)
Too often sites have their videos squashed into a tiny box along with the story. While many do offer a full-screen option, sometimes a near full-screen view as the default would better serve the piece. They way I see it, your organization paid the reporter or reporters to check out the story, film it and then paid your video team to edit and package the video. Why not play it up as much as you can? You’re paying these people for their hard work, show it off! The Las Vegas Sun is doing an excellent job of that.
The second thing I liked was that the Sun offers the video in a downloadable, MP4 format, in both iPod sizes and even in 720p HD. The effort may not see worth it now, but if people start downloading your site’s videos, sharing them and then word gets around that you offer these things on your site, the traffic will follow.
As an aside, I don’t know how much the complicated ownership structure the Sun has with the Las Vegas Review-Journal has to do with it (which I’m sure it does), but their site is refreshingly lite in ads. This may be a bad thing for them eventually in an increasingly revenue-centric model, but for now, it’s great.
I could go on and on about the Sun’s site, but I’ll let you decide. Check it out, they are a great example of design meeting journalism in a great way.
Related LinksTags: multimedia, new media, online journalism
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