You have to hand it to the Washington Post. Theyre not sitting around on their hands waiting for their newspaper to slowly wither away, theyre experimenting, and I think their latest experiment is fantastic. Its called OnBeing, and its a series of video vignettes of ordinary people with stories to tell not news stories necessarily, but interesting stories.
The first four include a young woman who has become a nun, and a gay man who is a Mormon, and each involves the person simply talking into the camera with a white background. Very simple, and very affecting. And the layout and design of the feature which is apparently one of the first projects from new hire Rob Curley, a digital media whiz-kid (who I wrote about here) is also extremely well done. It is clean and easy to navigate, with Flash controls that pop up when you mouse over them but then go away again. All in all, it has a very iTunes-like feel. Totally un-newspaper-like.
Not everyone is as taken with it as I am. DCist says that it misses the mark, and that while the design is nice the stories themselves are a little lightweight and perhaps they are. Not every one is going to be a gem (Howard Owens has some questions for Rob Curley along the same lines). But I still think is a worthwhile project, and extremely well executed.
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