Must-See Stories

By: Rich Kane

Video is a hot component with any newspaper—and the Los Angeles Times, which has been producing exclusive video pieces for several years, has just broadened its viewer base exponentially.

The paper recently partnered with streaming provider Hulu, which will serve as a distribution platform for its Los Angeles Times Originals short-form video series (hulu.com/los-angeles-times-originals), giving the segments and the Times brand wider exposure to anyone with a computer, gaming console or mobile device.

The videos are free, so viewers don’t need to be one of Hulu’s 6 million paid subscribers to watch. The Hulu hook-up also neatly unshackles the videos from the Times’ own website, where they’re trapped from repeated viewings by paywall restrictions.

“Strategically, video has been an important part of the Times newsroom for awhile and has been successful on its own at our website,” said Emily Smith, the paper’s senior vice president of digital. “But more consumers are watching video and it’s important for us to distribute that content.”

More than 70 segments are currently on Hulu, including restaurant videos based on reviews from Pulitzer-winning food writer Jonathan Gold; entertainment pieces, such as celebrity roundtable talks which the Times conducts throughout the year as part of its award show coverage; sports shorts on the city’s pro teams; and easily-digestible, sub-five-minute mini-docs that touch on everything from skateboarders to stuntwomen to crime scene cleaning crews.

“I’m really proud of the video work we do; it’s great in-depth work at the highest level,” Colin Crawford, the Times’ deputy managing editor of visual journalism, said. “With Hulu, we were looking at reputable partners and methods of getting that great content in front of more eyeballs.”

The segments are shot and edited by the Times’ in-house video and photo staff, including photographers who have been cross-trained into working with video.

While the Hulu pieces are mostly brief, there are longer productions on the Times site, including some designed to complement detailed written narrative features appearing in the paper’s print and online editions, like the recent “Relics to Ruins,” about a crime raid involving ancient Native American artifacts.

For these social-issue documentaries, the paper also recently partnered with DirecTV, whose 20 million subscribers will now be able to easily watch the Times’ video reports on the global population explosion, gang violence, war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescription drug abuse.

“Video can be very labor intensive, it can be a beast,” Crawford said. “But we try to let the story determine the length. It starts with how we can tell stories on a multi-platform level. Hopefully, our video work will adapt to what our audience wants, and it will just keep growing and growing. It’s exciting to experiment and see what resonates.