• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 4, 2010

All due respect to the superb journos at the Washington Post, but I can't imagine that in the midst of all your other writing and researching duties throughout the day, you relish worrying about how bad that bed head looks for all to see online. Starting last week, WashPo has recruited its writers to do online live video chats with readers from their desks. As Interactivities and Community Editor Hal Strauss told Beet.TV last week, the reporters at the paper have already gotten used to being part of the cable TV 24/7 news cycles where they do on-air stand-ups on a moment's notice and they had been doing chats with readers for years. Now the newspaper has launched a platform that blends the text and video format and gives the reporter easy access to the system within the CMS. Straus says he expects hundreds of Post reporters to be doing this in the next month and to post live reports from the road and whenever stories break.

In the first instances we saw last week the user-side interface is quite good. Most of the reporters we have seen thus far are starting with a run-down of recent stories -- a kind of reporter's notebook presentation. Then they field a few user-submitted questions. Financial reporter Frank Ahrens has a cute little titling card in the background to brand the chat as "Economy Watch." A text box gives you a summary of what the vid chat is about, and the questions come in from a left hand scroll. When some of the videos are archived and indexed properly the user can come back to them on demand and shortcut to the reporter's response to specific chat questions just by clicking on the question in the scroll.

WashPo is also using the new format to help promote its recently launched politics site PostPolitics.com. That site's chief blogger Chris Cillizza has a regularly schedule vid chat branded The Friday Line.

Is this the way newspapers will try to battle back against the other online news entities that are pouring video content online? Obviously this is just one more example of how the Web has eroded virtually all of the old silos separating media platforms. Newspapers and magazines are TV networks now. TV and radio outlets have to craft text articles if they also want to get into the search distribution machine. To its credit, the WashPo video chats are genuinely interactive and informative. Whether they find their way into people's regular online habits is another story.

By giving video news the special expertise and local angle a newspaper reporter brings to the table, brands like WashPo may be positioning themselves for that next wave of Web development, hyper-local.