NowThisNews Books Booker For First Instagram Political Interview

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is a meat eater and Newark Mayor Cory Booker is a vegetarian. That is what we learned last night in the first exclusive Instagram video interview of a political figure. Posted by the up-and-coming mobile video news company NowThisNews, this is the first of five installments to be posted this week.

The series poses one question each day to the Newark Mayor and U.S. Senate candidate. Within the constraints of the Instagram Video format, Booker has about 15 seconds for his answer. In yesterday’s post Democrat Booker illustrated at least one disagreement and difference between himself and Republican Governor Christie. NowThisNews says this is the first interview of a political candidate ever posted exclusively to Instagram. Booker, who is a pretty fast talker, may have been a politician made for Instagram.

NowThisNews started posting short video news items on Instagram Video several months ago shortly after the video feature was added to the mobile image-sharing app. Most posts include a combination of text headlines, slides and voiceovers to compose news updates at a rate of 35 posts a day. In the past few months, the news organization has attracted a relatively modest 28,000 followers for its experiment in super-short form video news broadcasting. NowThisNews started out as a mobile video app, present on both iOS and Android, but this year has also branched out into syndicating video to other providers and experimenting with emerging formats like Instagram video and Vine. On Vine, the company posts 7-second updates and items, with a following of over 56,000 users.  

Instagram has been attracting ever more exclusive content projects of late. During last week’s Fashion Week in New York Vogue magazine posted an exclusive photo shoot of fashion images by professional photographer Michael O’Neal made with models and his iPhone. In contrast to Booker's NowThisNews post on Sunday, which attracted about 800 likes from the company’s following, the Vogue photo posts drew between 11,000 and 20,000 likes apiece from a Vogue magazine following of over 600,000.  

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