• Red Herring , Friday, February 2, 2007 10:45 AM

It has to be more than a trend if The New York Times, that great bastion of traditional journalism, is jumping on the user-created content bandwagon.

At the SIAA Information Industry Summit in New York on Wednesday, Nicholas Ascheim, the Times digital's director of video and audio, said video is key to the company's future. Because creating professional video content is "expensive," the Times, like other news broadcasters, is now encouraging its readers to become citizen journalists.

Ascheim said the company is also seeking wider distribute of its content across the Web. A la Google, it will distribute its video on other news sites, although it's unclear whether the company plans to rollout a publisher network.

The company's struggle to amass a sizable (and monetizable) video audience is the reason for the shift. There's no doubt a deeper online strategy is necessary for the newspaper--and other newspaper companies--which this week posted a quarterly loss on weak print revenues, despite steady gains from its online divisions.

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