Web video startup NowThis News will produce two to three videos to illustrate stories in The Atlantic each month, the company announced Thursday.
The Atlantic liked the “tone and tenor of our content,” NowThis Editor and Chief Ed O’Keefe said in a phone call with Poynter. He and Managing Editor Katharine Zaleski came from New York to D.C. last November to discuss a partnership with the magazine, and the news orgs worked on a few dry runs together, including this video, which bounced off Emily Bazelon’s piece on bullying from the magazine’s March issue:
For the April issue, NowThis did only one video, a history of Jordan told in just over two minutes, which will accompany Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the new issue about that country’s King Abdullah.
A NowThis video story “is a complementary experience that might be consumed entirely independently,” O’Keefe said. “I think what’s key to that is we are not repurposing or repacking content that is meant for one form and tranferring it onto another.”
NowThis staffers Betsy Rate, Win Rosenfeld and Sadie Bass work directly with the magazine in planning the stories. The two teams will look at upcoming stories and decide what might work, he said.
NowThis focuses on mobile news consumers, “so we can play with anybody” when deciding where its videos end up on the Web, O’Keefe said. The Atlantic partnership is “not primarily a financial arrangement,” he said. “We have no preroll ads within our player, so we give the video content over to The Atlantic, and in exchange they are doing some promotion to us and our app experience.”
