Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Nov. 1, 2016, 12:43 p.m.
LINK: www.nytimes.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joseph Lichterman   |   November 1, 2016

The New York Times on Tuesday continued to grow its virtual reality offerings by launching The Daily 360, a daily series of 360-degree videos.

The first video is a minute-long look inside the rubble of a social hall in Sana, Yemen that was destroyed in a Saudi airstrike.

The Times began its push into virtual reality last year when it launched its NYT VR app and sent out a million Google Cardboard headsets to Sunday print subscribers. Last December, the Times produced its first entirely in-house VR project, and this spring its graphics and science desks produced their first VR film.

For The Daily 360, the Times is partnering with Samsung, which gave the Times the equipment to produce the videos. In a note at the bottom of its introductory post, the Times wrote, “Times journalists have been provided with Samsung Gear 360 cameras and equipment to use while reporting out in the field,” and the credits of the initial video also identify that the technology came from the company. Samsung will also publish The Daily 360 videos on its own platforms.

samsungnyt

The Times is dedicating some of its most valuable digital real estate to the series — it sent out a push alert promoting it and the video from Yemen tops the homepage.

nytvr_homepage

Sam Dolnick, the Times editor overseeing VR, told my colleague Ricardo Bilton in May that the Times doesn’t “expect our VR app to be a daily habit in the way that the core app is.” As a result, Daily 360 videos will be available on the main Times app and the Times’ website in addition to the VR app.

In the days leading up to the presidential election, the Daily 360 will focus on the home stretch of the campaign, but as the election winds down the Times plans to introduce other areas of coverage as well. In the spring, Dolnick said the Times wants to experiment with different types of VR films:

We are going to keep going after the big stories, but we’re also going to do VR films that look at the worlds of style and culture. The New York Times contains multitudes.

We’re also experimenting with formats. We’re looking at an experience that we jokingly call “meditative VR.” These are single-shot, no-cuts videos of some beautiful place. You’re at a Jamaican beach at sunset, a Canadian waterfall, and you’re just there. And you look around. There’s no story, there’s nothing happening. I don’t even think it’s necessarily journalism. It’s just transportive and something that can be really powerful in VR.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story misstated the chronology of the Times’ VR history.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
“For Google, that might be failure mode…but for us, that is success,” says the Post’s Vineet Khosla
Browser cookies, as unkillable as cockroaches, won’t be leaving Google Chrome after all
Google — which planned to block third-party cookies in 2022, then 2023, then 2024, then 2025 — now says it won’t block them after all. A big win for adtech, but what about publishers?
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
“The relationship he has uncovered is more like the co-dependence seen in a destructive relationship, or the way we relate to addictive products such as tobacco that we know are doing us harm.”