NowThis News publishing Instagram video interview series

NowThis News, which produces "social, mobile video", published the first in a series of short interview videos last night using Instagram.

The series started with a 15-second video posted at 8pm EST Sunday (1am BST Monday), featuring "Newark mayor, senate-candidate and internet phenom" Cory Booker. Another video from the interview with Booker will be published at 8pm EST each night this week.

Social editor Drake Martinet told Journalism.co.uk that the site has been building up its "Instragram presence in the last few weeks", with almost 29,000 followers at the time of writing.

The Instagram audience had been gobbling up our contentDrake Martinet, NowThis News

"The Instagram audience had been gobbling up our content and obviously enjoying it so much we decided it was time to do an Instagram-only interview," he said.

This was "something that would be, we think, a first for the platform and a great experiment in bringing interview content in short bursts to people's pockets."

He added that the team at NowThis News, which launched last year, is "trying to make things that are native to every platform that we post on". Therefore, when the opportunity arose to interview Booker, using microvideo was an interesting way to deliver his responses to the social web.

Digital producer at NowThis News Ashley Codianni, who carried out the interview, said the idea was to use the microvideo technology to bring a political figure "to the very demographic that can sometimes be hard to reach and engage, the 18- 34 demo".
 
"As an organisation, NowThis News meets the moment of this generation and condenses information down to the bare essentials with visually appealing style that can be viewed where the consumer already is, whether that's a mobile device or social network," she told Journalism.co.uk in an email.

"As for content to publish, we cater to our audience. If it's something that I, as a 28 year old wants to know, I know that most other twenty-somethings are feeling and wondering the same.

"We're able to harness the power of these popular social networks, like Instagram, and deliver short bits of news on the go - an entirely new way of engaging consumers who receive their news on mobile and social devices."

Martinet added that while it "is early days" for this experiment, he expects NowThis News to continue down this path in its use of microvideo.

"What we're really interested in seeing is, what can you communicate and how should you communicate it effectively in 15 seconds and our 'Instaview' with Cory Booker is just going to be the first of several iterations."

More broadly, he added that "the biggest takeaway" over the past year, has been how important it is to "pay attention to the platform" when working with online video on social media.

"Every platform – Vine, Instagram especially – has its own constraints," he said, "but we found that those constraints are a source of creativity."

"You just have to try things and listen to see what the community responds to. Our Vine content is a slightly different flavour than our Instagram content, but they are both very close to the same news stories and the things that everyone is talking about."

Update: This article was updated on Tuesday 17 September to include comment from Ashley Codianni

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