We love this idea, but would have loved it more if the New York Times made the videos embeddable. So we just took this screenshot and encourage you to go to this link and view them when you get the chance. Slideshow here and behind the scenes here.

What do we love about it?

1. Together they demonstrate the future of media – The New York Times brings its Magazine and TimesPeople to life with video.
2. Each are simple, yet powerful – These vignettes are beautifully shot and masterfully acted.

How would we have designed this site?

1. Allowed each video to be embeddable. There is no excuse in 2010, almost 2011, to now allow your video content to be shared.
2. Pulled in related actor content. No doubt the New York Times has written about each of these 14 actors before; why not use this as an opportunity to cross link the content, get a little SEO love, all while allowing viewers to learn more about those they enjoyed the most.
3. Created individual landing pages for each video. While the lightbox effect creates a certain “view on demand” quality, the New York Times is missing out on not only an opportunity to optimize each piece of content further (again) with a separate landing page (with optimized page title, cross-linking to related NYTimes.com content, etc.), but also the URLs they do provide as permalinks are less than optimized. Check this one out for Michael Douglas: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/12/magazine/14actors.html?ex=1307422800&en=836c4281e8b27e85&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=GN-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M179-ROS-1210-PH&WT.mc_ev=click#7.

h/t Kate Oppenheim

Written by: Leslie Bradshaw | President & COO, JESS3

Tags: acting, leslie post, nytimes, photography, video