Post Visit

Friday night my graduate class for multimedia journalism visited the Washington Post. In actuality it was only half of the newspaper. We visited the Internet side of the newspaper, which is located in Arlington, Va. I ended up taking the metro because there is a station located approximately two blocks from the company.

Overall, the visit was very informative and I enjoyed the tour of the Internet side. I expected the paper to have its own building or some type of sign indicating where they were located.

Chet Rhodes was kind enough to stay into the night and talk about what The Post.com is all about. He mentioned that his day on Friday started around five or six that morning. So he was very generous to us, plus he ordered pizza! He is the Assistant Managing Editor for news video at Washingtonpost.com. So, he is kind of a big deal. Actually, he is very much a big deal around the .com side of The Post.

He talked about the importance of story telling in news nowadays. He touched on in the next two years The Post will be converging the newspaper and .com sides into one building. Here is a video from Beet.tv, which has Rhodes talking about video training. The points he touched on during our visit are a lot of the same answers he provided to Beet.


During the visit, he talked about shooting video. It seemed that he just wants his reporters and videographers to implement the basics of shooting for their storytelling. He said he is more concerned with them building their video skills. He presented the process of shooting video:

1. The single most important part of the process is communication; he also said this is the hardest part for staff.


2. Shoot the video.

3. Watch the video and prepare a shot sheet.

4. My favorite part: send the tape and e-mail the shot sheet and names of people in the video.

The last part means letting someone else edit your video, which is what I wish I had right now for my final project. As I said before, I took a lot of valuable information from Rhodes. I think I might apply for an internship with The Post for the spring semester. I think working for them will be a valuable experience.