These video-stories from The New York Times are all so well put together that I feel privileged to know about them. I’m not even joking: I really feel honored every time I happen to lay my eyes on top-notch material.
The thing is that when reporters with great storytelling abilities meet video producers with great storytelling abilities, well, better believe the results are going to be epic. But, as it often happens, in spite of being excellent material, NYT’s Op-Docs is a criminally underrated video series.
So what are these video-M&Ms, more precisely? Well, the Op-Docs series is actually an open invite from The New York Times to both established and emerging teams of video producers + journalists/reporters to contribute with short opinionated docs reflecting a wide range of styles & subjects, including current affairs, contemporary life, historical subjects etc.
This is a very unique series mostly because they’re not pivoting off the news. The people who oversee the production are not part of the news & are not competing with the newsroom, so they are not trying to cover or recast the news. This allows the teams to be artistic and to take a different point-of-view that can be often provocative and spark discussion. Usually, most Op-Docs are around 5 to 10 minutes (they’re tiny bits of excellent material, hence my M&M comparison), but the people from The Times are opened to different forms of storytelling, which keeps the door open for very original content.
I will most definitely come back to update this text with more thoughts, but for now I just want to share some of these beautiful short stories with you:
You can find al of them here.
