NBC Relaunches Nightly News Web Site

MSNBC Video Player Brings High-Quality Video to NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams Site

By Marisa Guthrie -- Broadcasting & Cable, 1/9/2008 9:14:00 AM

Debuting a new video-rich web NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams Web site, NBC News hopes to attract a swath of viewers who are not watching the broadcast on their television sets.

The site officially launches Wednesday, but executives decided to soft-launch the new site Tuesday on the heels of Williams’ interview with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Nightly News executive producer Alex Wallace said.

The redesigned site uses MSNBC’s new video player to deliver a bigger, higher-quality, virtually instantaneous video feed with a full-screen viewing option.

“Hopefully, it will give us the ability in a visual and video-centric way to show you that NBC does have a lot more going on than you get in 22 minutes on Nightly,” Wallace said, adding that she hopes to beef up the site with more foreign news.

There will also be longer versions of stories and interviews seen on the broadcast, as well as Web-centric stories that may not have made the 22-minute cut.

A viable Web footprint is increasingly important for broadcast-news divisions facing declining audiences for their evening-news broadcasts.

“What we all do is changing every single second,” Wallace said. “This is our effort to keep up with it. There are going to be some people who watch Nightly online who do not watch Nightly on television, and that’s great. We want to have people who just find us online. We’re happy to have you wherever you want to watch us.”