PrezVid Joins Washington Post

The Washington Post’s online group, WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, relaunched several weeks ago with a blunt new stance on online video: they like it. So it wasn’t such a huge surprise to find out this morning that PrezVid has now found a home on Chris Cillizza‘s politics blog on WashingtonPost.com.

If you’re not familiar with PrezVid, you should be. It’s a more astute version of YouTube‘s CitizenTube, providing original video interviews and embedded YouTube clips about the presidential campaigns with news and commentary included. After launching in January, the site catapulted owner, content creator, and primary correspondent Jeff Jarvis (who is also a blogger, an old media journalist, CEO of Exploding Video Productions, and former contributor to and creator of many things that you probably read) to even higher fame in the new media circuit.

The partnership doesn’t appear to have changed PrezVid’s content or style, it simply allows Chris Cillizza to post Jarvis’ vids on the Washington Post blog with a little bit of written context. It helps to round out the online newspaper experience, I suppose, and I imagine that the vlog will be seeing some added veracity now that WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive is underwriting the formerly low-budget vlog.

It’s possible to see this as another bridging between old media and new media, like the new horror movie from the makers of the Saw films announced this week that will debut on Break.com in regular online webisodes.

But keep in mind that Jarvis was in the print industry for decades and is credited for helping found publications like Entertainment Weekly, making this more like a combination of old media and more old media. There’s an added advantage there that most vlogs don’t have when attracting big deals with old media. In other words, I doubt you’re going to see Wallstrip on the homepage of the Wall Street Journal any time soon, but nonetheless this is a strong first step in that direction.