Shira Lazar Launches YouTube ‘Partners Project’

Shira Lazar is no stranger to hosted online interview shows, she practically wrote the book on them with gigs at CBS News (The Tomorrow Show), Yahoo (What’s So Funny), Mahalo (This Week in YouTube) and MSN (The Tastemaker). Even with the blue-chip track record in web series, Lazar still didn’t have her own independently owned web show to call home. That is, until today.

Now the online video personality is heading to YouTube, via Next New Networks, with the launch of a bi-weekly interview show called The Partners Project that turns her camera onto the top creators of the world’s most popular online video site. The series launched today on their brand spanking new YouTube channel (partnersproject) with an interview with The Annoying Orange creator Dane Boedigheimer (aka daneboe).

Lazar teamed up with former Revision3 producer Damon Berger to develop a new web series around Shira, and the pair sought out the ideal distribution partner to give it some lift. Next New Networks, through their Next New Creators program appears to be the fit they were looking for.

As for how they landed on the Partners concept, it was a matter of timing with the growth of YouTube as a major entertainment network in 2010. “This year in particular,” Lazar told us, “YouTube has matured and grown in leaps and bounds. Content creators are not only getting the audience and engagement that networks would die for, but finally with that they’re all starting to be taken seriously by the traditional folks.”

Upcoming episodes, which release every Tuesday and Thursday, feature a who’s who of YouTube partners like iJustine, MysteryGuitarmMan and ShayCarl.

So who is this show targeted at? “We hope everyone will watch the show,” said Lazar. “Obviously this is for all the fans of our guests, but also for people who might not get this community or take it seriously. This is to show that the YouTube community is for real and it’s not going away.”

And while we had a few minutes Lazar, an online video vet herself, we asked he for some advice she would give to someone just starting out with their own web show. “Watch The Partners Project!,” she half-jokingly replied. “The best and brightest YouTube creators are going to be talking about how they started out on YouTube, and what they’ve learned about how to be successful along the way. If I were to answer based on what we’ve learned so far from the creators we’ve talked to, it’s that you just have to start creating and work really, really, ridiculously hard.”