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I mispelled something in an IM and then began to wonder, why doesn't AIM have a spell check option? Am I missing something? Does it exist and I'm just not computer savvy enough to see it? Is there an upgrade I don't have that I should get?
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Steven Rosenbaum, managing partner of Magnify Media told attendees of The Media Center's Cross-Platform media teams event "the people that are used to making content in an older model are the ones least likely to want to reinvent things on their watch, particularly if they have a mortgage or kids in college." He then demonstrated how easy some new content creation can be and shared lessons he's learned from 20 years in TV news, his work with MTV and how to capitalize on a peer review filter model for content.
Transcript of Steve Rosenbaum's presentation
So I talk in front of rooms like this from time to time, and generally my experience is that the room gets divided into thirds. About a third of the people by the end of my talk decide that I am the incarnation of all things bad in where content is going and they never want to hear from me again. About a third do their e-mail and read the paper quietly. And about a third have an "a-ha" moment and go, "That really makes sense, that's very exciting."
For those of you in the room who have the resources of CNN, who got video content and have a video content construction mechanism that's already operating, [CNN's approach] is a brilliant solution. It's exactly where it should go. Madison Avenue and Google have proved that there's revenue there. Taking down the firewall in the K model makes perfect sense, and I'm already using it.
For those of you who come from print, who are my favorite people, I have to say. I've been in this business a very long time. I've been in television news for about 20 years and, I find that the people that are used to making content in an older model are the ones least likely to want to reinvent things on their watch, particularly if they have a mortgage or kids in college.
A couple of questions before I actually go through my slides. How many people here own a DV camera or a video camera at home? How many people here, other than their day job, wherever you work, consider themselves content makers? Is anyone blogging? Which, by the way, doesn't change what I'm going to say at all. In fact, it makes it only better. That's the clue about where I'm going to take you all.
And the good news for today is that I'm going to give you some actual statistics on an event that we're running publicly in user content that I haven't talked about other than to simply be doing it, and it's about six slides in.
Let me just give you some sense of how I view the marketplace. Television is this incredibly powerful thing, and if any of you live in the print content world and you're being told by your boss or you're telling people who work for you, "Look, we've got to find some way to get in. We've got to put more video on the Web site. We've got to find a way be in VOD [video on demand]," you've gone and run the numbers, and the numbers are frightening because making video content's expense, by any model, old or new. You need infrastructure, you need people, there's no revenue yet. Someone says, "Well, if we invest this today, how many years before we actually turn this thing around?" and the answer is, "Uh, I don't know."
When I talk mostly to magazine publishers, they've all gone through that internal process. They've thought about setting up a channel, they've run the numbers, they've run back into print. They've seen the light at the end of the tunnel, which could be a train, and they're scared.
I had 120 employees making television in New York 18 months ago, and I watched where that business was going to go and said, "There's no good end to this story." It's getting cheaper, it's getting harder to sell, the networks are putting more pressure on costs, the cost of production is going down, the cost of fees are going down, and everybody who I used to hire is becoming my competitor. I mean, I would hire three kids out of NYU, and a month later they would set up a company and I would find out that they sold the show to a network that used to be my client. That's a bad day. When everybody who's your employee is your competitor, you wake up and go, "All right, maybe something should change."
I'm not going to read these slides because I don't know what came before today but I assume none of this is a big surprise. It's noisy. Motion media is all over the place. The audience is fragmented. Costs are going down, and the financing is a mess. Is that too strong a statement?
This is the good news side. There are tools all over the place. The gentleman who spoke before me made a joke about not wanting to be on camera. But the truth is, we're in a room, we're in private, no one's signing releases, everybody has a media recording device on them of some sort or another, lots of people are recording this, and it's going to go somewhere. The old rules about asking permission – all that stuff is kind of getting messy now. These tools make that happen.
I went with my son and saw a concert the other night. Because we didn't have tickets, we sat outside on the lawn in Central Park, and I went home, and somebody e-mailed me about 20 minutes later a clip from inside the wall of the concert. That was pretty cool, unless you're the band, or the venue, or the t-shirt guy.
So what I'm here to talk to you today and get you excited about – the third of you who don't think I'm out of my mind – is that there's this bottom-up thing happening out there. Some of you who have the tools, who have laptop editing, who have cameras, are inexorably drawn to this bottom-up energy of content creating. Which means, there's something out there you want to make – you don't know it yet, by the way. The interesting thing is the reason you don't know it is no one's asked you. I mean, if I said to you today, other than wherever that camera officially came form, where would you publish something from today? The answer is, "I don't know, I'd put it on my blog maybe." There's not really yet a home for or a way to filter or a way to organize user content. There are a lot of people struggling with that, and I'll share with you our vision of how that works.
Two sentences about what I've done in my past life. I'm accused of being early. In 1992, before anyone in this room had an e-mail address or a broadband connection or a DV camera or a laptop computer or lots of things, I sold MTV a show called ‘Unfiltered' by telling that their audience was going to make programming cheaper than they could. I think the only thing they heard in that sentence was the word "cheaper." I convinced them to let me run three promos on a Sunday afternoon on MTV and say, if you have a story they could tell, call this 800 number, which went to a single phone line with an answering machine sitting in my brown barn in upstate New York. Wednesday after the Sunday I arrived at MTV with a binder. We had transcribed all weekend and all the night, the 5,000 people who had called with stories they wanted to tell.
Now, because we're all in the news business, I can say this, 80% of them were just crap. But 20% of them were fabulous, fabulous, like heart-stoppingly fabulous, and authentic and dramatic, and people who wanted to participate. What did we do? We asked. People say, "Oh, that was really innovative." You know, it's been 12 years or whatever, nobody's asked. Asking is not that complicated. The Wall Street Journal does a little bit, Tell us this if you're working on these stories." But asking your audience to participate is a really scary thing because it presumes that some number of your colleagues aren't going to have jobs. It presumes that this job of storytelling which we're all professionals in is going to become diffuse in some way, and that's really frightening.
So from 92-96 I produced ‘Unfiltered' at MTV, and then I went to Judy McGrath, who I love, and I said, "Judy, you should cancel my show." And she said, "No one's ever said that to me." And I said, "It's a waste of money. You should cancel it immediately. You should give me the same amount of money, and I should take user content and we should sprinkle it all across the network. We should have fashion from Seattle, we should have music from the streets of Cleveland." So I wrote this big, fat MTV proposal -- it was, you know, a couple of hundred pages -- and presented it. And they said, "No, we don't think so." They said, "Our research tells us that our audience wants us to be the authority of what's cool." And by the way, to her credit, she was absolutely right. It would have been way too early. She would have lost a ton of revenue. And she was right to say no. That's why I said, I'm a little early.
So I left, sold Barry Diller a very similar project and did something called ‘Free Speech America' which for a variety of reasons didn't launch, then created ‘Camera Planet' which was an online channel service. But my point is, I've been at this idea of empowering the audience for a very long time, and I'm nothing if not consistent. So I'm either way too early or I'm just wrong, and that's why you'll break up into thirds.
So let's get to how we're going to do it. User content today is non-commercial, it's nascent, and major media really only embraces it because it's cheap. Meanwhile, blogging, podcasting, and all of this stuff is happening. Everyone pretty much acknowledges it's not going away. But if you're a company whose brand is a content brand – CNN is a good example – how do you embrace user content and not damage this thing that you offer the audience, which is validation, accuracy, fact-checking? Kind of a messy problem, right? This is not simple stuff. Good news for me because we think we've solved it.
Let's get to what Magnify actually does. We mediate the space between creators and consumers. What I mean by that – and the actual example I'm going to give you which is far better than my rhetoric, is, we got a call two months ago from Rodale (sp?) Press, and they said, we want you to come and make a video for us about people that are winning bicycles as part of our bicycling magazine franchise." And I said, "No. Not interested." And they called back and said, "What do you mean? You make videos, and we like you and we know you from things." And I said, "I'm going to make a film about X number of people who won bicycles, and it's going to be so smarmy and self-important. It's going to use words like ‘extraordinarily life-changing' and all these things that I can't say authentically because I don't own a bike and have never ridden one except when I was a child. Why don't we let your audience do my job? That way I'll earn more money, which would make me happy, and you'll get better video, and we might actually stumble into something. The honest truth is, we pretty much knew what we were doing. We knew that they had some – if you know the Rodale publications, they're a good fit. They're very authentic and they have a passionate user base, and there was some prior discussion about user content that they fiddled with.
The way the process works – this is a hybrid of the process is in its evolved form, and then I'll tell you about the elements that were actually put in place at Rodale. Rodale said, before we agree to this, what's our return rate going to be? Which I thought was a funny question for an editorial. I mean, how many people in a newsroom ask what the return rate is? It's like this weird hybrid of a business question and a news question. And I said, "Well, when we were doing MTV, the return rate was about six percent, so I'll tell you six percent." They said fine.
So we sent out 200 e-mails, and we said to the people who had just won a bicycle in, I think it was San Antonio, "Great news. Not only have you won a bicycle, but you've won the opportunity to make a video about how your life is going to change with this bicycle." And we did something – and I've never told this story – I had originally written the e-mail to say, "And if we need to loan you a camera, we will." And my wife and partner in that company – now that we went from 120 employees to two – said to me, "Take that line out." That was 1992, thinking we don't have to loan cameras to anybody. I said, "Well, what if someone has a great story but they don't have a camera?" She said, "No. If they want to tell their story, they'll figure it out." I give her credit because she was entirely right and I was entirely wrong. We sent out the e-mail with no mention of the camera. Anyone want to guess how many responses we got within the first six hours of those 200 e-mails? Fifty-seven yes's. And the exciting thing was, the yes's were passionate yes's. They were: "Thank you for asking me. I would love to make a video. How cool. I don't have a camera but I'm borrowing one from my son-in-law. I don't have camera but the school district where I work has one and I'm going to borrow it form them. Or I have a neighbor who's going to help me out. Passionate yes's. How cool is that? So, not only were they excited to be invited to make content, but they were appreciative that this thing that they love – which was bicycling – was asking them to play along in a space that they obviously cared about.
This is Kristen. She, by the way, is a real person. That image was taken from her video she shot of herself. Actually, her boyfriend shot it. You'll see her in a minute. [The image on the screen] is cheesy but I couldn't resist. So here she is. We've got 57 yes's. We didn't send out the balance of the thousand e-mails, and we now have 190 people making videos.
We ran into a little bit of a problem. While cameras are now fully deployed and people don't have any problem borrowing one from a friend… We sent in our follow-up e-mail, because part of what came from MTV is we've learned to have a relationship with people. What they really want is a little encouragement, a pat on the back, good job, and some tools, that's it. We then sent out a follow-up e-mail and said, "Oh, by the way, do you have any editing gear?" The numbers were not as promising. No editing gear. So I said, well, you know we've done this before. We'll set up a bunch of Final Cuts and we'll start editing bike videos. My wife, who in case you're not figuring this out, is significantly smarter than I am, said, "Just because they don't have editing gear doesn't mean somebody else doesn't have editing gear."
So in three weeks we designed, prototyped, built and launched Edit Exchange. It's up, it's live, you can look at it today. Edit Exchange is a marketplace in which editors meet filmmakers, filmmakers meet editors, and we simply get out of the middle and say, "Great, take your bike video and send it to this guy, he's going to cut it in Cleveland." It's pretty darn cool. And in case you can't tell, I'm fairly excited about it. It is working magnificently. It is not even remotely surprising because if you're an editor, the problem with being an editor is that you don't have anything to cut. Editors want raw material, right? They want to play with stuff. They want to try things. They want to make something. And even if they're professional editors, the stuff they want to do passionately – you can't do passionate when you're making VNRs.[video news releases] If you're working at CNN in Atlanta are you're cutting news, you might want to come home on your Final Cut and do a music video. But you don't really want to do it as a business. But here's a place where you can meet people that have footage, they send the footage to you. Now, would we like to have this be all online? Yes, we would. But anyone who's tried to upload video knows it's a particularly ugly, messy process. I'm a great believer in FedEx. I think FedEx is a great, you know, sneaker net.
So Edit Exchange is now running. We have two of the seven videos that have already been submitted.
Q from unidentified person in audience: What is the editor likely to charge the producer or the maker of the film?
That's a great question. We don't know yet is the answer. It's a marketplace. It's a bidding process. So the way it works is, you put up your project and say, "My band wants to make a video and I'm willing to pay $200, that's my ceiling." There's a private message board component. The first editor e-mails you and says, "What did you shoot on? Can I hear a soundtrack of your band? Are you guys any good?" You send them some stuff, and it's all done in an enclosed space so you're not giving out your private e-mail. The editor says, "I'll do it for $50." Somebody else comes in and says, "I need this for my resume. I'll do it for free. I want to do it as a barter deal. I just want the work."
This is built on a lot of what's happening in the peer production community in Linux and Open Source, which is, people do things for different reasons. And part of what's scary about this is, if we all earn our living making content, and I'm sitting here telling you that people are going to edit your stuff for free, some number of us are going, "Mortgage, kids in college, how does that work?" And what I'm telling is, we can all stand at the door and bar this phenomenon, but trust me, if you use Linux or any open source bulletin board or any open source browser, open source actually really works. It's not a phenomenon that's going to pass us by. It will come to content. We can't stop it. Some number of you can embrace it and probably do really well, because remember that I said the trick to the process is, we invite people to play in our space. All of these people could have made videos on their own. We didn't give them anything. But we just said, there's this ad-hoc community we're creating around bicycling, and we're inviting you to come play in it, and by the way, it's hard to get in.
Which brings me to my next point. So here's the video. We don't have any sound but watch it for two seconds if for no other reason just to see the shooting. (Video plays) It cuts together, she's got establishing shots, she's got close-ups – how did she learn that? They're creative, they're fun, they're different.
By the way, P.S., some of them are really terrible, back to my MTV rule. So, what happens when you've got people submitting videos, and you've got 100 videos submitted, and 80% of them are really terrible? That's a problem. Well, you can say back to your most loyal consumers, the people who love you, the people who busted their butt and worked all weekend and got videotape and sent in their stuff to you, "Guess what, nice try but we're not going to use your video." Probably a bad way to treat your most valuable customers because they never talk to you again. I mean, have you ever looked at anybody's work and tried to be a friend and be critical of it? It doesn't end well.
Which is why we built a peer-based review process. That was the "a-ha" moment. Good. So the peer-based review component works like this. One of the things you can choose to be is a judge. And if you decide to be a judge, you can determine how many videos you want to watch each week, you can tell us something about your skill level and your interest level, and we have software that sends you a link up to three times a week, five times a week – you tell us, you can dial it up or down – you get to review the video. You get to judge it on criteria that our clients set. And the clients get to be in a position where they say, "You know what, we got 100 videos in this week. I'm setting the approval number to eight. I don't want to see anything that doesn't get an eight rating or better." Well, if they only get two videos that cross that eight threshold, they go, "I better turn it down to seven."
But what that means is that somebody's sitting at a desk – CNN is probably the last place that this works because breaking news doesn't work this way, which is another problem that we're struggling with. But in terms of feature editorial or anything that has a moment where it can go through a cycle of being reviewed, what peers do – and by the way, the peer review is all anonymous.
So, here's the one thing that we know about content, because we've all made something – the first draft is never good enough. I joke that we ought to have an autobot that just sends an e-mail back to everyone that submits the first video saying, "It's too long, make it shorter." It's always too long. We don't know.
Comment from unidentified person in audience: And by the way, I want to go home and watch my daughter ride and not film her.
SR: That would make you not a participant in this space.
Comment from same unidentified person in audience: I don't have time to do that.
SR: But my guess is that if I dug three levels deep into something you love – a vacation, a sailboat, a golf trip, a mountain-climbing expedition, something – that you already have … We all own these cameras, we don't know what to do with them.
Comment from same unidentified person in audience: Being on Everest.
SR: There you go. I would love to see you video of being on Everest. And if a community that you participated in said to you, "Hey, tell us about your next trip. We may want to see the video." We all want an assignment, right? We want to be told, you're deputized, go do that.
So the peer review filter is functioning. It works. It's incredibly powerful.
It means that if you don't make the cut, we didn't make the decision as the
editorial, it got made by your peers. You get to read the comments. If it's
an eight-point rating – which you have to get to be put up on the site
– and you hit a seven, you can read the comments from the other judges.
Maybe you'll learn something. Maybe they'll tell you, "You know what, it's
too long, Make it short."
VIDEO: Lau Eriksen, a journalist with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, talks about what he hopes the pending convergence of his organization's radio and television operations will yield, and what satisfying the consumer means in Denmark.
Transcript: Lau Eriksen interviewed by Chad Capellman
LE: Right now I’m at the Radio News and very much working into making several stories for the Radio News. But we are moving together in one big building. Right now, the TV and the radio part of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation is separated. Next year we’ll move in together in one big building and we’re supposed to work together, cross-media.
You could argue that all the big TV networks would be covering the important stories from abroad and then the Danish TV or radio journalists should not be there, but actually I think the opposite is what is happening, that there would be a very high demand from people that we cover it our way. We want the Danish angles. We want the Danes that are affected by the tsunami or by the 9/11 attack; we want to see them. We want to see the Danish interpretation of that. So we want to have our own journalists out there, and we want even more of them than we have seen before.
And we want it out on all platforms. We want the journalists to report for radio, we want them to report for TV, and for the Net. We, of course, have an obligation to reach a lot of Danes. Hopefully we should during the week be able to deliver something that most people in Denmark would like, and they would find it worthwhile to pay the license fee, which is quite a lot actually, $320 a year each household has to pay. And if we are not covering that, if we’re not actually satisfying the population of Denmark, then I’m quite sure that the politicians would say, “We don’t want you to collect the money because you’re not actually doing the job good enough.” It’s in that context, you have to understand.
CC: What types of things are you not doing right now that maybe in three or five years you’d really like to see your converged news operation be able to do?
LE: We are not converged at the moment. We are living in two different houses. We’re living 20 kilometers from each other. There are some teams that will work together -- the finance department, the political team, and we have some other small groups working together. I think that we will see that much more when we actually move together, because I think just that we will be in the same building will mean a lot. So I think we will see a lot of cooperation. I think that many of the worries that people have today will not be there because we will actually sit together, we will get to know the people from TV and maybe find out they’re not to worry about, that they’re actually quite okay to work together with.
I think that will happen, and I think that from that, hopefully people will start working together not because the bosses want them to work together but because they actually find it fun, that they can find colleagues that have the same interests. They can work together doing a piece instead of now where a lot of journalists will be sitting alone and doing the piece and only be committed to that. Hopefully you will see much more working together in teams and cross-media. So if you’re doing radio, you will team up with a person doing TV and work together on a piece.
VIDEO: Howard Owens, Director of New Media for the Ventura County Star, talks about opening up newspaper content to comments, advice on what to say to management when trying to expand your online operation and why moving beyond text delivery is so important to him.
TRANSCRIPT: Howard Owens, interviewed by Chad Capellman
H.O.: My name is Howard Owens. I’m the Director of New Media for the Ventura County Star. What I was here to talk about today is what we’re doing in some of the areas of citizen journalism, such as blogs and community photos but particularly comments on stories, which has drawn quite a bit of media attention recently.
C.C.: A lot of times people seem to know they want to get in that direction but they’re not quite sure what to do and what not to do, and a lot of that was covered by different filters for profanity and that kind of thing. What types of steps did you take in preparation for the direction you ended up in, with giving people a little bit more access to comment and that kind of stuff?
H.O.: One of the ways we operate at the Star is to just kind of try things and experiment. So we’d had conversations about putting comments in stories, particularly within the New Media department, and had tried to get the ability to do it through our publishing system with corporate, and that was going to be a long process. I didn’t want to wait, so we just went out and got … a free commenting application that a lot of bloggers use, and started putting it on our stories just to see how it would work, and it’s been fairly successful.
C.C.: What type of feedback have you gotten from your audience?
H.O.: When the comments initially went up, there was a few, hey, this is great. Some local bloggers were particularly complimentary. I wouldn’t say we have a widespread amount of comments on that. We did get a lot of reaction when we took them down for a short time, from “Hey, it was great while it lasted,” to “See, you can’t trust corporations anyway.” You know, all kinds of stuff. It drew a lot of attention. Taking them down drew a lot more attention from the community than putting them up.
C.C.: You’ve done a lot to enable people to submit photos and really pull in a lot of that kind of content. What was the biggest hurdle in achieving that?
H.O.: There was really no difficulty to it. Working with Buzznet – they’re very easy to work with, and they make it easy for users to submit content. Just putting it up has generated a fair amount of user-supplied content. We haven’t marketed it at all. I think we’d get a lot more if we did, and we’ll do that at some point. It’s a fairly simple process. I should point out that all photos are moderated before they go live. We have had a couple things that didn’t need to go live, but it’s been a pretty easy process. It doesn’t take any time, really, to watch over.
C.C.: A lot of people have been talking to you and having conversations with you about how they can get their organizations to do some of the things that you’re doing. What types of questions have you been most frequently asked and how would you advise people?
H.O.: I haven’t really been asked too many questions about how to do it. It’s more along the lines of comments that, “My editor would never go for this. The newsroom culture is just not ready for this sort of thing.” One of the things that’s fortunate about the Ventura County Star is that from the publisher to the editor on down, kind of at all management levels, there’s a great deal of support for innovation, and recognizing that without the Web, we have no future. So, that opens up a lot of freedom.
And my advice to a couple of newspaper people who have expressed those concerns about their newsroom is, you’ve got to go back and talk to your editor and talk about the day after tomorrow. What happens when your 100,000-circulation newspaper in one reporting period loses $20,000?
I think it’s a very real possibility that there will be a tipping point where a lot of people in that 40-50 age bracket have been using the Web for a few years and they realize, “I don’t need my newspaper anymore. I get all the news on the Web for free. I get all the local news for free. There’s plenty of international and national coverage. It doesn’t get ink on my fingers and pile up in the recycle bin.” So I think editors have to seriously consider that possibility. We all want to do great journalism. What is going to enable us to continue to do great journalism? And that’s going to be figuring out how to build audience and build revenue off the Web.
C.C.: Every day there seems to be a new tool or feed search or something that gets introduced that creates a buzz that people are looking to incorporate into what they’re doing. What kind of things are you getting excited about right now that you’d like to learn more about or implement in your operation?
H.O.: There’s a couple of things. Comments excite me terribly, comments in the story. There’s a great opportunity for us there to build the new buzz word “social networking.” I think we can use that as an entry point into that that’s organic.
But looking long-range at what I think is important is not thinking of just as a text-delivery news operation. We’ve already started getting into multimedia. We’ve experimented with podcasting. We’re already shooting a lot of video. We’ve made a strong investment there. We have reporters who shoot video. We need to do more of that. We need to look at – how are we going to get that video onto video camera phones? How are we going to get that video into people homes when they start employing devices that allow them to watch IP video on their television screen. To me, that’s where there’s a lot of potential for revenue and for diversifying how we deliver content.
I think the important thing to be looking at is not the content but at how people want their news. And the future of news isn’t centered around any one platform. It is the ability of people to pick and choose the platform that best suits their needs at any particular moment, whether that be video or cell phone or the Web or whatever devices come along.
VIDEO: Neil Chase is settling in to his new role as deputy editor for news at nytimes.com, and he's very excited. He talks about the newly announced offering, New York Times Select, about bringing his experience from CBS MarketWatch to the Times, and on using the site to avoid incidents like the Jayson Blair fiasco.
TRANSCRIPT: Neil Chase, interviewed by Chad Capellman
NC: I’m Neil Chase. I’m the Deputy Editor for News at the New York Times on the Web. A couple of months ago I moved there from CBS MarketWatch where I was the Managing Editor. And at MarketWatch and at the Times, I’ve done a lot of work with the Media Center, followed the Media Center from its start-up and hosted a lot of Media Center sessions at MarketWatch. So it’s always fun to be here.
CC: The transition you made from MarketWatch, which had grown kind of on its own to some degree and not had a lot of the baggage, for lack of a better term, of some other entities, like the one you’re at now – how do you think that helps you get them where they want to be?
NC: MarketWatch was a pure start-up. A bunch of experienced journalists but starting up with very little editorial content from anywhere else, doing our own reporting, creating our own content. You come to the New York Times and there’s a lot of great reporting to work with. So it’s a very different challenge, but it’s a lot of fun to be at a place where there are 1,200 journalists in the newsroom doing this incredible work. The biggest frustration is that we can’t do more with so many more of the good stories because there are only so many hours in the day.
CC: You’ve got a lot of people here who are making a business of just taking everything that’s out there and making it sort of their own.
NC: The aggregators?
CC: The aggregators. And you’re in an organization that is as definitive as you can get from one organization in terms of the content that’s generated from that. What’s your perspective on how this all plays out and where we’re going to go from here.
NC: Well, one of the fascinating things here is being able to see the different players in this – not just the journalists who are collecting the content but the portals, the aggregators, the people who are getting the content and distributing it. There are a lot more ways to get our content out there these days. A lot more people can see it in a lot more different formats. We think we – professional journalists – will maybe always be the best ones to deliver that content, to create that content, to report that content, but the more ways to get it out there, the better. It’s just a question of learning those ways, understanding them, and making the most out of them, and maybe to a certain extent changing the way we do some of the reporting and production to match those ways it’s distributed.
CC: How do you see the evolution of the New York Times’ Web site in the next few years playing out?
NC: Ooh, good question. Being new at the Times, I see so much possibility, so many things we could do, so many things we are doing well, so many more things we could do. And it’s going to be a process of figuring out what’s next. The Times just announced their paid product, Time Select, starts in September, so one of the big focuses right now is gearing up for that, getting everything ready, making sure that when that launches it’s something that lives up to the title, Times Select, that it’s the best content. And people are going to be excited about getting it for the wonderfully low price of $49.95 a year. There’s a lot of work to be put in for that. We’re looking at design changes on the site. We’re constantly looking at ways to increase the reporters’ ability to work directly with us, to increase our producers’ ability to gather news in different ways.
CC: In light of the Jayson Blair upheaval and everything that came about with that, has there been any talk about using the site as a better tool to kind of help exchange with the readers and prevent those stories from getting out of hand the way they did?
NC: The couple of panels that have studied credibility issues at the Times in the past couple of years have both included in their recommendations ways the Web site can participate. And the most recent one announced a few weeks ago included suggestions that there be more interaction with reporters, more, if you will, transparency to the news gathering process, more ways to get reporters involved in either discussions with or answering feedback from or in some way relating more closely to the readers. And the Web site is the place that can happen. It’s an exciting place to be during all this, because the desire, not just at the Web site but throughout the news organization, to be a little more transparent, to be more accessible, to get the reporters, the editors, the journalists involved more with the readers – that all focuses around the Web site, so it’s going to be a lot of fun.
VIDEO: Kathryn Hamilton, network manager for NewsCorp's News Interactive, talks about evangalizing to the company's many newspaper holdings, about lessons learned from her company's tsunami coverage, and on her company's attempts to break down some of the silos that house their operations in different countries.
TRANSCRIPT: Kathryn Hamilton interviewed by Chad Capellman
KH: My name’s Kath Hamilton, and I work for News Corporation’s online division in Australia called News Interactive. News Interactive runs the online products for well over 100 newspapers in Australia, and we have classified products as well, and FOXSports. And within our news product we have categories for lift-outs such as Travel and Body and Soul, which is our lifestyle sort of product. So my role is basically to bring those offline brands, traditional brands, into online. I spend a bit of my time evangelizing around the country with some of these editors and trying to explain what we’re trying to do with online. They see online obviously as a threat, particularly to their revenues. And about creating new audiences and building a relationship with those audiences online by extending the traditional products into new digital mediums including mobiles and anything else that comes along.
CC: How hard has that evangelizing been?
KH: The evangelizing’s not hard. I’ve only been there a year, so I think there’s a lot of hard work that went in before I arrived that sort of met on pretty deaf ears, but I think there’s been a certain looking forward and understanding particularly because of the revenues that are being lost globally and that are coming online globally, that there’s starting to be some recognition. I suppose the challenge has been promoting online more as a complementary product rather than as stealing audiences. So, News Interactive’s charter is very much to defend and extend. So defend current revenues, and that’s predominantly classified revenues, and we have some really strong classified products online. And to extend particularly our news and media products online by providing complementary content, and that’s what we haven’t been so great on to date.
CC: You work for a company that’s got its hands in a lot of ventures around the world. What types of things have you maybe looked to other countries that they’re involved in that you’ve brought into where you’re at, and how has that played a role in what you do?
KH: Traditionally, we’ve been a really silo-based company. I think we have a lot of people in News Interactive that have worked in your Yahoos, or your MSN companies, and they say it’s the same worldwide, and AOL, that’s very solo-based in terms of countries. So there hasn’t been much of an effort, to be honest, to look to other countries internally within News Corporation to see what’s being done, and I think that’s starting to change. I know that there’s a directive, particularly after Rupert Murdoch’s speech in April now. He’s actually announced that online is really important, and I know that there are moves to create an international task force to leverage some of those great assets. So it’s a really exciting time, I think.
CC: One of the challenges in this country in terms of mobile is just the size of it and the reach. You’ve got some very sparse areas in your country. How do you deal with that? Has that been an issue, or have you worked around it?
KH: Yes, that’s an issue for our telco’s, and I certainly have responded with technologies such as CDMA and some other technologies that don’t work so well in the cities. But penetration in terms of phone usage – what I’ve been actually touting while I’ve been in the U.S. so far is that while we’re a small country, our mobile penetration is 80%, and half of that is GPRS-enabled. So that means we’ve got about eight million people that are on phones that have pretty high dialer transferability, so in terms of watching video on phone or downloading Web pages and that sort of activity, we actually have a great opportunity in Australia. I think here it’s about one million people have mobile phones that have video on them, so we’re at a slight advantage in those terms because we’ve got the latest mobile devices in Australia, much more so than America. So while we’re behind certainly in broadband in Australia, I think we’re a bit ahead in mobile. But I know that you’ll certainly increase at a much more rapid pace, particularly because of your volume of your market.
CC: The tsunami was a lot closer to your market than it was to people in this part of the world. Were there lessons that you learned from dealing with such an enormous story?
Yes, traffic. Really putting us under a lot of pressure in terms of how many people there were. So, making our servers more robust. Certainly that was the case. I was actually in America during that period. Usually that’s a quiet time for us -- that’s our summer – so we didn’t have as many journalists on, so we had to get them all in and really follow that story day to day. We didn’t have a lot of video capability at that time, so I think that was a really terrific missed opportunity for us. Didn’t have a lot of multimedia templates either, so it was just your standard reporting. We didn’t really extend it too far into any of the capabilities that we could have, but we still had fantastic text and image coverage, and certainly galleries. One of our great products is on our home page we have an in-page photo gallery that you might have seen on the New York Times in certain sections. We’ve got it on our home page for our lead image, so that was really powerful.
... "Holy crap, " as my wife said in an IM to me. I mention Pac-Man turning the corner and heading ever closer to the big 30 because I think it's a good reminder that nearly everyone graduating this spring (from high school AND college) never knew a world without the hungry yellow circle. A good thing to keep in mind as media companies weigh what innovations to embrace as they try to steer clear of the ghosts that loom around every turn.
I'm one of the many who have been caught up in Washington Nationals fever. I'm proud to say that I bought my gear all the way back in December of 2004, and even have the speeding ticket I got on the way to RFK Stadium as proof.
So this morning I'm reading a story on page A1 of The Washington Post "Beguiled by the Boys of Summer" that talks about the Nats' improbable 10-game winning streak and how the team now departs for the West coast with its hometown fans falling head over heels after decades without baseball in D.C.
"But, for the next 10 days, that won't be so easy. The next three games, in California against the Anaheim Angels, start at 10:05 p.m. Eastern time, too late to make most editions of the morning papers.
"What about television? Tonight's and tomorrow's games are available only to fans with DirecTV service. Wednesday's game gets a nationwide bump from ESPN2. And radio? Many local fans have complained that the signals from the Nationals' local stations are too weak to receive clearly.
"If you can't watch the games, can't listen to the games and can't read about the games, can this relationship survive? Fans are hopeful the inevitable sale of the team -- which is owned by Major League Baseball -- will improve the situation. But that doesn't help in the heat of the present enchantment."
Did I mention I was reading this story online?
I bring this up because Dave Sheinin neglects to even acknowledge the possibility of following a team online, even though there's one source, MLB.com which enables fans to follow their favorite team in ALL THREE ways he mentions ... plus a pitch-by-pitch java applet that’s great for following the action in close to real time and a condensed game video option that's perfect for catching up while you are getting ready for work the next morning. Did I mention MLB.com even has a beat writer assigned to the Nationals?
The point that I'm making is that, just as you never know on which page a first-time visitor will encounter your Web site, you never know how they will first interpret your organization's attitude toward the Internet.
This is not to say that Dave Sheinin is by any stretch of the imagination a bad reporter. Quite the opposite. He scooped the world on Cal Ripken Jr.'s retirement plans, for just one example.
But pretending the Internet isn't a viable media outlet for the purposes of making a premise work, feels like getting picked off at second base: One second you're halfway home, the next, you’re heading to the dugout and the fans (or readers) are left shaking their heads and wondering what happened.
So I've been hanging out with my new bestest friend, Zach Braff, all week. Man, what a funny guy. Well, ok, it's only been online. And ok, full disclosure, he has no idea who I am. But I certainly have gotten to know him in ways that just a few years ago would have been impossible for a working stiff like me.
I recently rented the film Braff wrote, directed and starred in, 'Garden State'. This is now easily one of my favorite movies ever, and in my opinion could be considered 'The Graduate' of my generation.
An aside on this point lest you think I'm pulling this analogy out of ... somewhere:
Anyway, back to Mr. Braff. Between being able to watch the extra scenes, outtakes, making of the film, and commentary versions of the film, and then reading the Webby Award-winning Garden State blog , and stumbling upon a July 2004 online chat with Braff on Washingtonpost.com, I really feel like I know more about some parts of his life in a way that is genuine, honest, and (not-entirely) self-serving to the subject.
I think this has a lot to do with the non-stop ascension of celebrity coverage that so many people are lamenting. There's a reason people seem to be eating it up more and more each day. Because they can. The more you know about anyone, the more real they appear. Even Syrian-based Iraq insurgency organizers like Abu Ibrahim don't seem so distant when you're taken into their world.
This is what happens when much of the world is available virtually. It's sometimes hard to tell what's real, what's true, and what only has enough truth to seem real.
(From Garden State, courtesy of IMDB)
Andrew Largeman: Do you lie a lot?
Sam: What do you consider a lot?
Andrew Largeman: Enough for people to call you a liar.
Sam: People call me lots of things...
Andrew Largeman: Is one of them liar?
Sam: I could say no, but how would you know I'm not lying?
Andrew Largeman: I guess I could choose to trust you.
Sam: You can do that?
Andrew Largeman: I can try.
Of course, I don't really think I KNOW Zach Braff as well as I know, say, my best friend from high school. I would NEVER make false assumptions about someone I read about online.
Well, except this one time.
A few weeks ago, all my wife wanted for her birthday was to stay at the very ritzy Marriott Renaissance hotel that the Red Sox were staying in during their visit to Baltimore to play the Orioles. Everyone chipped in to make this a reality.
How cool was this? Only people with room keys could even enter the LOBBY to keep people like me away from the World Champion Red Sox -- er, rock stars. And this meant the hotel bar was filled with players and a few fans who were fortunate enough to stay in the hotel.
We eventually see backup first baseman Dave McCarty, a former Stanford University student who had been featured on a blog called Empyreal Environs
What stood out about McCarty's posts was how intelligent they sounded and how it played into my deep desire to find truly intelligent athletes who were worth hearing from, along the lines of former NBA player John Amaechi.
The most notable of these posts delves into a supposed man-crush Red Sox Manager Terry Francona has on relief pitcher Mike Myers.
"In trying to understand Terry Francona's almost obsessive attachment to Mike Myers, I sought answers in the realm of neurochemistry. Why is the already feeble human brain, continually wrought with counter-productive emotions such as guilt and self-doubt, subject further to the unpredictable neurochemical chicanery of love? This is the question Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, delves into throughout her research. Fisher defines three stages of love and the associated chemicals that drive the impulses underlying those phases."
So I'm at the bar and introduce myself to McCarty, and ask him what stage of the relationship he thinks Francona is in with Myers.
"What are you talking about?" the 6-foot-5, 215-pound veteran McCarty asks, with a mixture of incredulity and bemusement.
After realizing that no fist was about to come flying at my face because of the question, I explain that I saw this on what I thought was a blog post he made.
Why do I feel comfortable sharing this with the rest of the world? Because McCarty told me I wasn't the first person to ask him about this. Who was the person who beat me to the question (and probably saved me from getting my butt kicked)?
A reporter.
While I know I should have looked closer and realized the mistake I was making, I let my desire for the post to be true override my better judgment. This too is a great lesson of this age we live in.
We all have enough material around us to make our own individual realities. Getting to that point was relatively easy.
Figuring out how to maintain a middle ground and establish some semblance of truth, to me, seems like the next frontier.
At least I know what I'll be watching on the in-flight movie.
ESPN.com's Tim Keown takes the media to task for the hype surrounding the upcoming Mike Tyson fight, though he never calls anyone out individually, instead writing "I must have seen 25 different media reports – print and broadcast – in the last few days, and every one of them mentions the same reason for the disproportionate coverage of an overdone fighter's final gasps: Tyson's inexplicable hold on the public."
He goes on to explain that the only people still carrying an interest in Tyson are in the media.
"The media cares, though, and cares deeply, because you never know when his sad self-loathing might cause him to do something provocative or inhuman or criminal. We want to be there when he does, so we continue to cover him and his fights while hiding behind the idea of 'public fascination.'
While I would have preferred him to at least take a couple individual outlets to task for what they actually say, I do agree with his premise.
When stories like Mike Tyson's latest attempt at a comeback or the "runaway bride" hijack media coverage for days and weeks when minutes would more than suffice, it leaves an impression on those who are saying in larger and larger numbers how much contempt they have for "the media."
As anyone in a long-term relationship will tell you, building and maintaing trust takes a long time, but undoing that trust can take just a few minutes.
I've been thinking of some of the most trusted media brands I now welcome into my world: TiVo, DirecTV, XM Radio, Google, Craigslist, New England Sports Network (You can't beat the Rem Dog), WashingtonPost.com (Disclosure, I used to work there, but I'm sure the addiction would have been there anyway.) One thing I feel they have in common is that they all do a great job of not shoving something I am completely sick of hearing down my throat. (That's where Jerry Remy distinguishes himself from Fox Sports' Tim McCarver, but I have enough venom on that topic for another entire post.)
The point is, what these outlets and services and Web sites DON'T do can be as important to me as what they DO do. And brands that don't recognize this are, well, doodoo.