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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.