“I am a big believer in television journalism–its power for telling stories and raising issues that should engage younger audiences who are my peers,” he said recently. “But I just didn’t see younger people tuning into network television news.”

He did see that generation flocking to online news and shifted to the Web with them. Since October 2006, he has been a senior producer at ABC News Digital where he says he has an opportunity to test how the power of television can translate onto the Web. Samuels spoke to OJR recently about sending out stringers with DV cameras to cover world news and how the webcast might be a precursor to the television newscast of the future.

OJR: Tell me about the webcast you produce for ABCNews.com? How different is it from the evening newscast?

Samuels: It started before I came here but they basically wanted a way to have some news before 6 o’clock available to those who were online. So correspondents who were working for the 6:30 broadcast would file pieces for the webcast at 3 o’clock so that people could click on them and watch them during the day from their office or before they left to go home.

But over time it’s evolved to where it has a distinct attitude, and it’s not shy about targeting a different group of viewers who may not be watching the network news. There is a different focus, a different DNA to the show. We kind of loosen the tie a little bit, if you will.

We do stories that may be appeal more to Generation X and Generation Y than stories that are directly trying to appeal to Baby Boomers and [their] parents. As a person in charge of it, it’s my job to kind of select stories that I think appeal to a younger generation.

We really have no rules to the show. We can try things that are very different. The mandate is to try to be different and try and engage the viewers who are not right now watching the evening news broadcast.

People believe that younger audiences get their news from the Daily Show. It’s a very smart show, but it’s produced by people who work for Comedy Central–not by traditional journalists. We have tried to create a webcast with content that appeals to people who are looking for news but are not really that engaged with what the traditional shows are offering.

OJR: Could you give me one example where the storytelling underscores how different it is from the 6:30 broadcast?

Samuels: Sure, I’ll first go over just the nuts and bolts. It’s essentially a 15-minute, commercial-free show every day that we tape live with Charles Gibson as the anchor. The first two and half minutes are the meat-and-potato headlines–the traditional network news fare. The rest of the show has pieces that can be on the news of the day but they can also be like features.

As an example, though, correspondents usually go out to cover stories; they write a script, edit it and put it together for the broadcast. But I tell them to just shoot a video blog. So in today’s show, Miguel Marquez in Los Angeles was assigned to do a story for the broadcast about the new line of Bible-themed action figures that are going to be sold in Wal-Mart. So when you watch the broadcast tonight it’s going to be a traditional, well-crafted 1:30 to 2-minute piece. What we asked him to do is that when you are at Wal-Mart and you are reporting your piece for the broadcast, just stand there, hold up these action figures and just tell us about them. Don’t script anything perfectly just give us your own impression and your sense of what is the story. Miguel filed a video blog piece that is about a minute long for our webcast. It’s a little less formal, it’s a little more raw and I would argue in some ways it is a little more real.

It is less polished but I think younger people are willing to accept that and almost prefer that instead of showing what’s packaged so perfectly.

Now if there is a piece for the broadcast that we are interested in, we will put that on our webcast as well. For example there is a piece for broadcast tonight about a woman who has homeless kids taking photos of what they wish to aspire to. And it’s a wonderful piece that should be interesting no matter how old you are. We’ve put that into our webcast.

Another example. We did an interview for the webcast exclusively with Christopher Hitchens, on his book, “God is Not Great.” We sat him down in front of a camera and we had him basically talk about the themes in his books and we edited that down into an essay. That would never go on the evening news shows but for us it worked. It’s provocative and it’s different.

OJR: You’re also lucky that you can use any portion of the massive amounts of content produced for ABC News on your webcasts. How much of what is produced specifically for the webcast is constrained by budget issues?

Samuels: Sure, a bit of being different is also for budget reasons. We don’t have the broadcast news staff; we don’t have the broadcast news budget. So we have to do things a little bit differently but I think effectively as well.

OJR: How are you as a broadcast-based news organization using interactivity on the Web?

Samuels: Now if you go to our website ABCNews.com, you can comment in real-time on the broadcast.

I’ve only been here for four months but I am trying to slowly bring more interactivity into the fold. One thing we would like to do is have people watch the show, react to the show, and then the next day feature their reactions. This would mean that viewers could literally sit in front of their webcams, tell us what they thought and we will put it on our webcasts.

The Christopher Hitchens’ piece is a perfect example. We asked our viewers to send reactions and comments in video about his provocative essay. Going forward, I want to do more of that.

I am also trying to develop a way for people to send us their story ideas for the webcast. If you think there is a story in your town or city that you think should be on the webcast, send us info and we will try to assign someone to do the story.

Those are two ways that I hope would make us more interactive soon.

OJR: News organizations have always controlled distribution of their content. The Web is changing that with RSS feeds, Google News and other ways of news personalization. What is ABCNews.com doing in that direction to share its content more broadly?

Samuels: The webcast is available on iTunes. When it’s posted on iTunes, I believe we are one of the few video broadcasts that have chapters. So when you are watching the webcast on iTunes, you can fast forward through the segment if you are not interested.

In June, we had over 5 million people download the webcast from iTunes and ABCNews.com.

I should mention is obviously every segment that we do for the webcast lives as an individual piece, if you will, on ABCNews.com. So the webcast exists as a show but it also exists as a way to manufacture very interesting short news segments for ABCNews.com.

OJR: Disney’s ABC and Apple’s iTunes have obvious connection through Steve Jobs and Pixar. But there is also this realization that you need to be on as many platforms as possible. Are your shows available on places like YouTube as well?

Samuels: This is a little bit beyond my pay grade but I think that ABC News is not letting people post our content everywhere else, including YouTube. Their philosophy is we want to drive people to our websites and we want the clicks on our websites. That’s an internal discussion that’s going on and I think a lot of media companies are trying to figure out how much do you let float out there and how much do you keep behind your walls.

OJR: How do the reporters and producers react to all of a sudden having more work to cut an earlier segment with the pressure of meeting the 6:30 deadline?

Samuels: I think that initially they probably thought it was pain in the neck but I think that they understand that this is the future.

The downloads of our show is increasing. Whereas if you look at other forms of news content–whether it’s newspapers, or evening newscasts, or news magazines, or nightly news shows–they are decreasing. With that in mind, I think they realize this is something they have to do.

We also try to have them do something a little different. They don’t have to give us the same thing that they doing for the broadcast. We want a video blog with a behind the scenes look at something.

Also, I am already using stringers around the world for content. Before the advent of small DV cameras and laptop editing, these stringers were only used when there was a huge catastrophe. Today I can call the stringers who have DV cameras and laptops for editing, can they can do a story about anything and send it to me over FTP and we can put it on the webcast.

For example, the recent stand off in Islamabad, in Pakistan, an ABC News person in Islamabad that filed for the web cast virtually everyday. He would shoot it and send it to us with his own DV camera and it was wonderful stuff. As we go forward, my plan is to have people all over the world filing for us–stuff that would never get on the evening broadcasts because they have a more serious structure to them. But we can post video blogs from people in Cuba, in China, in Islamabad, in Africa, in Australia, in France… everywhere. Because the technology allows that and I don’t need the polished or experienced correspondent. These are usually younger people. I love to have that kind of energy and that raw look at the news from around the world. Technology makes it possible.

I can’t predict the future but I know that ABC News is making a commitment and an investment to position young people with DV cameras around the world in Africa, in India, in places where they ordinarily would not be able to afford to put a crew and a cameraman and a producer. Now you can put a 20-year-old graduate student with a DV camera and a laptop in far away places and they can send you things through the Internet and you can put them on the air. I plan to have my show take full advantage of that in New York.

OJR: How do you respond to critics who say this is nothing but an attempt to cut expenses by using inexperienced and therefore cheaper labor because the technology allows it?

Samuels: I absolutely understand that argument. If I am an editor who has worked 30 years in my craft and some young kid out of graduate school and edits these pieces, what does that say for the value of my skills? I would say there is room for both, but I think if you are an editor or a cameraman that’s been in network news for a long time, you might have to adapt instead of shooting with your beta camera take a DV camera out and shoot with it. If you are an editor that’s used to working with a big beta system, use your skills to edit on a laptop. I don’t think the skills are no longer needed I just think that the tools are changing.

At the same time, what we do everyday with a smaller staff as we do is pretty remarkable. So I think there is something to the notion of less people doing more.

There are also more outlets for work in terms of work that’s different and that’s exciting.

OJR: As the generation that’s used to the structured evening news format gets older and older and continues to shrink, are we going to start seeing some of these webcast techniques making their way into the evening news?

Samuels: I think it will over time. When you have a 20-year-old stringer in Islamabad doing your report it’s not going to look like Brian Williams. I am of the mind that younger people are more able to appreciate a raw unpolished news pieces. They are used to homemade videos on YouTube. YouTube is big because it’s not the polished sitcom stuff that’s on the network. It’s raw, it’s shaky video, it’s … its real, it’s gritty and I think that appeals to younger viewers.

When I took the job, I asked myself whether the anchor, Charlie Gibson, was the right man for the job for the younger audience? I have been so pleased with how he embraces the show. He values the show and he gets what we are trying to do. We don’t have him be anything other than what he is which is a very intelligent, passionate. He is not trying to pretend like he is young and hip. But the content of the show is different and he embraces that.

There are plenty of days where he will see something on the webcast and he will put it on the newscast. That has happened more than once.

I think in many ways we are almost a breeding ground, an experiment, if you will, to see what might work going forward for the news division.

Given the AP’s proven formula for writing breaking news articles, I spoke to Anthony about how this over 150-year-old news cooperative’s youngest division is tackling multimedia storytelling, how the asap has changed over the past two years, and what skills multimedia journalists need in the AP universe.

OJR: What were some of the initial goals of asap when it was launched and how have those goals evolved?

Anthony: We started the service in response to AP members who told us repeatedly they needed some help attracting and retaining the 18-to-34 year-old audience. But what we learned quickly along the way was that it was much more about how media was being consumed, than it was about the subject matter chosen for 18 to 34-year-olds. We found it very much transcended that age group. We have people as old as in their eighties who have said that they consume media in the ways that the online world has become accustomed to.

So reaching a younger audience was the dominant narrative, but by the same token we very much wanted to fundamentally reconceive storytelling at the AP. In some ways we wanted to get away from the assumption that a story would be text and photos. We implemented what we call the multimedia litmus test that would ask at the beginning of the story process, how should the story be told?

We also recognized that the AP is this rich tapestry of people from around the world, who know different things and who have different sets of experiences in different areas of expertise. So another goal was that we wanted to bring them into the mix, in ways that perhaps they hadn’t been brought in before. Their main product had always been the stories that they wrote, the photographs that they took and then applied in ways that were time-tested. But we wanted to see what we could do in bringing out those talents in different forms.

So asap has evolved into what we call a premium multimedia service of The Associated Press. The asap entertainment editor calls it a multimedia imprint of AP and an alternative storytelling lab.

OJR: How alternative can asap’s storytelling be given its clients—the traditional newspaper industry?

Anthony: Well, I recognize that when we talk about alt-storytelling in the newspaper industry, we are a little less alt then perhaps the mainstream of the Internet has become. But it’s the place where we need to be pushing towards—we recognize that. The way we are experimenting with storytelling is very much the mainstream in some online communities.

OJR: How is it different reporting and putting together a multimedia piece?

Anthony: I’m the child of linguists and the printed word is very near and dear to me. But when I started pushing into this stuff, I realized that the fundamental building blocks of storytelling really do cross platforms–and I know that’s a very trendy way to put it these days, but it is very true. We perceive stories in certain ways. We recognize that a story moves through time. We recognize that a story has characters, settings. We recognize that a story has resolution. All of those things that we apply to storytelling, whether it’s non-fiction or fiction, those things all play very much into multimedia.

OJR: Can you please give me an example?

Anthony: This may sound too lit-crypt, but for years when I was a national correspondent, I used first a film camera than a digital camera to take notes on stories. These weren’t photos for publication. I used them essentially to supplement my written notes to make sure, say, that if I was going looking for a missing plane on a mountain in New Hampshire, I could come back and write that the grass that crunched under my feet was green or that the bark was peeling off the trees. Things that I might not have noticed during the time that I was there but that I can have at my fingertips. I recognize that those were as much a components of my storytelling as my notes were. That’s a very basic and fundamental thing, but it’s not necessarily something that we would think of.

I have always believed that the visual specialists in the newsroom are as pivotal and as insightful if not more so than the word specialists. Once I started realizing that there was such a deep relationship between the two, and then I realized that we had to be able to control the tools that we use. That’s what we’ve tried to teach here. We’re bringing people together who are versed in different storytelling techniques and having them playing common ground. The common ground is the storytelling essentials. Once you get that down, the story can be told in a Flash presentation or an audio slideshow with photos, or just an audio podcast.

If we are able to see a story as a story rather than a chunk of text or a series of photographs, then we’re going to be able to tell that story in all different realms. One of the things that I have always wanted to do–but we never really had the resources– is to send four reporters with different specialties out to cover the exact same story and see what they come back with. I think that will be an interesting exercise, but to some extent that’s the mentality that we’ve tried to spread here.

OJR: News organizations have traditionally done the reporting to tell the story. Now more are trying to tap into their readers’ interest in telling their own stories. How is asap incorporating that form of storytelling?

Anthony: Let me come in through the back door on that answer. As a B2B (business-to-business) model, it is more difficult to reach out to users online because the online relationship is predicated on the fact that there is some kind of interaction between content provider and content receiver. A B2B model makes that a little bit more difficult, because it puts in a middle man, i.e. the AP’s member newspaper or the client, who we are providing content to. So we’ve looked for ways editorially to essentially make that connection without blatantly reaching around the people who we’re serving.

One of those things we’re doing is called “Assignment: You” in which for the last several weeks, we’ve solicited story ideas from people and said that you can assign an AP reporter a story. What have you always wanted to see a story done on, but you think the mainstream media will never do? We will assign a reporter and put the resources of asap and the larger AP behind it. We’ve had a great response.

Another thing we’ve done is something called “My World” in which we hand over a camera to someone who is in a middle of a major news event and have them shoot their lives for a day. Then they give the camera back to us and we produce the piece. One of the pieces we got out of that was pretty staggering in its impact but also caused some controversy. We gave cameras to two Iraqi children and one of them came back with the picture of his friends playing execution. That was a really dramatic photo that emulated the videos that you saw from al-Zarqawi for such a long time.

We certainly got negative feedback, but we also got feedback of how this felt like it was really authentic and that’s something I know that is tough to achieve when you are trying to develop relationship with your users.

OJR: Are your member news organizations seeing the kinds of results they were hoping for through asap? Are they drawing in younger readers who are actively participating on their sites?

Anthony: The active participation part, I can’t really speak to. I know that our renewal rate after the pilot project was roughly 70 percent, which I think was a little higher than expected. But that stuff is more business side stuff so I’m less confident speaking about it.

I will say that the feedback that we’ve received suggests that the more innovative we are with our storytelling, the better the results. Earlier on, we sometimes took safer routes because we were a still a bit unsure of our footing.

OJR: Can you give me an example of something that drew participation or feedback?

Anthony: What’s a good example? We did a Flash interactive on how to buy a man’s hat for our lifestyle section. It involved about six different pieces of video, with a hatter talking about different kinds of hats, how to buy them, what type of shop and that got really, really good feedback. That’s not something we would have thought about doing early on. It wasn’t a story in the sense that we traditionally view stories but yet it resonated with a lot of people, because it seemed to represent our willingness to tell something in a very alternative way.

I think that we have been surprised at how far we can go—in terms of telling stories in different ways and not how far we can go in being “edgy” or “provocative.”

OJR: The AP has of course perfected wire service format–getting daily news stories out quickly, accurately and fairly across the wires to member news organizations. How do you assure that those same standards transfer to asap when there is much more technical production work involved that may slow the posting process?

Anthony: We’re pretty relentless about hammering home daily that this may be a new department but this is the AP and certain things can’t be compromised. We’re in new frontiers but we have regular and sometimes very lively discussions about ethics and standards and how they apply online. When it comes to those kinds of questions we try to err on the side of traditionalism. One of the hugest things that AP brings to the table and through it to asap are the AP standards—readers know that they are seeing something that’s accurate and that’s real. We do not try to match word for word or image for image the AP’s covered spot events. We recognized earlier on that we should not compete with 3,000 colleagues in terms of bringing back the news. So we’ve looked for alternative ways into the news. We’re not designed to be a breaking news service. We’re designed to be a very timely, a very fresh and a very newsy online magazine.

So we aren’t cranking out news, but that said we have had reporters at every major news event in the last couple of years. We had two go to Virginia Tech two months ago so we definitely stand on top of the news. I think it is certainly harder because there are no neat answers that come from decades of literature that we learn in our journalistic ethics classes. But we adhere to the AP’s baselines and AP’s ethics statement. It has not skewed us wrong yet.

OJR: Can you give me an example a decision you have had to make?

Anthony: Hmmm…we had a story when Betty Friedan died on how she was the original “Desperate Housewife.” We decided we were going to do a photo illustration of Betty Friedan with the Desperate Housewives. This is something that magazines and even The New York Times now do all the time. These photo illustrations that tell something iconically. We had what must have been an hour-long talk here about whether we wanted to do this and if so, how we wanted to do this. And what we did was to have a picture that had Betty Friedan in black and white, amongst the Desperate Housewives and their very deep colors. We wanted anybody looking at that to be absolutely sure that there was a wink-and-a-nudge in there.

It certainly is a challenge. You have to have continual conversations about this stuff and you have to foster an environment of conversation in which somebody who brings something like this up, doesn’t feel like they are being a nattering nabob. As long as we are designed to be this forward guard of multimedia, we are going to do it within the ethical and journalistic boundaries that the AP is still espousing after all these years.

OJR: Can you tell me about the qualities you are seeking in journalists to tell stories in alternative ways?

Anthony: We hired 27 journalists by the time we were done hiring. We went in with the thought that we would hire about 70 percent from outside the AP and about 30 percent from inside the AP because we wanted something really dramatically fresh. But as we got to the hiring we realized that virtually the opposite was true. We ended up hiring about 40 percent from outside and about 60 percent from the AP, because we recognized that if we really wanted to try these new things and do them with “oomph” and do them with credibility, that we would need some real AP experience embedded in there.

We were looking for people who were flexible in their storytelling–and by that I mean people who wouldn’t say, we don’t do things that way. Too many news organizations in today’s world are populated with many people who say, we don’t do things that way. Those people are not going to be doing things at all if they keep up that attitude. We have to be willing to acknowledge that there is a certain core group of values and skills that we have, but that beyond that we are in this brave new world and we have to be able to think critically about how a story should be told and whether a story will resonate, will echo if it’s told in the best way.

I really was aiming to hire people who are willing to say, “okay, we will not be bound by convention.”

Allison’s touch seems just as potent on the Internet. In 2001, he helped launch two Websites, Transom.org and the Public Radio Exchange that encourage citizen involvement in public radio. “I would like to see public radio become more invitational,” he says, “and the Web is the way to issue that invitation.”

Allison spoke to OJR about the future of public radio on the Internet; about what makes powerful Internet audio; and how he hopes the Internet will help bring new voices to public radio.

OJR: What the original goal was for starting Transom.org and how that goal has evolved since that time?

Allison: When we started it, it was kind of cutting edge and now it’s sort of old fashioned. It’s hard to keep up with the changes in literacy and expectation and community tools and all those kinds of things.

But in the beginning it was simply an effort to give out the tools and ideas that people might want to be able to tell their own stories on public radio. I’m a lifer in public radio and I’ve always had the notion that public radio could be a little bit more like the way the Internet has turned out to be–namely that the users are also the content providers.

When we started Transom there was no real repository of either the practical tools to make programming or the sort of philosophy and mission behind the origins of public broadcasting. My interest is in getting more voices involved and from communities we may not be hearing from and from demographics we may not be hearing and ages we may not be hearing from. The Internet presented itself as a chance to build a library of that kind of thing and keep that library current.

OJR: How is Internet audio different from public radio pieces?

Allison: I don’t think it is all that different but I think the point is that in public radio it would behoove us to admit a greater range of style. I think one of public radio’s weaknesses is a sameness of style and an expectation of a certain kind of presentation and a certain attitude and sensibility. While it is important to be able to rely on the credibility of the source and it’s comforting to know what you’re going to get, that can also be a weakness. It eliminates the element of surprise, which is one of the things that captures attention.

I think I’m more often surprised on the Internet than I am by public radio. At Transom we hope to embrace a greater range of style–we don’t impose an expectation of how someone should sound or how a story should be told.

Which means that some of the pieces we put on the site may not ever make it to public radio because they are too far out of an accepted existing style. Still it’s important to explore those boundaries and very important I think to talk about what makes the cut in public radio and what doesn’t, and, more importantly, why.

OJR: Is that line shifting, as to what will make the cut in public radio?

Allison: I think public radio is scrambling to figure out what its identity will be, and it should. Since public radio began, there have been so many changes. Its earliest incarnations were as an educational broadcasting system. Most of the early stations were University licensees. As they began to get into the news, it was far from the mainstream. I think it considered itself a kind of an alternative news source in the early mission statements, with language about giving voice to the voiceless, and shining light in the shadows. It suggested that our obligation was to look where others were not.

Then public radio became the radio source of record. It now is relied upon by many for their daily fix of news and information, and it’s no longer an alternative. The Internet has created greater public involvement and, in that framework, public radio needs to figure out what its role is.

OJR: What can it learn from what’s going on in the Internet in terms of audio and the ways of presenting the news?

Allison: I think it’s a lesson in humility, and that it’s important to recognize that if you are not delivering a tone and style and substance that people want, they now can find it elsewhere.

OJR: What I see now in terms of community citizen journalism is very text-driven. What role is Internet audio is playing in citizen journalism?

Allison: I tend to be more involved with citizen storytellers rather than citizen journalists. Journalism is an actual profession and does have a sense of ethics and boundaries and rules, which are appropriate. On the other hand each of us has stories to tell which don’t require a particular training other than making it a good story. I’ve always been a champion in all kinds of projects of trying to get people to realize that they can take advantage of the opportunity to get their stories and voices heard.

OJR: Is there more tolerance for different sound quality on the Internet?

Allison: I have a pretty great tolerance for a range of sound. The problem is if the sound interferes with your comprehension or hearing the heart in the voice, which is what’s important. If technical issues overwhelm our ability to hear the piece then it’s less effective.

OJR: And those are the rules that you still teach on Transom?

Allison: Yeah, simple stuff like: “mic close to your mouth” and “get the appropriate levels.”

OJR: Many citizen journalism sites tend to tend to cover a small community or a niche topic. That generates community involvement and debate. When I look through Transom there is just such a richness of topics from different places. Can you get the same kind of sense of community when the topics vary so widely?

Allison: When you are organized by theme or subject or special interest, you’ll get the zealots involved. Whereas at a site like Transom you are focusing more on the skill and practice and effectiveness of the story, and therefore the story can be about Possums or it can be about torture. And our goal is to get people to be able to communicate their story and truth, no matter what the subject. The community gathers around the practice of using the medium rather than a given topic area.

OJR: Transom still relies on the community to give you the stories?

Allison: Yeah, Transom spawned another site, Public Radio Exchange, which is built with the next generation of tools. Transom covers the how-to and the why of making and the Public Radio Exchange deals with the distribution of that content. It’s been a rather effective tool in getting people to the air on public radio stations around the country.

OJR: You talked about how there is often a formulaic expectation on public radio and now if a site that helps people get back on the air, maybe they are not going to be as experimental or creating new ways of telling story. Might Public Radio Exchange actually have the opposite effect of what you may want?

Allison: I think you’ll find a huge range at the Public Radio Exchange, everything from your “meat-and-potatoes” public broadcasting reports to lots of experimental and odd and interesting stuff. It really just depends on the taste of the public radio station as to whether they’ll take a chance in airing it.

OJR: Print news organizations now use audio, video and photographs to complement their print pieces on the Internet. Radio is posting the audio on the Internet along with photos and video. What does that do to the visceral connection one feels when listening to audio? When you bring in images, how does that change the audio storytelling?

Allison: Well, dramatically. Images are very powerful. I’ve worked in television, I used to shoot specials for Nightline and the image tends to rule the eye. So sometimes if you want your listener/viewer to simply pay attention to the story and you have an image present, the image can often work against you. It can work against your receiving that voice and letting it fully get inside you because the picture captures you in an instant.

We’re soon going to have a new feature on Transom with a guest talking about attaching images, slideshows and video to audio. They will discuss how to keep a program audio-driven when there are visual images. We will also feature two pieces. One about the last day of an old country store and one about a guy who was released off death row on DNA evidence. Both of them are slideshows but the narrative could stand alone as radio pieces.

Assignment Zero, the site’s first experiment in collaboration with Wired, is to cover the small but growing trend of crowdsourcing using crowdsourcing—that is having large groups of people spread across the world working together to report and write about the phenomenon of large groups of people working collaboratively from far flung areas to produce high quality work.

“We are trying to figure out whether you can do open platform journalism and whether there are advantages to it,” said Rosen, who emphasized that this is “just an initial test.”

Rosen spoke to OJR about how the Assignment Zero experiment is progressing and what he hopes to learn from the results.

OJR: Why this particular topic for Assignment Zero?

Rosen: We used the gift of particularity that an assignment like this with Wired gives us. We don’t have to ask ourselves what on earth should we investigate because we have to investigate something that’s of interest to Wired, and so the collaboration helped focus our first efforts and give some shape to our story.

It’s also an initial test that also helped us launch our site. Because it’s hard to think of what should be in your site if you want to do open source reporting. It’s very difficult to think of something in the abstract and try and build something that works for a practice that doesn’t exist yet. So instead of doing that we just built what we needed for this assignment.

OJR: What are the criteria for whether the final product is a success or a failure?

Rosen: And there’s a number of answers to that. The most important result is learning how to practice in this area. That’s all I am trying to do we are trying to learn how to practice in this area. Where you have the many reporting and a few editing, is there a way to do it? What do you need to be prepared for? How do you motivate people to contribute? What can volunteer users do? What do they have trouble doing? All these questions are open questions and so our first imperative is simply to learn a lot about that and to learn the lessons that can only be gotten through practice.

The other goal is the work of journalism at the end is exactly going to be lots of pieces of journalism that we can compare to other forms and we can compare to standard methods. So there will be a Wired.com cover story written by Jeff Howe, who is a Wired writer, that would draw on Assignment Zero and link downward to it and at the same time we will publish a editor’s cut or edited package of features and interviews and articles and close ups–recognizable forms of journalism that can be compared to peer products as it were. So these are all ways of judging what we are doing and I think it will be pretty easy for people to judge. I’m trying to kind of make it easy by doing something recognizable on the one hand but novel for journalism on the other.

OJR: The idea of how open source reporting might work is important given some of the problems that can crop up working in an open source environment. How do you plan to deal with these negative aspects as they come up?

Rosen: Here is the way I think of it. I said we are doing an open platform reporting. We are trying to capture some of the benefits of openness. What are they? Well it’s not a big mystery. It starts with what Dan Gillmor said – readers know more than I do.

So we picked a story where we think users know a lot more than we do because the spread of crowd sourcing and open collaboration is in fact a sprawling story. So we are trying to get the benefits of openness like that crowd is more diverse than we are and has more perspectives than we do. And when you try to gain the benefits of the openness you also know that there is a lot of cost, there is a lot of problems that come with openness. And so working in this area, is by definition trying to capture the benefits and solve the problems or reduce the costs and if a reporter comes along, as many have, and brings up one of those costs and says “what about this?”

Well the answer is almost always going to be the same it’s a problem we are working on that and the solution is going to be different in each case and most of them don’t have magical solutions. They have approximate solutions.

So if you can reduce the costs enough and you can get the benefits it may be worth doing. But I can’t even tell you right now that it is. I don’t know yet, we are trying to find that out. I don’t know that this is going to work. I think it’s the most important thing to mention in this interview. We don’t know yet what the potential is. A lot of people think that there could be potential and I am one of them but by practicing we will reveal some of the problems.

OJR: Based on the volunteers that you have gotten so far, what is it that is driving these people to, as you say, “commit acts of journalism for free?”

Rosen: We hope to have a better understanding of that at the end than we do now, but a lot of them are well aware of the citizen journalism discussion. They see themselves as participants in it. They want to be part of it. It’s sort of like the de-professionalisation of journalism appeals to them, but its not that they are terribly ideological about it. They are not. In some cases it’s somebody who took a few journalism courses in college and so it’s a road not taken but still of interest. Some of them are dissatisfied with the way professional journalism has been conducted. Some of them have an interest in this subject that we are investigating here, and a lot of them we don’t exactly know. We don’t know what they intend yet and we don’t know why they joined and this is not unusual in a project like this.

OJR: There is a certain amount of enthusiasm when things are novel that drives people to want to participate. How will you sustain that interest and enthusiasm from start to finish?

Rosen: Definitely, that’s a major challenge, preventing premature disillusionment. I wouldn’t say we totally succeeded at that and that we have seen that happen. Sustaining involvement is definitely a huge puzzle.

I consider that this participation the part of this work to be puzzles within puzzles. It’s all really fascinating and difficult to understand.

OJR: As a pilot project, everyone is watching Assignment Zero very closely. With the limited resources of independent journalists or small publishers, how might they implement aspects the Assignment Zero model?

Rosen: The whole point of NewAssignment.net is for people to take what we are doing and develop it. That’s why I founded this project. It’s supposed to give its results away, it is itself a part of the gift economy.

And my belief is that since this is simply a set of tools you let people practice in this area and they use these tools the way they want to, they will start inventing things, creating things, discovering things that others will be able to pick up very quickly. So I can write 10 blog posts about how open source journalism could work should work but if I can send people one URL where a smart editor is organizing a group of people they will get it like that.

OJR: There are also hurdles in journalism culture that make this a hard sell to some organizations and journalists even if you were to prove it a success.

Rosen: I could think of a zillion and one ways in which it would be a hard sell. And there are also hidden weaknesses and traps in it that I think will come out. Because there’s a ton of problems–and I can’t stress this enough–with an open approach to reporting.

That’s why everybody loves the idea of blogging as in individual writers giving their opinion. But when we are trying to figure out the right route to reliable information than a whole bunch of new problems arise. And I just wanted to steer right towards the biggest problems because I feel that I don’t really think that I am going to figure this puzzle out. I think it’s going to be someone somewhere looking at what we are doing or reading about it who says to themselves – that’s not the way to do it, you know there is a simpler way. And they’ll figure it out. But that’s fine. Again, that’s what NewAssignment.net is; it’s not a company. Its only mission is to spark innovation. So I have a very simple agenda and I don’t care where the innovation happens.

OJR: Did the fact that you have never been a professional journalist help or hinder when putting this project together?

Rosen: I haven’t been a journalist and so I do approach the routines and rituals of American professional journalism in a more anthropological way and a lot of what journalists do seems very strange to me, but I have made a study of the routines and rituals of the press, and there are parts of them I know better than professional journalists. Not in the sense that I know how to do the job better than them, I don’t. I rarely tell journalists what they should do, in terms of like editing their newspaper or covering their story. Usually they know much better than I do but if you look at parts of their professional life, I know them better.

One of them for example is the legitimacy system that they use to derive their rationale. I studied that and know where it comes from. They tend to just reproduce it you know. It’s nature to them. It’s professional culture to me.

But this thing is not really about that. What I am trying to do with Assignment Zero is it doesn’t really have its reference points in the problems of the newsroom. It really has a different reference point which is the fact that open source projects have succeeded in other areas and so we know people can collaborate online and then pool what they know. So we are trying to figure out can this work in journalism too.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, he wasn’t inventing a new platform for CNN, he wasn’t trying to put the newspaper out of business, and he wasn’t trying to create a multimedia world. What he was trying to do when he invented the World Wide Web was make it possible for people in a scientific community interested in the same problem to share knowledge and to share data and work together.

So collaboration is not something new in use of the Web; it is in fact the original motivation for creating the Web and it’s in the DNA of this wonderful machine. And so I see what we are doing as springing from original promise of the web which is a democratic promise. It’s the idea that we are stronger together if we share what we know. Than if we are atomized and alone. And it’s not really the obsessions of the newsroom that gave rise to what I am doing now.

OJR: How do you plan to handle info overload in this project as it flows in from the legions of volunteers?

Rosen: If you invite participation that generates a lot of activity and that activity generates certain costs, like returning e-mail, for example, and if you simply try to absorb those costs by hiring more people your project runs out of money within a week. And so this point has been reached many times in open source projects and the way they work and the way they scale, as people say in the valley, is that you have to convert some of those participants to organizing the others.

And those people frequently called super contributories if you look in the literature on online organizing you’ll find that these are key players right in your volunteer core. And so that’s what you a have to do you have to configure participants so that they themselves absorb the cost of organizing other participants. I can’t say that we have done that completely yet but we are highly aware of the problem.

One of the coolest things I think in NewAssignment.net and this is something that I am going to develop more of as I go along is we have a director of participation. Her name is Amanda Michel and I got her from the world of online organizing and politics. She worked in online organizing for Dean and for Kerry. And she could have worked and made quite a bit of money actually doing the same thing in the ‘08 cycle but she is more interested in the media side of things.

And so I went out and this is the person I found when I went out looking for somebody who would actually organized people horizontally on the net to work under high pressure conditions where being wrong could have consequences right. That’s what I had wanted somebody who had done that because that’s what kind of situation we are in. So the director of participation their job is to organize people while the editors who are much more traditional figures organize the story. And learning how those two jobs work and how they those two people can work together is another thing that we are trying to discover here. And there has never been a need to organize people to report stories except for the news people. This is all a whole other kind of thing and you need somebody working on that. You need someone who is constantly removing barriers making participation easier because participation always has costs and they can get high very quickly either for you like the institution doing it like Assignment Zero or for the participants.

And if you are battling those costs constantly your project quickly becomes unworkable.

OJR: What’s the timeline for you the work that comes from this reporting?

Rosen: Yeah there will be we are looking right now… this could change of course. But right now we are looking at about June 4th or 5th to publish and so everything has to work backwards from there.

But we are going to have a filter and we are going to have… hope to have a verification round but we might end up like with two days of back checking by crowd you know what I mean. Throw everybody at what we need to check really we don’t know yet but that’s exactly why we are doing this and journalism doesn’t happen until the familiar structures of bylines and deadlines and you know…

So basically we are going to let 40 people steer 40 pages through to completed text and publish the best of them and Jeff Howe will do an overview.

But instead of creating a documentary that screens at film festivals, he decided to create a website that “airs” short videos weekly. The site, Alive in Baghdad, has seen its traffic rise to well beyond film festival capacity.

“We’ve grown to actually become a small organization,” said Conley. “We have two Iraqi correspondents producing stories about daily life in Baghdad.”

Conley, 26, spoke to OJR about the challenges of running an independent Web operation that focuses on the lives of Iraqi struggling to survive in a war zone.

OJR: When I Google the word “Baghdad” and “video,” Alive in Baghdad comes up as the No. 1 result — above CNN, MSNBC, the BBC or Al Jazeera. What does this mean to you?

Conley: I think one thing is that we’ve got a niche. Alive in Baghdad is video only about Iraq and at this point still primarily about Baghdad. I think that if you look up “news” and “video,” you’ll likely get CNN much higher. But if you are looking for something about Baghdad specifically with video, there we are. It is really great for us because it means that we are really getting our message out that we have video about life in Baghdad.

OJR: The Alive in Baghdad correspondents… are they shooting and editing the video or does it come back to you?

Conley: They edit the video to the degree that they select tapes, but as of right now we do the editing here in the States. We try to take pains to do the editing in a way that it captures the story that they are interested in telling. And so far we haven’t had anybody say that ‘you took it out of context’ or ‘that is not what I was trying to get at.’

We try to produce stories in collaboration, where I’ll pitch some story ideas to the guys over there, and they’ll pitch story ideas to me. Then we come up with what’s do-able and what makes sense.

OJR: Do consider yourself a news organization?

Conley: Well, we take pains to be somewhat objective and unbiased.

OJR: What does “objectivity” mean to an independent Web-based organization?

Conley: I think being objective means that we always say that this is the story, these are the limitations of the story, and these are limitations for us get the story. Depending on the story, we try three to five sources but sometimes it is difficult. We did a piece about young people in Baghdad and what do they do for entertainment. We ended up airing it with only one interview because after trying for three months, we just couldn’t get the young people to even talk on camera about something as basic as “what do you do for fun?” Everyone is just so scared. Those were the limitations in that piece.

We also take really great pains to educate the correspondents. One correspondent very often would ask leading questions. So we told him to be more general. Don’t say, “Tell me about your son who was killed by the Americans,” say, “Tell me what happened to your son.”

OJR: And what are some of the challenges of running Alive in Baghdad?

Conley: Iraq and Baghdad have gotten more and more dangerous. We are realizing we have to branch out and find correspondents in different neighborhoods because somebody in one area doesn’t feel safe covering another area. But if we want to maintain balance and objectivity, we need to get stories from different parts of Baghdad instead of just one or two neighborhoods. That’s particularly challenging.

Tied to that is the issue of translations. I’m trying to get translations done in time to produce a story for every Monday. We have correspondents from one part of the Baghdad ship the video to us by DHL, which provides some level of security. Then in Boston, we capture the video as highly compressed QuickTime movies and then send the files by email or FTP to a translator in another part of Baghdad. The correspondent who shot the video from one part of Baghdad doesn’t feel safe traveling to another part of the city to hand the tapes to the translator.

OJR: You have actually interviewed an insurgent and a mother of a suicide bomber. Do you sometimes have to defend Alive in Baghdad from people accusing it of giving terrorists a platform?

Conley: Yeah, it’s definitely been a huge issue. Do I think that larger news organizations should be reporting on the military issues and interviewing politicians, and government officials? Yes, I certainly do. Right now CNN does that, MSNBC and other organizations do that fairly well.

I think that we are doing something very different. We are trying very hard to have a mixture of stories about the direct impact of the war, whether it’s about someone whose son was killed fighting the Americans, or a family whose home was smashed up during a raid by the U.S. forces. We are producing pieces that are just daily life in wartime stories. We try to get a variety of stories–from a piece about a house that was hit by a rocket to a story about a guy trying to figure out how to get electricity.

OJR: Do you have a sense of who is watching these videos globally?

Conley: It’s primarily the coastal areas of the United States, with some from the middle of the country. And Europe. There are some dedicated viewers in Japan with a surprisingly large upsurge in Brazil.

OJR: Specifically Brazil?

Conley: Yeah. We didn’t have a very big penetration in South America until some an article came out the press in Brazil in January or February. Since then the audience in Brazil has ballooned.

OJR: What about from Iraq itself?

Conley: Some, but not a lot.

OJR: Do you see a time when traditional media might rely on Alive in Baghdad to get the type coverage that they are currently not getting… somewhat of a symbiotic relationship in which you provide content and they funnel their massive following to your site?

Conley: I think a large part of this is just having more people be aware that the project exists and that they can find alternative coverage from Iraq. The larger media corporations won’t be able to get away with just saying, “sorry but this is the best coverage we can do,” because people can see the coverage we are doing.

The BBC and Sky News as well other media companies have approached us about doing work with them. I will pretty soon have a short documentary for BBC News and the licensing of five of our stories from Alive in Baghdad to Sky News for use during the anniversary of the war.

We are hoping to create a relationship where one of these media companies would air each week a weekly episode or one episode a month or something. And it still remains to be seen how we are going to work it out.

OJR: How are you financially supporting Alive in Baghdad?

Conley: We have pretty lucrative contracts with Sky News and BBC. We are also about to sign a contract with a company called Next News Network and that will finally let us pay a regular salary to Steve Wyshywaniuk, our editor and myself. Because of these deal, we can continue to produce for the next six or seven months as well as a probably hire a third correspondent.

OJR: If and when the U.S. forces leave Iraq, what role will Alive in Baghdad play?

Conley: That’s something I was thinking about a lot this summer when it was looking as though a withdrawal might even come sooner than first expected. What I realized is that once the American troops leave, so will the rest of the media. We have to scramble to get as much out of this as possible at that time so people will still keep their eyes on Iraq. That’s really important.

Earlier this month, that distinction was laid to rest when Artley was tapped by the Los Angeles Times to become one of the first of the digital generation to assume the leadership of a major newspaper website. Despite cost cutting at the Tribune Company, the news organization has big expectations of Artley as the executive editor of the LATimes.com. She is charged with overseeing an expansion of the online staff, a redesign of the site, the launch of new projects and integrating the print and online newsrooms.

Artley spoke to OJR from Paris, France where she is wrapping up her work as at the digital development director at the International Herald Tribune website. During the interview, she gave advice on how smaller news organizations can integrate their print and online operations, how to produce high-quality digital journalism on a limited budget and setting up lucrative tie-ups between news organizations.

The complete interview. [17.75 MB]

Click on each speaker symbol below to hear Artley’s thoughts on specific topics (all links are mp3 format):

Introduction and Artley’s goals during the first year at the LATimes.com. [1.8 MB]

Challenges facing regional news websites. [1.8 MB]

Common problems faced at the NYTimes.com, IHT.com and likely to face at LATimes.com. [2.8 MB]

Problems integrating print and online news divisions early in the industry. [1.1 MB]

How is it likely to be different today? [1.9 MB]

What resistance do online divisions face today? [1.4 MB]

How will you deal with all the expectations at LATimes.com with all the cost cutting? [2.1 MB]

Advice for smaller news organizations for creating a strong web presence despite smaller budgets. [3.1 MB]

Setting up tie-ups between larger and smaller news organizations and blogs. [1.8 MB]

But since Nov. 16, 2005, New York city-based MediaStorm has gathered force in its second coming as a multimedia journalism website, winning accolades and awards. OJR spoke to Brian Storm about how his boutique media company continues to crank out high-quality journalism.

OJR: What was the impetus for taking a fresh look at MediaStorm in 2005?

Storm: I looked at the landscape and I remembered vividly in 2000 when broadband penetration at home was 10 percent. But by 2005 or 2004, we actually hit 50 percent of the online households where broadband enabled, and that’s a sea change. You remember surfing with dial up. That was a different experience. Now it’s always connected. Broadband gives you real video speed.

The other thing that I was noticing was the desire for video advertising. Madison Avenue now was looking at the Web saying “Pre-roll video ads are a big deal,” to the tune of $275 million business in ’05 looking to go to $640 million in ’07, looking to triple in ’09 to $1.5 billion. I think those estimates are low. I think it is going to grow faster and bigger than that.

The other thing I noticed was there was a supply problem. Everybody was saying, “look there is demand to place these video ads but there is no content to place it against.” There was no inventory. And if you look at circulation going down and fragmented television programming, and about viewers moving to the Web, now all of a sudden you have Madison Avenue wanting to place $25 dollar CPM video ads in front of content. This is a huge financial opportunity that just didn’t exist a couple of years ago.

The other thing that has happened is what I call the democracy of production. So you think about things like this magic box that we are sitting next to. This is a Mac with 3 terabyte hard drive in it. I mean, it comes with a seatbelt. It’s a multimedia powerhouse machine. This is like a Hollywood production facility that we are sitting in front of in my apartment. And it’s not that expensive. Final Cut Pro is 1,200 bucks. And it’s like a Avid system that used to cost $250,000. HD video camera used to be $70,000. Now they are $5,000. I own a HD video camera, man.

So that’s the democracy of production–that’s a revolution in my mind.

So I wanted to get back to my publishing roots, frankly. I had seen a lot of great projects and I felt like I had developed a model for financing and producing and creating them. And I felt completely empowered because of production tools because the way the medium has matured.

It was just the right time to do it… to start this thing again.

OJR: You said you had developed a model for financing. How are you financially staying alive in the middle of Manhattan with four employees and putting out publication that is really about socially aware journalism?

Storm: How do you do that? You cash in on your relationships and you go build really high-end stuff for big name brands.

The Los Angeles Times hired us to produce a Gail Fisher project. It’s called “Blighted Homeland” it’s about Navajo living in Monument Valley where they’ve been doing all this uranium mining and so the people you know have been affected adversely because of that the mining. We’ve produced this project for the LA Times.

OJR: So their photographer collected the audio you worked with them to produce this?

Storm: Exactly, Gail actually came to New York stayed in our guest room–we have a guest room exactly for that reason. And Pam Chen produced this project. And I do the oversight.

Early on, MSNBC.com hired me to produce video projects for a magazine called “Take 3″ which was targeted at baby boomers. There was the story about “The Vanishing Americana” about the “Milk Man” and it was laden with sexual innuendos; it was really funny.

And then we did a piece called “The Sandwich Generation” which is also now on our site but we first produced it for MSNBC. It was at the level at which I want MediaStorm projects to be so it was also on MediaStorm.

Plus we do a lot of consulting. It’s standard interactive Web stuff but most companies don’t have teams that can produce that for them.

The other thing we are doing is that we really are acting as a multimedia agency. And I am really excited about this element.

There is the technology that we deployed for them so we work as both a consultant and a production arm. We help them tell the story but we also help them get up to speed with doing video.

OJR: Tell me about the auction model you tried out for selling a project last year?

Storm: I sent an e-mail out to 25 key clients inviting them to participate in a private auction to license the exclusive right to premier “Iraqi Kurdistan.” So the premier was auctioned off eBay-like. So what happened is I actually had ability for people to write their name, and publication, their e-mail address, their bid amount, and they’d hit send, and that would come to my cell phone in my e-mail and I would say yes, approve it. So we now have a template for doing digital auctioning of editorial content where we are allowing the client to drive the price up. I mean, I could have said $10,000. I could have guessed what that that’s what it was worth. It was far better to let the industry sort of decide. You know I mean that’s the key issue. Producing great content and trying to get it to the right publication and you get paid an appropriate fee to do it. I mean that to me seems to be the Holy Grail of trying to do these kinds of stories.

OJR: With the ability to route your content to TiVo over cable, you are poised to be a broadcast company…

Storm: In my mind we already are a broadcast company. We have this unique place on the web right now that we can do pretty much anything we want to do. I can publish any story I want. I know the next nine projects that we are going to produce for MediaStorm. I am sitting on 200 stories right now. Thirty of which I would love to produce for this site.

OJR: Your roots are of a photo editor… how do you see the Web’s impact on photojournalism?

Storm: So with this idea of a photojournalist going in and taking a picture but also doing audio reporting, we can give our subject a voice and I think that that is such a critical element. That changes the equation.

Most of us as photographers, we got into this because we didn’t want to write. We love journalism but we wanted to tell the story through photography. And because we are not necessarily great writers, the thing that’s so beautiful about sound is that we don’t have to write the story we can let the subject write it for us. And it’s just refreshing to hear the subject of a story tell you their story as opposed to some beautiful television person telling you… standing in front of the situation saying this is what you should be seeing and what you should be thinking. I don’t feel we need that.

I always describe it as documentary photojournalism meets National Public Radio. It’s like a combination of the fly on the wall of “This American Life” and the story telling approach they take meeting the sort of fly on the wall hands off approach that we take as a documentary photographers.

OJR: What does that say about just journalism in general? There is no more division of labor… the photographers, the print reporters, the radio reporters, the television reporters…. You have to be good at multiple things?

Storm: That’s the trend but for economic reasons and that bums me out. It shouldn’t be an economic decision.

What we should be doing in journalism is figuring out the very best way to tell a story. There’s division of labor on a breaking news story, where you’ve got people doing multiple things to try to meet the deadline. That’s one form of news.

The stories I work on are long term. The difference is that these photographers are authors. Only Olivier Jobard was on the story with “Kingsley’s Crossing.” He spent six months of his life on that story. Now if we would have had the resources to send a crew on that story, I think it would have changed the intimacy of it.

So I think there is a fine line between our just redoing this because it is just flat out cheaper to not send a sound guy.

OJR: Right, so you’ve been in this field for about 14 years. What’s really surprised you with MediaStorm about audience feedback? Enthusiasm for this kind of work?

Storm: Honestly it’s not surprised me that the “audience” has responded, because this medium is completely different from television, for example. The television has a signal that they send out there and they have to homogenize it frankly, because what they are trying to do with that one signal is trying to get as many people to watch it. So therefore they get stories on Britney Spears’ belly button because that’s going to give you more numbers.

The Web is completely different. I can have thousands of stories on my website and its exact opposite mentality which is I want to do a story about AIDS that will stand the test of time because those sort of affinity groups will find it and promote it. You will find people promoting “Bloodline” off their blog or off a foundation site or charities. They want advocacy work to be able to get people to be inspired and act and give.

There are a lot of interesting things about the way the audience is different. About 70 different countries hit our website. How do they find us? It’s all word of mouth. We don’t do any marketing. It is all viral conversation and its exact opposite of broadcast. When we launched on November 16, 2005, maybe 500 people watched our project that day. Today there are thousands of people watching those same projects who have never seen it before right so the whole time-shifting capability is really critical to this medium.

I wouldn’t say things have surprised me I think what they have really done is to encourage me to believe what I always believed about people: that they really do care and they do really want quality stories. I think mainstream journalism isn’t always set up to deliver that. They’ve got to feed the beast. They’ve got to shoot for numbers. The biggest problem with big journalism right now is answering to shareholders, instead of to their readers. They are trying to drive a profit margin at twenty seven percent instead of saying let’s invest in journalism and you know satisfy and gain readership. They are answering to the wrong matrix in my mind.

I hope this is just one example of the kind of company that is going to say that it’s time to take journalism back. I know I’m not going to make a pot of money with MediaStorm. I’m not going to. I’m just continuing to do stories that I believe in.

You know that’s that whole living a rich lifestyle thing. You know making money is a necessary evil to stay in business but it’s not our focus. It’s not like any of us got into journalism to make tons of money. We got into journalism because of the experiences—the rich lifestyle.

OJR: Nicholas Kristof, a columnist at the New York Times, recently invited readers to “tell the story” using the material he has gathered with his producer Naka Nathaniel on a trip to Darfur. What are your thoughts on audience participation-–helping with the process of production?

Storm: Well that to me, honestly, sounds like a gimmick–and that’s what that is. But if that gimmick gets more people to care about, and learn about, and understand what’s going on in Darfur, I’m for it.

I think citizen journalism is incredibly exciting because we need to engage the audience. We just do and getting them to tell their own stories or to comment on a story. I think that’s super important and valuable. I think we as professional journalists have to contemplate what that means. Breaking news is really not for us any more because there are going to be tons of people on the scene. We need to be the people who come in with our rich journalism skills and do the definitive story… the story of record if you will.

You can see more MediaStorm projects at http://mediastorm.org. Brian Storm can be reached at brian [at] mediastorm.org.

I decided to speak to Calvin Tang, the co-founder of Newsvine, a next-generation news personalization site that tracks reader habits and serves up articles that those individuals might actually read. I wanted to find out how news personalization sites have changed and if they are ready for people like me.

Tang talked about the improvements and the hurdles facing news personalization, and what refinements we might see over the next few years.

OJR: In a broad-brush stroke, what is Newsvine hoping to accomplish?

Tang: There were the three major things that we are going after. First, our aim was to set out to automate the collection, organization, and syndication of the exponentially growing pool of content available on the Web. With the rise of the blogosphere and personal publishing, it seems that there is becoming an ever-increasing amount of content out there.

The second thing we set out to do was to leverage the base of people in the world who had a story to tell but who also lacked an easy way to use publishing platforms and get an audience. Not everybody in the world is tech-savvy enough to set up his or her own blog. That’s why the first wave of citizen-generated content out there was very tech-heavy.

Our third aim was to give people a way to interact with each other in meaningful ways on topics of shared interest and to also be able to discover new material and authors as a result of this interaction.

OJR: How close has Newsvine brought this “Daily Me” concept to reality?

Tang: I would like to think that Newsvine is at the front of the pack as far as personalization of news but I think we, and the industry in general, have a long way to go. Some of our more long-term initiatives involve setting up our systems so that people can get their news in an ever-more increasingly efficient manner. I think that as the amount of content grows it becomes more and more important to organize that in a meaningful way.

OJR: What do you mean by more “efficient” and “meaningful”?

Tang: I mean there are two problems to solve and because you have to solve them both, it becomes difficult. One is that people don’t want to get certain types of information. They want their international news but they may not want sporting news, or something like that. And as a result there are services out there that are narrow in terms of topic–like a site that’s all technology news. That’s good but that can’t be your only news site. People like to discover things that they might enjoy reading but they didn’t necessarily know that they would before they were exposed to it. So giving them a way to sift through the large body of content out there is one problem.

There is also the type of news that everyone should generally know about. If there is a huge event in Iraq that is going to impact our domestic and foreign policy, a reader should have access to that. Now whether or not you spend a lot of time reading about it that’s another question. We think that bringing you the top news is one of the important things. That’s why we present our site with traditional media content right next to citizen-generated content. We don’t favor one or the other. We think that they are complementary in many ways.

OJR: Newsvine obviously doesn’t have the overhead of traditional news organizations because Newsvine does not have a staff of reporters and editors per se. What impact do you think sites like Newsvine will have on the quality of journalism when traffic flows to Newsvine rather than traditional news sites that also depend on advertising to support the reporting process?

Tang: I think that eventually all traditional media companies will have to rely on some form of citizen reporting, partly motivated by financial reasons but also because of access. While the quality of reporting from the average citizen is typically of a lower ‘quality’, in the traditional sense, I think that this is offset by the timeliness and unfiltered nature of accounts offered by citizen media. Traditional journalism will always be a part of the equation, but a combination of new and old media coverage yields a flow of information from event to consumer that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is for this reason that we don’t take sides between traditional media and small media. I believe that consumers will benefit from a convergence of the two models, and that the long-sighted media companies will adapt accordingly.

Take the recent incident involving the UCLA student who was Tasered. Prior to the existence of video-enabled mobile phones and youtube.com, I think we, as consumers of news, would’ve been further from the truth and less affected by it. However, without the follow up research and reporting by professional journalists on the officer’s background, we would be left with an incomplete picture of what led up to the incident.

Currently, a good deal of the reporting done by citizens is largely incidental, a byproduct of proximity, chance and personal initiative. Moving forward, I think economics and consumer appetite will convince publishers to actively procure citizen reports on specific topics or events. Meantime, Newsvine’s base of contributors from around the world grows and improves continually, ready to meet that demand.

OJR: Your users are also providing links and summaries of articles people can click on, sending traffic to those news sites…

Tang: Yeah, absolutely. We have a very liberal linking policy. We don’t do things to keep you on our site. We are happy to send you off to wherever the best information is hoping that a good user experience will bring you back. I would say that’s at the heart of the Newsvine model. There are many sites out there that provide AP news; there are many sites out there that provide links to other content. But Newsvine essentially is a crossroads of content where a rich discussion happens. So I would say that the number one thing we strive for is to create rich discussions around content.

OJR: So who is taking part in the discussions?

Tang: I guess there are a few different definitions of active users. The majority of the visitors to our site just read articles and that is to be expected of most sites. Participation at most sites is somewhere in around one or two percent. At Newsvine depending on your definition of participation, that rate can be much higher. So about 15 percent of our users are actually actively voting and commenting around the site. I would say another four to eight percent are seeding links and one or two percent are writing original articles. That number is low as expected because it is hard to write articles.

OJR: And even more generally, who are these people?

Tang: we have a good proportion of college students on our site but we do have an older crowd. I would say people in their 20s and 30s are probably at the center of that long curve but we have users all the way up to their 70s as some of our most active users.

OJR: Are you getting people from all over the US or also from around the world?

Tang: I would say that we definitely have a heavier presence here in the US and one of the reasons for that is because the AP is a little bit US-centric in terms of their news coverage. But while our viewership is more skewed towards to the US, if you look at our top contributors, there is a very wide mix of people from around the world.

OJR: Do you think newsreaders ready for this concept or do you think these are all the early adopters?

Tang: Since March, when we had our public launch, we’ve been moving beyond early adopters. We’ve had month over month growth for the last six months and we’ve tripled our traffic since May. And a lot of that new traffic is your traditional news consumers. That’s who we are aiming for.

We are not really trying to compete with other sites that employ the newer types of technology and newer sorts of models. We are going after the crowd who is used to getting their news from CNN and MSN, NBC, and Yahoo News.

That intention is built into the design of our site. We don’t launch right off into a five-minute tutorial on how do you use the site and all the things you have to set up. We wanted to make the user experience very good for someone wants simply to point and click and read.

OJR: You mentioned earlier that 15 percent of the audience is actually voting so those are the active members…

Tang: Yeah, voting and commenting…

OJR: How does this affect what news is presented? You are displaying news based on the interests of a small group of people. Do you have some counter-balancing algorithms to still be able to provide a diversified news budget?

Tang: Yes we do. Anytime you have a system in which editorial functions are driven by user behavior, you have to do things to safeguard against a small group of people making changes that affect the rest of the user base.

So while comments and votes do affect the placement of stories on Newsvine that’s not nearly the whole mix of things that go into our ranking algorithm. Some of the other things include page views which all readers of our site affect that and we measure something we call long views, which is the amount of time somebody spends on a page.

So we add weight to an article ranking if somebody spent a few minutes on it rather than just clicking there and clicking away.

In addition to that one, of the strongest contributors to an articles rank is its freshness. So if something comes in right off the wire or is submitted by a user right away, it has a pretty high ranking right off the bat. Imagine that the content, as it comes into the system, cascades down the page, and if it receives a lot of activity in terms of views, and votes, and comments, it can stick or even move back up. So if we didn’t do that, Newsvine would be a static, old style site.

OJR: You mentioned getting contents from the AP and individual contributors. AP is mostly text. I assume that a lot of the material submitted from users is also text based. When do you think you will diversify more into multimedia content?

Tang: Right, it’s funny that you ask that because just this morning I executed an agreement that will bring video to Newsvine. We will always be primarily a text-heavy site. We already have audio, that accompanies some of the articles from the AP but soon we will also have video from one primary partner who I can’t name yet.

OJR: Do you provide any editorial oversight when something is submitted?

Tang: It’s hands off from our standpoint as a company. There is no editorial process that happens prior to an article being published by a Newsvine user.

However we depend on our community for that function. We have both an editorially and an user-driven policing system. There are a couple of ways this happens. As far as inappropriate content not just the correction of facts, we depend on a sophisticated reporting system.

This works amazingly well. It’s much more efficient than if we had somebody manning a desk 24/7 looking at user contributions and deciding yes or no.

The other system that we have in place is an area called the Greenhouse. This is a place that serves two functions. When you sign up for Newsvine you can’t immediately post onto Newsvine, onto our tag pages, or the content can’t get up on the front page. Articles or seeded links will show up the Greenhouse. In addition to keeping spammers out, it serves as a place to showcase new users. So if somebody just signed up it might be hard for them to get their material up in front of a lot of people but they are showcased in this new user area and if their content receives a certain number of votes and comments then we quickly promote them out of the Greenhouse and get them into Newsvine.

With this system, you deter spammers almost completely, because spammers are all about high yield, low effort propagation of their material.

OJR: What refinements can we expect in news personalization in general?

Tang: Well I think that a site can always be improved up on. It can always become more intuitive and the more that sites can do to accommodate users preferences without them explicitly having to set things up the better. For example there is no reason why you shouldn’t come to Newsvine, and we detect where you are based by looking at your IP address. Then we can give you headlines from your local papers in your area. I mean that’s something that we should be doing and we will be doing in the next month or two.

And also based on a user’s behavior we should be presenting you with information or news similar to the stuff that you’ve liked other places. We have a rudimentary function that shows recommended articles page based on the types of articles you voted on. Now here are articles that you did not vote on but voted on by other users, who we think, are similar to you. And in that sense we are showing you things that you might have missed but would have liked. That’s another example of being able to pick up passively on the behavior of a reader.

OJR: Social networking…

Tang: Yeah, but for these social networking sites or customized news sites, the first thing you have to do when you sign up is you have to customize all these things to your tastes. Now the more we can do that for you, I think the better.

Along with a business partner, she launched Barista of Bloomfield Ave., a site that covers a small town in New Jersey. “I had name recognition and publisher blood,” she says. “I thought it might be better than being a freelancer—always subject to the whims of other people.”

Two years later, she has a small staff of reporters and freelancers, and a dedicated Internet server to keep pace with the site’s growing readership. Galant spoke to OJR about the challenges of running a hyperlocal site, building its credibility and making a living off the publication.

OJR: A New Yorker article by Nicholas Lemann in August about blogging and citizen journalism called you “one of the most esteemed ‘hyperlocal bloggers’ in the country.” But it was a backhanded compliment. The article, “Amateur Hour,” went on to say that sites like yours amount to nothing more than a “church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up.” How do you respond to that?

Galant: Well, you know I don’t mind being part of the store of things that improve the world. I don’t consider that a terrible insult, number one. Look, we’re not changing journalism in the way that Woodward and Bernstein did necessarily, but we are a serious threat to our traditional competition in the local market. We are using the medium really well. We are working very well with small resources. And we are doing certain things that are creative and innovative. You probably saw the teardowns map and the story in The New York Times. We used Google mapping technology to show how Montclair was changing with old houses being torn down. I think that tells the readers in a creative way what’s going on and it would be harder to tell in any other way.

We’re also doing live chats with local politicians. We did a live chat with a councilman who said that the rest of the council is in cahoots and that they’ve been using patronage. He called for the ousting of the mayor and that happened on our site. We had a post on our site about someone who started going around and called our advertisers and telling them to no longer advertise with us. So obviously we are threatening the establishment enough.

And we’re doing another live chat with the county executive about another controversy. There was a movement to get rid of county government. There’s this huge controversy over the new jail that was built, and the union that runs the jail has been very much anti-local administration. A lot of tax issues in this town, so that could be very interesting, as well.

You could easily look at The New Yorker and pull out a cute little anecdote from “Talk of the Town” pieces that would be just like my piece that Lemann quoted… about kids chasing each other on move up day. There are many charming, charming pieces in The New Yorker that are equally worthy of a church bulletin. I didn’t have any shame over the anecdote he quoted. I was tickled to be mentioned in The New Yorker even though it was a left-handed compliment.

OJR: How has Baristanet evolved since the original launch?

Galant: The design has really pretty much stayed the same. But I’d say it’s bigger. There are a lot more people involved. When I started Baristanet, it was basically a one-person operation. I did have a business partner, but I did all the editorial myself. And now, there’s at least three different people doing editorial stuff. That deepens it. And a lot of it changed, we now have interactive stuff–like the teardown map.

If you go back into our archives to 2004 you’ll find stories with just a comment or two comments. Now, virtually every story we have has a dozen at a minimum. Anything with a controversy to it can easily have ninety to a hundred comments. So that definitely changes the whole personality of the site.

A lot of people interact with us by sending us either pictures or giving us tips about stories that we couldn’t have anticipated.

OJR: You have a certain amount of name recognition from your Times column. Have your contributors also acquired “name recognition?” Do people also come to Baristanet to read what these “personalities” have to say about local issues?

Galant: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Well, first of all, Liz George, my business partner and co-editor, is a professional. She freelances for the [New York] Daily News. She was less well known in New Jersey two years ago. She definitely has not only a lot of personality in her writing, but has expertise that I don’t. So she really brought a lot of knowledge of real estate and, and is also much more of a food writer than I am.

We pay Annette Batson to write a page four days a week. She doesn’t have any journalism background but actually in some ways she is a better reporter than us. She tends to pick up the phone more to follow things up. And she also has this kind of sweet personality that she just has friends all over town. So, you know, in this good cop/bad cop world, she is our good cop. No matter how controversial things get, pretty much everybody likes Annette. Her personality is not as caustic as ours is. Her voice is not as professional in terms of having a writer’s voice for years and years. We had a fourth writer, but we unfortunately came to a mutual conclusion that it wasn’t working out. She was having a lot of problems with typos and mistakes and the audience just really pounced on her. She was pretty much rejected by readers because of all the mistakes.

OJR: That’s interesting because a lot of times when people think about blogs, they think of free flowing copy–that it’s okay to have mistakes and typos–but here you have readers pouncing.

Galant: Yeah…

OJR: Are people expecting something different from blogs now? Are the standards evolving?

Galant: Well, I don’t think they think of us so much as a blog. I think they think of us as sort of a professional product. We don’t necessarily carry the banner of journalism to feel like we have to get one quote from the pro guy and one quote from the con guy. That’s what journalists are trained to do. We are much more… shooting from the hip and smart-alecky. We’re more like the front of the book in Newsweek or like those sly Entertainment Weekly-type magazines.

But what people have come to expect is a certain kind of professional polish. So while we’re not pretending to be completely objective–we do have a point of view–there is a certain amount of professional polish that they do expect from us and if they don’t get it they feel cheated.

That’s one of the things that’s been really interesting about this and has surprised us is how much people come to take ownership of the product. They are not paying a cent for this unless they are an advertiser and yet they get really mad if you make any mistake, if you make a typo, if you don’t cover the blackout that was in their neighborhood last night. They expect full coverage in your style and at your level and all the time. They are pretty demanding.

OJR: So the role of the professional journalist continues online…

Galant: The journalism really kicks in for us when there’s some emergency. Our shining hours have been during fires and this microburst last summer that was just like a tornado and that’s when we utilized the medium really well. We get normally like 5,000 to 6,000 visits a day but after the microburst hit overnight and hundreds of old, big trees fell down, and the power was out over half the area, we had ten thousand hits and we almost doubled the number of hits the next day.

And the local newspaper surprisingly enough, even though they were out reporting it and even though they have a website, they didn’t use that material and saved everything for their newspaper on Thursday–which was two-and-a-half days after everything happened. And so we just really felt like we completely kicked their butts.

OJR: You’re using blogging as a publishing platform…

Galant: Yeah, as a publishing platform but with the commenting and with the interactive features. It’s instant publishing relatively cheap and with interactivity. So it has all those aspects of the blog. It also has the general snootiness and attitude and voice of many blogs.

But it’s a little bit different from that because it is a more of a public service and most blogs promote a point of view of whoever writes them. We have lots of different types of pieces… we let people know what’s going on.

OJR: How has your writing itself evolved for Baristanet compared to what it was like for the Times?

Galant: I’ll look back at some of my columns from The New York Times and they’ll look a little floppy and a little long. The writing for Baristanet is a much shorter format. The joke is that you have to make the point in a 100 words instead of 800 words.

I’d say I’m also much more courageous now. I remember one of the first posts I wrote was about a fundraiser in 2004 for Kerry in the backyard of some very wealthy liberal. I wrote a teasing post and I remember really struggling over it, afraid people would be mad at me. And they were but that’s the kind of thing I can do now in an instant. I’m much more likely to just press the button and be decisive and not worry about who’s going to like this and who isn’t going to like this.

OJR: What was the biggest challenge you faced when you first launched?

Galant: There were issues like it was a lot easier to get people to call you back when you could say “This is Debbie Galant from The New York Times” than it is when you say, “This is Debbie Galant from Baristanet.” We had to explain it to every single person every time we made the call. That slows you down. But now there is a lot more name recognition for Baristanet but it is not universal.

But the biggest challenge is simply to become a real entity and keep running it. I said earlier that readers expect all this stuff of us that you struggled to build. To keep that going is a professional and personal struggle. I remember the first time we received an ad for a whole year and I gulped and said, “Oh, my God. Does that mean for sure I’m going to be doing this in a year.” It was just hard to believe I had made that commitment to someone. You think this is cool, but, boy, I have just committed to being here next year, to being here on weekends, to being here when I don’t feel like it.

It was like claiming the territory of being almost like a newspaper single-handedly. It’s not very glamorous from the viewpoint of new media as a business and nobody talks about that. But it’s absolutely important for Liz and I to rationalize it as a business and to make it work as an organism, so that we have procedures, we are allowed to have vacations and go out of town. So that when somebody has agreed to be an advertiser, somebody is making sure that the bill is sent, and the money is collected and all those things. Writing is natural since that’s what we have done professionally, but it’s a whole different set of skills that has to be learned to run a business.

OJR: You have to devote time to editorial and business concerns. Are you concerned about breaking down the sacred separation that journalists have between advertising sales and the editorial side might compromise your work?

Galant: In some ways we’re shameless about it. But we have our own standards. I’ll give you an example: one of our advertisers called and said they are having parent workshops and they wanted publicity about it. It didn’t seem unethical to help an advertiser publicize the fact that they are having these adult workshops and the first one was about gay and lesbian parenting which makes it even more interesting. I happened to look at the backend and saw what Annette had written. It had really come out like a press release and it made me want to vomit.

I called Liz and I said “Have you seen this?” and she said “Yeah, I’m talking to Annette about it,” and she said, “Oh, I also found out that people from the advertiser wanted to see this story ahead of time, before it went up.” Liz told Annette that we don’t do that. We never do that. So basically we had our own values. We have our own standards for polish, we have our own standards for groveling.

OJR: And now does your audience also expect a different standard from you than it does of traditional media?

Galant: Oh, I think so. There will be people who will criticize us, and that’s part of the course. The comment function allows them to do that.

In a way, we are more like the editorial page. We don’t pretend to be objective but we do try to be fair. But we are more and more trying to be provocative and to provoke conversation. We’re almost more like what a TV talk show would be like to journalism.

OJR: What’s your advice for the many young people out there who want to start something like this?

Galant: We’re now after two years really starting to make some decent money. It took at least that long to build up the readership so we could become a viable competitor in the local advertising market. It certainly helped that during that time Liz and I both have husbands who were bringing in the health insurance and the steady income. My advice would be, don’t count it being your income right off the bat. But there is definite real economic potential there and I think we’re just starting to hit that. It’s not nearly as instant as I had hoped it would be. So you have to do some other work–like freelancing–to have some other source of income.

When we launched, we were on Typepad at the $15 per month level. The main thing that this technology allows is for you to throw something up. You can build a castle for free. Just try it, and that was what we did. There are many, many people in journalism who have this dream of starting their own small town newspaper. And it’s certainly something nobody could have done for $15 per month twenty years ago.

Once you become successful, then issues of the reliability and bandwidth come into play and so now we actually have some real expenses. We now have a dedicated server and we pay almost $400 a month for hosting and if the site grows where we want to go, we will have to expand the number of servers. And we now pay people on a freelance basis, both technical people and editorial people. So, yeah, I think the attraction is at first that you can do it for free, but as you become more serious you realize that you can’t really do it for free–you actually pay for things.

If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, e-mail Sandeep here.

“It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront,” says Fox. “I didn’t have deadline pressure, I didn’t have editorial pressure, I didn’t have many viewers.”

How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven “Video Journalists” for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces “Fueling Azerbaijan’s Future” and “Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans” are nominated for Emmy awards.

Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.

OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.

OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a “video journalist” at the Post?

Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn’t help but notice. That’s when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that’s on par with the newspaper.

OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?

Fox: I can’t speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It’s not reporter driven and it’s not celebrity-anchor driven. That’s not to say that it’s not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television–they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.

OJR: What is your subject’s reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?

Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don’t match up–much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it’s for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.

OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?

Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don’t think it makes any difference.

In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that’s still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.

I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that’s considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that’s where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.

OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?

Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it’s a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.

So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don’t want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.

Whereas on the web you don’t want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don’t have the answers but it’s a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?

I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What’s the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?

There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?

Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It’s using videos to capture the characters’ stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.

OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you’ve tried something…

Fox: I’ll think twice about it…

OJR: …you’ll think twice about it. That’s a big issue: maintaining a blog.

Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.

OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?

Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I’m not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that’s also a good model that we have tried in the past and we’ve liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.

These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that’s in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.

And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper–the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it’s going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.

That’s not the nuts and bolts but that’s an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that’s something that we noticed. So that’s essentially a good model–not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?

Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it’s more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I’d like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video–like they create writing–you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.

OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?

Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven’t nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don’t want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don’t want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.

I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom–both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.

I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That’s an example a successful collaboration. We didn’t actually work together ever– even our trips didn’t overlap to Azerbaijan–but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that’s the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.

OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won’t be compelling.

Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don’t think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn’t war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.

A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.

OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?

Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS’s “Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria”, it’s on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.

So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren’t cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like “for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com.”

OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?

Fox: What’s really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it’s never going to be as good as when it’s on your TV or when it’s on your high-definition plasma screen, right?

So I think in the next five years–or even sooner than that–we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it’s technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television–either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box–and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won’t matter.

I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that’s on iTunes. That’s kind of the first glimpse–it’s a small screen but it’s essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that’s really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it’s good content or unusual content or it’s better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.

It’s not just for me or for newspaper sites, it’s for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It’s another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.

Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times’ first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.