[Editor's note: Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the editorial director of Lives in Focus, a website that uses video, audio and photographs to present the voices and stories of those who are rarely given space or time in traditional news media. Junnarkar is joining OJR as a contributing writer, offering a monthly Q&A which visits online reporters, producers, editors and executives to talk about the challenges they face, and the ideas they are experimenting with, as they try to compete in an ever-changing media marketplace.]

This month: Angela Morgenstern, Supervising Producer MTV News Overdrive

Angela Morgenstern has the unusual experience of hopping back-and-forth for the past decade between television and online journalism and landing in, perhaps, the best of both worlds.

Now 31-years-old, Morgenstern began her journalism career as a television producer for PBS’s “The Democracy Project” and later for “Livelyhood” where she served as a producer and then managed online projects. At the height of the dot-com boom, she briefly left journalism to work at a political action group which was attempting to harness the Internet for outreach. In less than a year, Morgenstern returned to the newsroom and worked for several years as an on-air reporter and producer for different PBS shows like “Springboard” and “Frontline/World.” She also had a stint with PBS Interactive.

In early 2005, Morgenstern joined MTV Networks and is now the supervising producer for digital products at MTV News. MTV News, however, is not all song and dance. Between coverage of Ashlee Simpson, Outkast and Christina Aguilera, the news division even managed to be nominated for an Interactive Emmy for its broadband coverage of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. “The path of my career has been going back and forth from TV to online until the point I’m at today which is really a true convergence of the two,” says Morgenstern. “My career reflects this buzzword, convergence, where TV and online are not so separated anymore and you really need to understand multiple mediums to succeed.”

OJR recently spoke to Morgenstern about how to navigate this converged world to produce compelling journalism.

OJR: You’ve been back-and-forth for sometime. How and when did you transition to online journalism?

Morgenstern: I was working in San Francisco as an associate producer for a PBS Television series called “Livelyhood” which at that time was about ordinary and extra-ordinary American working people and of changes in the work place. This was right at the tip of the “dot-com” boom and I just became interested from a content perspective in material that we were not using and in this thing called the “Web.” So frankly, without having a particular expertise, I started to question what we put up and asked if we could put up more–thinking about what parts of stories might make for good web content. It was up to the producers as to how we utilized that space.

As I moved forward in web production, I was fortunate enough to work for a series [Frontline/World] that really understood the importance of original content for the Web. The series combined what I consider to be the best standards in journalism with the opportunity to experiment in new platforms and with the idea that we could bring new voices to public media. I was actually lucky enough to build the Frontline/World site from the ground up and for that we really put an emphasis on this idea that original stories could find a home on the Web and you could break important news and tell stories in an important way online.

OJR: Tell me about where you are now, MTV News Overdrive. What do you know on a daily basis?

Morgenstern: I moved to MTV a year and a half ago where I am now the supervising producer for digital production for MTV news. I helped the staff at MTV launch what would become Overdrive, which is a broadband channel driven by this idea that the audience is getting its information in new ways and MTV wanted to be there. News was a big part of that.

My day-to-day at MTV: I’m overseeing the digital production–the technical and creative production–around programs. There are now two breaking news editions as well as all the MTV News specials that have a corresponding show on air or not. I am interacting a lot with people who are producing other channels for Overdrive.

OJR: What technical skills do you need on the job now and what skills have you acquired in your new role at MTV?

Morgenstern: I think a good way to approach that question is to consider the kind of people we bring on as opposed to me specifically.

I think in my role, the skills are more broad-based. There’s an incredible need to be able to handle a fast paced environment because not only are you dealing with an enormous amount of news daily, but you are seeing the product change constantly. You are seeing the audience’s habits change and you are seeing the technologies and the tools that are available to you change just as quickly.

So it’s really having an understanding of what different technologies can do for your news organization. I have to be able to analyze quickly and be able to work with my team to change on a dime when needed. Another broad skill was my television production background. I’d been in the field and conducted tons of interviews and followed different types of stories so I have an understanding of editorial issues. That makes it more comfortable when dealing with traditional television producers or print reporters because you can talk about the story and then figure out the best way to convey the story online.

In terms of specific skills, we have a smart team of people who are doing digital production for the news department. Almost everyone knows HTML, and is familiar with publishing in a database environment. Photoshop is an absolute must. In most cases they’re familiar with other Web languages. On the video side, they are familiar with as with non-linear video editing. In the beginning they might have familiarity with Final Cut or Adobe Premiere but eventually Avid Editing. That knowledge usually extends into audio editing and other things. So really specific skills are required, but what’s more important is sort of a propensity for new technologies and the ability to pick up new tools with very little training.

OJR: You went from an organization with a smaller budget to one with greater resources. Are you able to present content now that you weren’t able to before?

Morgenstern: Being part of a big structure is helpful. But I found that some of the entrepreneurial skills that we picked up because of need when you are working on a public television show or documentary are just as valuable in a big environment–like finding ways to optimize your pages for a search engines, or finding creative ways to recruit people to help you on a project or story. Those are similar regardless of whether you are in a big environment with lots of resources or sort of entrepreneurial smaller environment.

At MTV we are charged with the same mission as you would be at any smaller organization, like figuring out what you are going to do about podcasting, RSS feeds, wireless phones, and broadband.

OJR: Going back to the idea of limited budgets, how do you decide which news story will get the full Web treatment? Or is that now something that’s become part of covering stories: we are going to use video, audio, and send it on a cell phone?

Morgenstern: I think that figuring out the right formula for making those decisions is the holy grail of online journalism–or journalism in general. I don’t think that anyone has quite figured that out. When I was at KQED one of the executives there had a fantastic matrix that helped evaluate decisions about whether to do a particular program on particular platforms. I think that those formulas are still being worked out but can at least lead you to the right conversations.

At MTV, where we have weekly meetings in addition to the daily meetings where we decide what we are covering with cameras as opposed to sending a journalists with a note book. And at those meetings, we are conscious about what medium we are going to try to hit. Will this also be a broadcast? Is this something that will go into daily news on your phone? Is Video-On-Demand going to want this? Is International going to want this and all those things are considered at the outset.

Regardless of where I’ve worked, I have had to strike a balance as a new media producer between the new media newsroom and the traditional newsroom. You want to be an advocate for new media and get reporters enthusiastic about using new media to get to tell their story. So, if you do your job right, what happens is that you end up with a lot of people with a lot of ideas for new media. Then you have to ask how do you strike the balance between that enthusiasm where you want to do everything, use all your material that you didn’t use in one medium and where you want to make smart decisions and really be strategic about which element of the story you tell where and why and how you toss from one medium to another.

OJR: So you are not just using material off the cutting room floor for MTV’s Website? Is the content that is going on the Web simply material that hadn’t found a home in broadcast or print or has that practice and attitude changed?

Morgenstern: I think it has changed tremendously. We are more sophisticated about how we think about what we put online. I like to think of the unique attributes of each medium. It’s no longer a place where you place things off the cutting room floor. It’s now more about thinking about the particulars of the medium. I like to think of the unique attributes of each medium, as all of us in this industry do when we are planning projects. I tend to think of television or video as an emotional medium. Radio can be a very intimate medium and text is a great way to convey factual information. So what’s the online extension of that or the multimedia extension of that? In some context, it can be the right combination of those elements. In another context it might be the ability to give users choice and shape their own experience.

OJR: There is still resistance in some newsroom against harnessing the Web beyond shoveling print to the site. What advice do you have to get more support for new media coverage?

Morgenstern: I think that if you are in an organization that’s running up against some legitimate resistance–like a lack of resources or a lack of understanding about the possibilities– the first thing that online journalists or new media journalists can do… and this sounds obvious… is to understand how traditional reporters work. Understand the process and what the pressures are in the field and back in the newsroom when a reporter returns. With that understanding, you can really see the smart places to insert yourself or your team into that process. There are sometimes better places for the new media team to get involved. Sometimes it’s at the conception of the story or further along when ideas are honed to begin the discussion about what makes sense for new media.

When you are working with journalists it makes more sense to talk about the story and the goals of that story than it does it talk about specific technologies. You use the technologies later to illustrate what you want to convey creatively.

Another thing is providing examples of the kind of journalism you’re talking about even if they’re examples from other organizations. This can really help garner support from the people you need for support of your project. Once you have that support, you can try new things.

MTV is a big organization but in my limited experience, I have seen that a lot of projects are the results of groups of people who went out on a limb and experimented with ideas that they had and then presented later what they meant by those ideas.

OJR: Thank you Angela.

Suggest a new media journalist whose Q&A you would like to read. Email me at sandeep [at] livesinfocus.org.