Bernard Gershon's newest title after 11 years at ABC News says a lot about the network's approach to the world outside of broadcast television: senior vice president and general manager of the equally new ABC News Digital Media Group.

Gershon describes the new group, quietly formed earlier this year, as "an aggregation of all of the pieces of ABC News that are devoted to enhancing the brand and expanding the reach of the product." It's a broad portfolio including ABCNews.com, video on demand, pay-per-view, wireless markets and international syndication along with ABC News Productions and ABC News Video Source.

"It's basically putting all of the pieces together that are not supported by advertising on television and seeing if there are ways to grow it longer-term," says Gershon, 46, who was vice president of ABC News radio before moving to ABCNews.com as vice president and general manager in 1999.

Gershon did just that with ABCNews.com. The site, which celebrates its seventh birthday this May, turned a profit last year, according to Gershon. Reuters reported last December that the site has averaged 15 percent to 20 percent revenue growth annually since launch; Gershon told the wire service that the site entered its fourth profitable quarter last October after a profit for the fiscal year that ended September 2003.

But by April, details about finances had been taken off the discussion table. The group's results are not broken out by parent Walt Disney Co., but were included within the Media Networks segment. When asked about profits, Gershon was vague. When queried, media relations staffer Julie Summersgill replied: "We do not disclose specifics; we're very pleased with our 2004 revenue growth."

Blending the resources of ABC News with the Internet's ability to meet individual viewing needs, Gershon and his staff have crafted a palate of products that appeal to a wide variety of tastes. The subscription-only video service ABC News On Demand isn't just snippets; it's literally video on demand with 30-day archives of marquee shows and more. Users can swap a quick registration process for free subscriptions to nearly two dozen daily, weekly or monthly e-mails ranging from a reminder that the snarky, densely packed political roundup The Note has posted and the more matter-of-fact I-Team: Daily Terror Report to recipes and gardening tips from "Good Morning America."

The war in Iraq was still a week away when ABCNews.com launched an ambitious online video news channel called ABC News Live to meet the increasing demand for breaking news coverage. That pattern had been set first by "Nightline," which started out in 1980 as a nightly report on the hostage situation in Iran. ABC News Live has now expanded, in only 13 months, to include two anchors and more scheduled shows like the weekday "Politics Live."

Live news should be second nature for Gershon, who joined ABC after stints in New York as associate director, news and programming at CBS NewsRadio 88 and news director of WOR Radio. He told high school students in 2002 that his introduction to 24-hour news came through radio as a broadcast student at New York University as a student in the mid-70s.

He can't resist flip answers. Ask about a recent trip to China and the answer is "It's a pretty big country." But he's completely serious when it comes to the present -- and future -- of ABCNews.com. He talked by phone earlier this week about the potential of the Media Group. (Summersgill sat in.) The following is an edited excerpt of that interview.

Online Journalism Review:  Does the streaming video content consumers get differ from access point to access point?

Bernard Gershon: The experience will be different but the product will be the same. The same product -- ABC News Live -- is available to subscribers through ABCNews.com, through Real SuperPass, through AOL, through SBC Yahoo, through Bell South and through the MobiTV service available on Sprint phone. However, if you look at it on a (cellular) wireless device, it's going to be about three frames per second, whereas if you look at it through a broadband connection, it's going to be similar to a television experience.  

OJR: You've gone through different phases with Yahoo. You started with Yahoo Platinum and then you withdrew from that ?

BG: No ? you talk about different content bundles, different content packages. It depends on what our partner wants their end-user experience to be, how their business model works, how they want to package content from other providers, etc. ?  Yahoo Platinum morphed into Yahoo Plus and the Yahoo Plus subscriber has access to some ABC News On Demand content. They do not have access to ABC News Live. The SBC Yahoo consumer has access to a wider range of ABC News content, including ABC News Live.

OJR: Is the AOL subscriber getting the full access or the partial?

BG: Again, it depends on the consumer. What we try to do is work with our partners to see the kind of things they're interested in having. I'm not going to draw a spreadsheet for you ? but, for example, the AOL subscriber is getting access to some content we've created just for AOL.  George Stephanopoulos is taking questions from AOL users on a weekly basis and answering them as audio/video as part of the AOL politics section. What AOL is trying to do is get a range of 'best of breed' content, so there's a bunch of print partners and we're their primary broadcast news sponsor.  ?

OJR: If I want to get access to the full range of ABC News products, I'm going to end up going through Real (SuperPass) or your own subscription.

BG: Today there are five ways that you can have access to a robust package of content from ABC News video; obviously our text is free on the Internet. 

OJR: I looked at three of the five today trying to figure out what the difference was and it felt like Real had a deeper amount, more content.

BG: I think that may be, in part, because ABC News controls the user interface for Real. Those are our pages. ?

OJR: Where do the majority of your streaming users come from?

BG: I'm not sure that I'm going to answer the question, in part, because I don't totally understand the question and, in part, because I don't want to answer it. 

OJR: Where does most of your streaming traffic originate?

BG: The reason that a) I'm partly hedging and b) I partly don't know is I truly do not get daily video streaming reports from let's say AOL. I do get it from the content that's on my own site because I know where the servers are and I have access to it. AOL -- it's not as transparent to me how much volume, how much users access the content. Does that make sense to you at all?

OJR: It does. How many consumers do you estimate your content is available to and how big is your potential audience?

BG: I would much rather answer 'how big is your potential audience': a) it's a bigger number, and b) it's easier to quantify. The potential audience is in excess of 30 million, and that's based on the subscribers to AOL, which is obviously the biggest piece of that number, plus the publicly available subscriber numbers for SBC Yahoo's DSL service, Bell South's DSL service, Real One SuperPass and the ABC News On Demand package. If you roll that up, it's in excess of 30 million. Again, I don't get daily numbers from all the partners, and there is no Nielsen or Arbitron or anything for streaming video, or at least anything that's accurate across multiple sites. I could probably hire someone to give me the streaming video numbers just off ABCNews.com and verify those numbers ? across all these sites, but this is still a nascent little medium

OJR: Does that make making deals any more or less complicated? The fact that the numbers themselves are hard to track or can you just not bring numbers into play the way you would exactly if you knew exactly how many people were doing what?

BG: Obviously it's not a medium that has the metrics as easily transparent and as well known as network television, where you know how many people are watching, you have Nielsen and all these other methods and people understand it, advertisers understand it, etc., etc. This is much more difficult to explain. I think over the next couple of years there will be real ratings and it will be easier to figure this out.

OJR: How would you like to see ratings work? What would matter to you?

BG: Typical is the total number of users who are accessing the content during an hour and how long they watch for and how often they come back during the course of a day, a week, a month.

OJR: I'm guessing you have a sense of what users are coming back to.

BG: We definitely have a sense based on traffic to the static Web pages, as well as general traffic to the video. For instance, we saw a fairly substantial spike in video streaming numbers the day Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 commission. We saw a smaller spike, but a spike nonetheless, the day Richard Clarke testified.  We saw a spike the Sunday morning Saddam Hussein was captured. We even saw a spike that day on the accesses to ABC News Live through our wireless partner MobiTV.

OJR: In terms of daily features, do you have any sense of what people come in to watch at different times of day?

BG: That data is much more driven from our Web site, where we actually kind of have real numbers, so we believe that primetime for video streaming for us is lunchtime. 

OJR: That's where you've got 'Politics Live'?

BG: Correct. 'Politics Live' is on at 1 p.m.

OJR: If all of this is so nebulous, how do you know how to schedule? How do you know how to program the site?

BG: Again -- not again because I haven't made this point but I'm going to make it now and it's a damn good one.  When it comes to the on-demand content, the great thing is you don't schedule it. If you're looking at Real, we have the last 30 days of 'Nightline' and some other programs of 'Nightline' we think are just neat, like the first one from March 1980 and another one I particularly enjoy where Ted interviews Kermit the Frog. ?We leave up the 'Tuesdays with Morrie' -- that continues to do well.  We have the last 30 days of 'World News Tonight' available as the entire program, as well as the a la carte version where you can pick which piece from the program you want to watch, clips from the magazine shows, etc. So the on demand (content) doesn't require programming, which is the nice thing about the Internet. Someone can go in, see something cool that they like, watch that, then either watch something else or go away. 

OJR: What's your most downloaded on-demand area?

BG: Major breaking news stories particularly do well --  the day Saddam Hussein was captured, probably for a week the video of Saddam Hussein did well; the big interviews that ABC News does traditionally do well -- the interview Mel Gibson did with Diane Sawyer did well for weeks after it aired, Whitney Houston, Jason Priestly, Martha Stewart ?

OJR: Any particular shows? 'World News' or 'Nightline'?

BG: It depends on the content. If 'Nightline' is doing the capture of Saddam Hussein, or they've got an exclusive interview, or it's a particularly compelling product, it will do well. The 'Good Morning America' clips consistently do well, and that's a range of the newsmaker interviewer -- for example, last week they had the exclusive of Richard Clarke responding to Condoleezza Rice's testimony -- and Charlie Gibson's enchilada recipe, a great Super Bowl recipe where he makes an enchilada casserole. ? The nice thing, at least from our standpoint in producing on demand content for the Internet, is ABC News has a wide range of content from the best investigative team in journalism to the great team of people who are producing 'Good Morning America,' who get celebrity interviews, do interesting cooking segments and also make news. 

The other thing, to answer your question, is how do we program ABC News Live. The best answer I can come up with is it's kind of a guess. We believe that our audience peaks during the day, based on the flow of e-mails and some server data; however, we also see baby peaks in the evenings. ? So we created 'Politics Live' as what's going to be happening during the day. If you're a political junkie, you've read your morning papers, you know what is going on so what is fresh during the day? How can we use the resources of ABC News that are covering the candidates and covering different stories to report for this at-work audience? Then we make 'Politics Live' available as an on-demand clip as well. ?

OJR: Are you seeing any changes in behavior as residential broadband becomes more prevalent?

BG: I guess that's probably the change we're going to see over the next couple of years ? the at-home audience spending more time watching video at nights and on weekends. At the moment most of the usage is at work. People are taking their break during the day and want to get a quick news update or quick diversion from working on an Excel spreadsheet.

OJR: Do you see a time when you'll expand some of the live programming to the weekend?

BG: We have a little bit of live-event programming on the weekends. If there's a breaking news event, a news conference or some other live event, we'll do it on weekends. We have no scheduled news programming on weekends. Over the course of the next year, we would look to expand both the topics that we do, so not just politics but other specific topics; kind of an obvious one would be technology, given the audience. And then to additional dayparts; the evenings and weekends are obviously viable dayparts, too. 

OJR: Although for now video on demand is filling the need for that at-home user.

BG: Correct. ABC News Live never shuts down. In the evenings, we run a kind of 'best of' package and we interrupt it a couple of times during the night for live news updates. Obviously if something happens, we'll do more live updates.

OJR: You do have the ability to reach all of these different interests?

BG: You get back to what is the Internet all about -- reaching a lot of people through niche product. If there are people out there who are interested in the daily terrorism update, the latest from the ABC News investigative team, they'll subscribe to it. That may only be in the Internet world a small, in the tens of thousands, audience, but they're people who will have a connection to ABC News and be able to then forward that content to other people so it helps us extend the brand and ultimately get them to be more interested in watching our programming on network television.

OJR: Is that how The Note got started? The Note has become in some respects a signature product.

BG: I never want to say that one baby is more well-liked than any other baby. ABC News Live is important to us, the recipe e-mail is important to us, the Barbara Walters e-mail, The Note, are all important products to us; the 'Nightline' e-mail -- I will leave one out and Julie [Summersgill] will have to start my car.

OJR: But The Note gets the most media attention.

BG: Again, I think that's because it's very good, the quality of the content is terrific, it's something you can't get anywhere else, but I also think it's geared to the political cognoscenti, if you will. It's geared to people who want to know what's going on in politics and that's traditionally media people and other politicians. The mom with three kids in Iowa who is thrilled to get the recipe e-mail from GMA is probably not as interested in The Note. 

Back to your point, which is accurate, it's the range of content. If we can touch somebody with ABC News content because they're a political note fanatic or because they're a recipe fanatic, we're happy and we think that person's more likely when they're sitting in front of a TV to watch ABC News on television. 

OJR: You're extending the brand with Noted Now. What is that all about?

BG: Your question was how did The Note start. We had for years an internal daily political briefing that went out just inside ABC News. Mark Halperin (political director of ABC News) said, 'Why don't we come up with a version of this that takes out any stuff that would be secrets or any stuff we don't want to actually report, which is a tiny, tiny percentage of it, and make this available on the Internet.' We said, 'That's not a stupid idea.' We introduced The Note and we made it available to people who basically registered in a very simple registration process.

Noted Now, something that just started last week, as there's more and more political news, how do we do brief updates of The Note during the day? The political unit's thinking was let's come up with something that's a little bit different from The Note but still uses the same brand and update it during the day.

OJR: So do you now have a blog?

BG: It's kind of a blog. I guess it's bloggish.

OJR: In the sense that it's continuously updated.

BG: We don't invite people who don't work for ABC News to contribute to it, so it's not sort of 'anyone can contribute' and say 'here are my thoughts on politics.' I'm not an expert on what the definition of blog is, but I would say it's blog-like.

OJR: Are you looking at other blog possibilities for ABC News?

BG: I think in order for a blog to be really good and for people to actually want to look at it -- I mean other than the person actually writing it -- more than once during the day or the week, it really requires a lot of time and effort. On the Internet, there are very few blogs I would actually go back to.

OJR: So which ones do you follow?

BG: One of the ones I looked at over the weekend was Dave Barry's blog, it's humorous, kind of makes fun of the blog thing. Otherwise, the only blog I read is Noted Now. 

OJR: Some people have gotten kind of taken with doing blogs or they're sneaking them in. Is it necessary to follow trends like that?

BG: I don't think so. I think it depends on the topic, it depends on the people who are involved in doing it. I think politics makes sense for us because we have terrific resources and we can say to them, OK, here's an opportunity for you to share your reporting on a minute-to-minute basis with our online consumers, that's worthwhile, but I can't think of too many other situations where we have reporting that changes minute to minute unless it's a big breaking news story.

OJR: Is there a role for a news blog using the blogging technology to keep people posted on news? I think that's what Noted Now may be more like to me than an actual blog. 

BG: I think the answer to your question is yes but I think that if you were to do, say for a news site like ours, let's cover Condoleezza Rice's testimony as a blog as opposed to 'let's do a story in the traditional let's put a lead at the top and build an inverted pyramid.' I think that's the best way to tell that story in print. I think to say 'now she answered this question, answered that question' -- for the most part our users come to the site for a quick update of what's going on in the world. There are going to be these niche audiences that want a great deal of detail and want every moving part; that's why Noted Now is a terrific addition to our range of content offerings. I think you're going to need to be very careful about how you present different ranges of stories as blogs. ?

OJR: It's basically been a year since you debuted the live streaming service.

BG: We debuted ABC News Live on March 12 pretty much exactly a week before the war started. We created it because we saw that our broadband streams of just raw news events -- Colin Powell speaking to the U.N. in February of '03, Pentagon briefings -- we saw we would get a surge of traffic to our broadband streams. We looked at the situation and said, 'Could we, using all of the resources of ABC News, create a 24/7 service that was available to our consumers through broadband and could we have this up and running during the war with Iraq? So we managed with spit, baling wire and a lot of dedicated people who worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week to make this thing work.'? and the feedback we got from our partners and our users was positive. So we looked at the economics and said, 'OK, how can we keep this thing going for some months beyond the war?' And now a year later we're chugging along. We have some terrific product. We have a full-time anchor and we're in the process of hiring another anchor. We're looking at expanding the daily program offerings.

Part of the lesson from the war with Iraq was even with the glut of cable news networks there is an interest for people who may not have access to a television in their office during the day to get high quality updated video information from a trusted source.

OJR: You've talked about ABCNews.com making a profit last year. Was that in spite of ABC News Live? Did it help? Did it push subscriptions?

BG: We look at ABC News Live as an investment for the long term. We were able to show a profit for ABCNews.com in fiscal 2003, based on the growth of our broadband revenues and the recovery of the advertising market.

OJR: Advertising is still very important to you, isn't it? Subscription is a stream; it's not the stream.

BG: Any business that will survive for the long term needs to have multiple sources of revenue and being able to build, again on a small scale compared to ABC News on television, a small subscription stream and a small advertising stream, is, I think, crucial for our long-term growth and our ability to reinvest in the product.

OJR: At the bottom of your left-hand nav bar (on ABCNews.com) is a section called 'featured services' with subjects like 'relationships' and 'the insurance center.' How do those differ from the editorial departments?

BG: You don't think relationships are important? ? This is why Web sites like ours look at redesigning their site.

OJR: Are these things you can build advertising packages around?

BG: Look at CNBC and the reason that CNBC is so profitable, given the size of the audience, is that it's a specific targeted group. So if you can say here's some relationship content, sell advertising around it. These are people looking for dates. What can you sell them? That's interesting. ? How can you find qualified candidates for advertising?

OJR: So if Williams-Sonoma wants a micro site we might see 'cooking' under featured services?

BG: I don't want to walk down the path of hypotheticals but I would say -- I would stop there. 

OJR: Since we're looking deep into content do you ever read your own comment boards?

BG: The message boards? Sometimes I do.

OJR: Are they doing what you want them to do? Why are they there?

BG: It's important for us to give people an opportunity to give us feedback -- positive or negative. We get e-mails from our consumers, our users, our readers and all of the various names for the people who access our site. I think part of the whole Internet thing is giving people the ability to do real-time feedback so whether it's people on the GMA message boards talking about recipes or people talking about they like or dislike our news coverage, those are all reasonable.

OJR: What are we going to be talking about a year from now?

BG: I'm going to stick to wireless. I'm very bullish on wireless.

OJR: Why?

BG: They're really cool gadgets, and I think that video on little tiny screens is going to become a better and better experience for our product, a lot of which is breaking news.

For somebody who's a mobile professional, it's a pretty good experience, not like sports play-by-play. Certainly a movie is going to be a lousy experience on a mobile device today. But I think mobile is kind of a sweet spot for news content. Today there are not a lot of devices out there that can handle video, but I think over the next year that will change dramatically. If it doesn't, you'll call me up and tell me I was wrong.