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Gary Kebbel, news director at America Online since early 1999, is in charge of the News, Government, Politics, Elections and International areas on AOL. He directed the site's coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, headed AOL's Election 2000 coverage and oversees a staff of 14 employees who update news on the AOL service, AOLTV and AOL.com. (A separate team programs the Welcome Screen.) If you think the AOL news team is a gaggle of clueless Internet programmers, think again. Its editors and producers herald from WashingtonPost.com, USAToday.com, USNews.com, UPI, Reuters and other established news organizations. "All of our employees are experienced journalists," Kebbel says in an e-mail interview.
AOL members can click on the News channel to see the handiwork of Kebbel's team. The editors create news packages using AP and Reuters stories and photos, as well as stories or multimedia from AOL's partners, which include CBS News, CNN, Time, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, the Weather Channel, the Christian Science Monitor, Court TV, CBS MarketWatch, Business Week, Money, E!, People, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and National Geographic, among others.Like Yahoo! News, AOL has no on-staff reporters and doesn't plan to get into the news-gathering business. "We have no reason to, when we have daily rights to the work of the best reporters and writers in the business," Kebbel says. "But if what you're asking is do we do journalism, the answer is a resounding yes. "Our editors have a dream job of creating a one-stop-shop news package of the best of journalism's best. They have the luxury of deciding who, at any given moment, has the better story or better audio or video or timeline. Sometimes it might be The New York Times, sometimes Time, sometimes CBS. ? AOL News editors add photos and graphics and write the headlines that entice millions of readers each day. Then we add the 'AOL secret sauce' of interactivity: polls, chat rooms and message boards."
As a news aggregator, AOL practices what Kebbel calls "converged journalism" or the "one-stop shop," and it doesn't restrict its offerings to in-house material.
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"It's the HBO approach," he says. "HBO did not become great by only showing Time-Warner movies. It became a winner by showing the best movies from any and all studios and making all the business deals and production processes invisible to the user, who simply tunes in for a great movie. The AOL News experience is analogous to that."Kebbel describes how the AOL Time Warner media divisions share content by citing AOL's relationship with Time.com, which was an AOL News partner for years before the merger. "Editors at Time .com send us multiple e-mails daily -- as do editors at CNN and many or our other partners -- about what is new on their site. We use those e-mails to quickly find additional stories to add to our news packages. "We also request stories from partners like Time. We'll say that a given story has a missing angle and would they write a story about X. Usually the partner is very accommodating, because they know that such a story will get prominent play and a lot of traffic." Inside AOL, convergence and synergy are becoming a way of doing daily business, with AOL tapping into content from CNN, Time, People or other Time Warner publications but at the same Time recognizing each media unit's individual identities, Kebbel says. "Synergy is the relationship that our newsroom has with CNN.com's newsroom and Time's newsroom," he says. "It's the ability to trade ideas and make requests and realize that in the end, we will best serve the user by playing to, and then bringing together, the strengths of each of our separate units. "That might mean that AOL News, CNN and Time all recognize that CNN is the best unit to do X story, Time is the best to do Y and AOL News is the best to bring it all together. On a smaller scale, it's the same thing as a city editor assigning stories based on reporters' talents or backgrounds. You play to each person's strength to create a better, stronger whole." That's a laudable goal. But the students made a valid point when they complained that they found little besides wire service reports and fluff from People magazine when they head to AOL for news. AOL still hasn't found a way to surface some of its best journalism from its top-rate sister news organizations. Here's one suggestion: Offer members a rudimentary personalization tool, letting us create a top-level page that contains more journalism, less fluff. If you're one of the millions of AOL members who prefer to hear about the latest events in the war on terrorism rather than the latest news about Britney's belly button, you should be able to get a straight shot of hard news. Young people, especially, want deeper levels of personalization from their news experience. As Johnson, the college senior, says, "I wish that I could totally set my Welcome Screen to give me the information and stories that I want." Kebbel says that in the weeks ahead, members will see significant changes in the look and content of the AOL home page. "In the past two years, the AOL Welcome Screen has focused a lot on entertainment and celebrities. Our users are telling us they also want more news, so you will be seeing a lot more news on the home page." Kebbel, who served as the home page editor at WashingtonPost.com during the Monica Lewinsky/President Clinton impeachment story, closes out our interview with a word about AOL's editorial standards and the rush-to-publish temptation in today's news media.
"Yes, we do sit back and wait until a story develops more often than cable news does. We, for instance, have not killed Bob Hope, as so many news sites have. With the story of the recent explosion in lower Manhattan, we did not report that the building collapsed, as some organizations did. Our motto is an old one modified from UPI: Publish it first, but first, publish it right."
NEXT | The employee: "A respected tradition of editorial strength and excellence"
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