Beet.TV Transcripts

WashPost Online Exec Editor: Journalists Have No Choice but to Change and to Promote Their Work

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

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[Start of Audio]

Jim Brady: We saw back in the late 90’s that or suspected that video, once connection speeds really improved and people had high speed at home and at work and that the art form was a little better forum that people would watch a video on the Web. And so we started throwing resources at this back in ’99. I think we hired our first video journalist.

And we just kept refining the craft over time. It got enough traffic that we felt like we could continue on. It wasn’t getting huge amounts of traffic, but again, we felt like this was something we were preparing for that day in which suddenly people were willing to watch a video.

And I think over the last three years, a combination of YouTube, a combination of video iPod and just better connection speeds – suddenly one day, people will seem to be willing to watch a lot of video. And it was odd for a lot of us who have been doing this for a while that it seemed to happen so quickly that it went from some people watch video to everybody’s willing to watch some video.

Andy Plesser: Tell us about the scope of the video that you’re producing.

Jim Brady: We do some that’s purely news video. A Bush press conference, just something we think enhances a news story and gives somebody some depth. We obviously do some documentary video where we send one of the six or seven video journalists we have somewhere in the city, somewhere in the country, somewhere in the world to chase a story on our own; sometimes with a post reporter.

Reporter video is kind of a third category where we give the reporters themselves cameras and ask them to shoot video that helps to kind of enhance a story or add another dimension.

Andy Plesser: We’ve heard a lot about the changes in the world of journalism and newspapers and the imperative for journalists to change, to learn new multimedia skills. What are your thoughts on that?

Jim Brady: To answer the question about journalists and transitioning into the world, there are two answers. One, it’s hard. And two, they have to figure out how to do it; that the world is changing, how people consume media is changing by the day and we can’t, as journalists, sit back and say this is how we’ve done it. This is how we’ve done it for the last 10, 20, 30 years and that’s the way we’re going to keep doing it because our consumers are completely changing how they get to what we produce. And getting yourself out there in as many places as you can and making sure people understand what you’re doing is important. So if you’re out covering a story and you go on MSNBC for two or three minutes; you do a spot on Washington Post Radio, come on here and answer questions from readers for an hour. That does all cut into your schedule in figuring out how to juggle that is complicated.

But we, like every other major media company in the world now are fighting for the attention of every reader. And how are we going to make sure that they know what we’re doing and in some cases, getting on and talking about what you’re doing is more important now that it’s ever been; especially as we try to attract a national and international audience. So I think the challenge is definitely there but I don’t think we have any choice but to figure out how to juggle our schedules and help them produce better journalism.

[End of Audio]

Washington Post, Public Relations

WashingtonPost.com Exec Editor Mulls YouTube for Video Distribution: The New York Times Grabs Smart Dartmouth Grad for New Blog

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Some newspapers are beginning to solicit video from their readers, actually, or users or whatever you want to call them. What are your thoughts about soliciting and using video from your readers?

Jim Brady: Well, I don’t think there’s any question we will get into that and pick our spots in doing it. It may be around the cherry blossoms, it may be around the Redskins. It may be around, protests downtown. I don’t know what it will be about but we definitely want to get citizen video or citizen submissions in certain areas. We’ll probably be getting into that in the next couple of months.

But I think it’s a part of every site. I don’t think – it’s never going to be the dominant thing that WashingtonPost.com is but what we really focused on a lot of the reader engagement; providing all sorts of forums for readers to talk to us whether it’s through comments on articles or live discussions or making it easy to send email to reporters. Actually providing access on our own pages to ____ blogs that are writing about our articles. We feel like that’s something we’ve done really well, which is give people an opportunity to go deeper than just what we wrote. Write about it yourself. See what other people are writing about it. Contact the reports.

Andy Plesser: So the Washington Post has had video for a long time. You guys have sort of retweaked the home page by bringing video onto the home page in a very prominent way. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts behind that development.

Jim Brady: We brought video to the new homepage primarily because we needed to really signal the people that this was the central part of the site, that over the past couple of years, we’ve continually heard in focus groups and in other places ‘I didn’t realize you guys did video’. So a lot of the reason we’re doing this is we really need people to see that we do it. We need to get them into video and we need to get them to watch more video which is obviously good for us from a business perspective.

But when we tested this homepage out on people over the last couple of months, the one thing everybody noticed because we had that big multimedia strip on the home page, and some people said, ‘oh, I probably wouldn’t click on things in there’ but they all saw it. And I think that was a key for us because it really – this homepage signals better than anyone we’ve had what we’re about if we’re focusing on a couple of core items and making sure people can find them on the home page.

And with the Braco player on top of that, it’s now an opportunity to drive people into vide and then once they’re in video, we’ve presented them with a much better experience and a much better chance to go to more videos. So we think there will be a pretty significant impact on traffic.

Andy Plesser: Jim, let me ask you, most people experience the videos – well, let me just ask you about how the video is watched and where it’s watched. I assume it’s pretty much watched on the WashingtonPost.com. Will you have that content syndicated? Will it be downloadable? Tell us a little bit about how folks experience now or might experience these video clips beyond the confines of the WashingtonPost.com.

Jim Brady: If you look at kind of the phases we go through with video right now, and Travis comes back with this piece from Chad, we blow it out for like three days on the site.

But after a week, 10 days, that story still resonates and is still as powerful as it was the day we launched it but it’s been pushed out of the way by all these new things we’ve put up on the site since then, whether it’s the 100 stories we get from the newspaper every day or more multimedia projects we do.

So at some point, promoting a piece like that on the site aggressively becomes a lot more complicated so why not, when that second phase hits, not turn it around and say, let’s put this up on YouTube or let’s make ____ embeddable somewhere. Let’s figure out how to get this on as many platforms as we can now to give it a second life, for lack of a better term.

In terms of video podcasting, we do a ton of video podcasting. We literally bought the video iPod the day it came out and had our first video podcast out 24 hours later. So we embraced it quickly. And we actually have more people downloading video now via video podcast than we have watching video on the site. And so it’s been huge uptick for us.

Now, that’s apples to oranges because all we know is they’ve downloaded it. We don’t know that they watched it. We know people on the site watch the video. So I’m not saying more people watch video on iPod than on the site but the fact that that many people are downloading it is great for us. And so we’re going to continue to explore any avenue we can to get our video content out there, whether it’s an Apple Set-Top Box or whether it’s working with broadcast organizations to try to get stuff on network TV. We’ve done some stuff with Frontline in the past and some stuff with local TV.

So there’s no platform that we would not be willing to put our video.

[End of Audio]

Washington Post, YouTube, Online Video, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,

Hearst is Transforming Online Video and Itself with Smart Investing in MobiTV, Slingbox, Brightcove and the NewsMarket

Michael Dunn, Vice President, Hearst Interactive Media

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[Start  of Audio]

Michael Dunn: My interest dates way back pre-blogging, just from an online, rich media perspective. The thing that really resonated with me is when RSS2.0 with enclosures became capable, and then publicized through Adam Curry and Dave Winer and blossomed into early stage podcasting.

I created my blog, which is nomadicaudio.com, within a few days of hearing the first – what weren’t even called podcasts at that point.

Andy Plesser: So, Michael, there’s a lot of emerging forms of video blogging coming up. What do you think is the best form to you? Is there one form? How should video be distributed?

Michael Dunn: I think you need to put it out in every format. If you look at what Andrew’s doing at Rocketboom; he makes sure he puts out everything from HD to just view it on his website in flash.

Andy Plesser: Hurst is both a very old media company and a new media company. How does – how does the company evolve and where might it be going, and what’s happening on the division level?

Michael Dunn: Sure. Hurst is made up of a newspaper division, magazine division, broadcast division – that’s Hurst-Argyle – it’s a public company, and business media division, digital media, focused; probably the earliest group that was focused on digital media because their asset was digital, and entertainment, as you mentioned, so ownership and ESPN, AME and so on.

Each of our core divisions has been looking at digital media strategies for a while, and so each of them is entering into it. Newspapers has a very big initiative underway; so does magazines, and from a venture side, which is a group I work in; I work in a venture and technology group that’s at a corporate level.

We look to make investments in companies that can do two things, provide economic return on the investment and also provide new knowledge that we bring into the company, so by investing in an innovative startup company like a Brightcove, we’re going to hopefully both gain economically, but also gain from a perspective of understanding.

Andy Plesser: How do you figure out what to invest in, and what kind of companies are you investing in now?

Michael Dunn: They tend to be companies that don’t fit into one of our traditional divisions, so we’re not gonna get involved in buying a new newspaper or a new TV station or acquisition of a magazine property. We already have businesses that do that naturally.

We look at areas that are on the edge of those divisions, so they’re media-related. We look at them for two basic reasons; financial return to the company and key learning from being involved with those companies, especially early companies as they’re looking at emerging business models.

Andy Plesser: Yeah, why don’t you give us a little bit of rundown on some of the portfolio companies and who they are?

Michael Dunn: Gather is a social network site. Sphere is a blogsphere servicing company. The NewsMarket is a video services company. MobiTV is a mobile TV offering. Brightcove is a digital or Internet TV offering. Sling Media is a different way to consume TV through the network. Pandora’s an online music-sharing site, and Light Orbit is a broadcasting industry services company.

[End of Audio]

Hearst Interactive Media, Micheal Dunn, Wireless Video, Mobile Video, Online Video

As Newspapers Gear up with Online Video Reporting: the Wall Street Journal is Set

Bob Leverone, WSJ.com

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[Start of Audio]

Bob Leverone: Let’s take a look around a little bit of our video facility here. We came down to this space here, eeew, almost a year ago and the whole point here – well, a little over a year ago actually, and – was to go into the Dow Jones newsroom here, in this case the online newsroom, and really become a part of the whole online process here at Dow Jones. What we have in here is an editing suite. In this case we have both an avid editing facility, also a Macintosh Suite with Final Cut Pro on it. Again, you see the Macintosh computers. We’ve really adopted that as a standard in our editing, so we can have a number of people working with desktop editing, and we’ve found it to be very effective, particularly in the broadband area.

The Wall Street Journal reporter is now being gradually equipped with cameras, and those cameras, some are mini DV’s and sometimes they’ll send us the tape. Other times they will do FTP, yes. If you’ve seen any of Walt Mossberg’s videos, which have been very effective for us, he does those directly through his Macintosh, the camera on his Macintosh computer, and he FTP’s them to us. This is a – actually a very highly equipped television studio. It’s all completely digital through and through. It was custom designed for this space. And this is particularly interesting, these small Sony cameras, which are really becoming state of the art now in a lot of broadband situations, because they are small.

They can be controlled through a normal control unit, remote control, and they have a – really a full range of operation with 3CCD technology, which enables you to do what you had to do with a $50,000.00 broadcast camera even just a couple years ago. And that’s our video production facility. I’m Bob Leverone, Dow Jones Online appearing here on Beat TV.

[End of Audio]

Dow Jones , Bob Leverone,  The Wall Street Journal, Online Video Journalism, Bill Grueskin

Associated Press Explores Videoblogs with "Reel City Tales"

Ilana Arazie, Associated Press

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[Start of Audio]

Ilana Donna Arazie: At the AP, I work at the online v­ideo net – I work in the online video network department, but on the side you know that – I was more on the business side of online video, but on my own personal time I was creating my own videos, doing the storytelling online. So I distributed on different sites like Network2 and YouTube and put some videos together and I sent it over to the editors at asap. And I said take a look, this is what I’ve been doing, and they really – they liked the idea and they said, “Would you expose yourself out to our affiliates and tell your stories for us and do a video blog?”

Andy Plesser: So tell us about the blog here at the Associated Press, sort of what role it has within the company.

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, it’s separate. It’s for the asap service.

Andy Plesser: What is that?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Asap is an AP service that started about a year or two ago. It’s a youth driven AP service. They wanted – were able to start something like this ’cause it’s younger and hipper and they could experiment a bit more.

Andy Plesser: So we’re experimenting right now. How do you see success – what do you think a success of a video blog is? How do you gauge that?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Success is – you know I’ve had some newspapers email me and put it up on their home page. I mean that’s a really big deal for newspapers to feature a blog, a video blog, so success is getting feedback from newspaper sites and TV sites saying, “This is great. We’d like to feature it.”

Andy Plesser: You’re observing the scene. What do you think some of the interesting trends that’re emerging in video blogging?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, I mean it’s just really exploding. I mean it’s amazing how many people are just getting involved and creating their own programming. People from grandmothers I’ve seen to regular housewives, so I’m just seeing a lot of every day people starting their own video blogs and doing their own storytelling, or having something to say or share.

 Andy Plesser: Well tell us about the segment about – you called deal breakers. We saw that recently. Tell us how that idea came to be and a little bit how you organized that and what went into producing that spot.

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, I did a story on deal breakers in the city because I just felt meeting so many people here that we’re a very fast-paced society, and we’re also fast about our relationships and how quickly we go through them. So I really wanted to get into and find out what people thought about what their biggest deal breakers are. It just seems like we are so quick to just move on to the next person in our love lives and relationships. So I just went out on the street and talked to people about their deal breakers and it’d be – it’s really interesting to find out why someone would end a relationship and I got a bunch of people to open up about that.

[End of Audio]

Associated Press, Ilana Arazie, Real City Tales

Exclusive: Microsoft and the Associated Press Teaming with Thousands of Newspapers and Broadcasters in New Online Video Network

Jim Kathman, Associated Press

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: I’m at the Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, that’s embarking on a very ambitious plan to syndicate video, not only video that the AP creates but also that’s created by the affiliated newspapers – hundreds of newspapers, TVs and radio stations around the country. It’s a very exciting new program and we’re gonna spend some time looking into that today. Jim, tell me about the online video network and your association with Microsoft. How does that work and tell us a little bit about the progress over the last 12 months.

Jim Kathman: Absolutely. It is – March 1 is actually our one-year anniversary. We launched March 1, 2006 and we’ve grown really exponentially since we launched. The basic premise for it is that AP provides content and distribution network, all of the affiliates that are AP members and subscribers, and we partnered with MSN to do this because, to a large degree, we didn’t necessarily have technology and ad sales capability in-house and most of our members didn’t have that capability in-house either.

So as they were looking to launch and get into the online video business, there was some real concern from some initial conversations with them on we’re not really sure exactly how the technology needs to work and what the hosting and streaming and all of that, so there was a concern on – you know, with their capabilities in that area, at least initially, and there were concerns that even if they were able to drive traffic to their site, how do they monetize it.

So we’ve taken care of that by partnering with MSN and MSN does a great job selling national brand advertising, which they sell for MSNBC and all the MSN properties, so they are really a leader in that space relative to the amount – the brand advertisers they have in their network and the amount of inventory they’re selling and the CPMs that they’re able to get for that inventory.

Andy Plesser: Right now, you guys are basically syndicating content from APTN, from the material that the AP creates. When will you start actually integrating and syndicating content from your affiliates?

Jim Kathman: Yeah, that’s actually where the real value proposition, we think, comes into play and in the first year we’ve been out there, all of the video in the video network, those 40 clips a day, have really been AP video clips that we’ve either gathered ourselves or we’ve partnered with others to get access to that content and the rights to that content.

As we get into what we’re calling Phase 2 – and we’re in beta right now – and we’re in February and we’re in beta and what that’s gonna enable is for our affiliates to upload their own local content. They can upload anything they want – if they have their top beat reporters on the local crime scene going out and interviewing the police commissioner on a major story; they’re able to talk the mayor; or they’re able – they’re interested in having people upload video of local football games or other local events of interest.

So really we’re providing them with the tools and the infrastructure to upload any video that they think is of interest to their audience and use AP’s online video network and that infrastructure to play out and make that video available to their membership.

Andy Plesser: Your affiliates who are uploading video, are those newspapers? Are there radio stations? Are there TV stations?

Jim Kathman: It’s a combination of newspapers and broadcasters, at least a couple of radio stations, a couple of television stations and a wide variety of newspapers in kinda size and scale and strategic interests in video, and they’ve uploaded a wide variety of things from what you would consider to be a more traditional hard news or breaking news story to, like I said, local sports video or a couple of how-to and I think there were some things on gardening and other things that would be of significant interest to a variety of their audience.

[End of Audio]

Associated Press, Microsoft, Newspapers

The Wall Street Journal is Advertising on YouTube (sort of): Paper is Making its Videos Free and Sharable to Bloggers -- Could the WSJ.com Be a Cool Online Media Brand? Beet.TV Interviews Bill Grueskin, Managing Editor

Bill Grueskin, Managing Editor, WSJ.com

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[Start of Audio]

Bill Grueskin: As aggressive as we’ve been on the web with charting for our core content, we feel that there are certain online-only options, like video and audio that really work best in the free space where you get the maximum audience and scale that you can.

Andy Plesser: Are you concerned that the clips will go into some sort of environments that you’re not happy about or have you seen any – or can you tell me are there any anecdotes about where you’ve seen it show up and things that you’ve never really expected? Is this early on?

Bill Grueskin: It’s still pretty early because we’ve actually been making the code not available for a few weeks or maybe a little bit more than that. But we’ve been very interested to see how blogs and other third party sites are gingerly starting to pick up the code, and in terms of worrying about it being misused, to say something, that’s just part of the web. I don’t think that’s gonna be that much of an issue for us. Insofar as it happens, we wanna be aware of it, but I don’t think we’re gonna be policing every use of every video. We’re just – we’re as eager for the traffic as anybody else is, so we wanna be as liberal with it as we can be.

Andy Plesser: Well, thank you on behalf of the bloggers, if I may say video bloggers. Thanks for making like great video available.

Bill Grueskin: Well, we can all work together here, right?

Andy Plesser: So how are you guys kinda getting the reporting operation to be more digital or to use these tools?

Bill Grueskin: You know, it’s been a steady – it’s been a steady climb to basically engage print staff in on line on many different levels. First, it was getting them to provide documents or primary source emails and that kind of thing that would help rend out a story on the website.

Then it became a matter of getting more of them to do columns or participate in forums. More and more reporters are taking digital cameras with them and uploading photos to our office here in New York, so we can do very nice photo galleries.

Then the next big hurdle was getting them to do more spot news, basically to come around to understanding that the news cycles have tightened so much, especially in business news, that the idea of holding a scoop for tomorrow morning’s newspaper is almost impossible these days, and it’s more and more important to break stories online.

And now here’s our next big challenge, which is doing more video. And, you know, as I said, and as I tell people, not every story in the Journal needs or deserves a video; in fact, really, not that many of them do. We’re only looking for a few good videos every day. We aren’t looking to have a video link list, 30, 50, 80 stories a day because a.) We don’t have the bandwidth; but b.) I don’t think our readers have that much time. We want to make every video experience as special as we can make it.

[End of Audio]

YouTube, Wall Street Journal, Bill Grueskin

New York Times to Publish First User-Generated Videos with "How We Met" Wedding Announcements

Nicholas Ascheim, Director of Entertainment, Video & Audio Products, The New York Times

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: It’s pretty awesome that people who are getting married now cannot only have their picture, which is like one of the most important things in a write-up, but also, their video. Tell us about the plans for that.

Nicholas Ascheim: Yeah, we’re very excited about this. It’s our first foray into user generated content. What’s gonna happen is users who submit their write-ups to be included in the weddings pages of the paper will also be asked, if their write-up is, in fact, accepted, will be asked to submit a video. And if they choose to do that, we’ll put it up on the site, and we’re using bi-cuff to enable it so that the technology is ironclad, and we’ll make sure that their videos get seen.

And it’s a really interesting idea because we’ve been wanting to get into user-generated video, and we haven’t quite figured out exactly how to do that on the new side yet. So we figured we would start more in what’s referred to as the back of the book, and we would get something out there to look more playful and, at the same time, engage our users in a way that we think is – is really interesting.

Andy Plesser: That’s great. So what kind of – do you have any idea about the forms or what you’ll be asking people? Will it be sort of the couples? Will it be sort of – will there any editorial guidelines at all? 

Nicholas Ascheim: There won’t be very many editorial guidelines. We’re just gonna ask people to tell their story. They’re called “How We Met,” which is pretty self-explanatory, and we’re really asking people just to tell us exactly that. If they want to include footage from their video – from their wedding – they’re more than welcome to do that. If they wanted to record themselves doing interviews the way that we’ve done in our own produced versions of this, which we call VAS, they’re more than welcome to do that.

The only guidelines we’ll place on it is length, and we haven’t quite determined what that will be yet, but something short enough so that the file sizes aren’t too huge, so this won’t be hard for people to do. And we’ll ask people not to do anything obscene or inappropriate.

Andy Plesser: So what’s the imperative or the motivation for you guys in embracing consumer-generated content? How come you made this decision, which is kind of an interesting one? I mean, it’s a baby step, but it’s very significant. Why have you guys made this step?

Nicholas Ascheim: Several reasons. The first is that we wanna engage our users. We wanna – we have a unique audience for the New York Times, both in print and online, and we wanna make sure that we give them more tools to play with at the site, and we wanna make sure we give them a richer experience. At the same time, it’s a great way for us to build out our content library, and we think that it’s something that we wanna do further down the road in other areas, so this is, as you said, it’s a baby step. We think it’s more of a toddler step, that we’re actually trying to see how – we’re using it as an experiment, really testing the waters and seeing if this is something we can expand later into other areas.

[End of Audio]

The New York Times, Nicholas Ascheim

Washington Post Set to Grow Online Business with "Hyperlocal" Publishing, Community Generated Content and through Acquisitions -- 21 State Attorneys General Foaming over Over Bud.TV, Ad Age Reports

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine interviews Mark Whitaker of Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive

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[Start of Audio]

Jeff Jarvis: I’m Jeff Jarvis, blogger at BuzzMachine.com, here for Beat TV and I’m with Mark Whitaker who’s the new head of Ventures Digital Future, the Fate of Journalism at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive. So how are you enjoying the new gig?

Mark Whitaker: It’s great. It’s been a lot of fun.

Jeff Jarvis: Are you in your new role mainly going to start or buy innovation?

Mark Whitaker: We’re looking at both. We think we can generate some things internally with our existing talent by partnering on the content side with other people. But, you know, a lot of people coming to us with acquisition possibilities and we’re looking at all of it.

Jeff Jarvis: We have a problem in this industry, in the newspaper and news industry of a lack of innovation, I’d say. That’s why Martin Nisenholtz started a lab at the New York Times Company. I think it’s a woeful picture. Can we innovate in the news business? Is it possible? If you’re gonna score our innovation as an industry, at 100 percent would be a proper amount, where are we now as an industry?

Mark Whitaker: Well, I think – I think you have to make a couple of bets and I think one of the interesting things about what the Post is doing in asking me to do this job is, in a way, it’s a kind of counter-hedge against the old media strategy of just investing in your existing properties, looking at new properties, new opportunities, new ways of doing things. As you know, the Washington Post bought Slate a couple of years ago. We’ve learned a lot from them and their experience as being an all online publication. We just hired Rob Curley who is probably, you know, the most interesting web developer in the world of local –

Jeff Jarvis: And Adrian Holovaty too.

Mark Whitaker: And Adrian Holovaty who is probably, you know, the master right now at interactive relational databases and so forth. So we have – we’re bringing a lot of people in-house who, I think, have some interesting ideas. And then, of course, the cross-pollination and synergy between us batting around ideas is also very exciting.

Jeff Jarvis: Washington Post Online has been really a leader and you’ve done wonderful things, WPNI as a group. What do you think the best frontiers are now going forward. Don’t talk about a few of the things you’ve already done. What are the best frontiers that you see for news online in your work?

Mark Whitaker: Well, one of the things, which I know that you talk about very publicly, is I think there’s a real opportunity in what we call hyper-local content. And we’re obviously focused on being the best at that in the Washington area and I think we’re gonna learn some lessons there that might be applicable elsewhere. I think that, you know, I think online – the web is all about passions. And I think you have to figure out what people’s passions are and connect with them there and then sort of build out from there. So we’re looking in terms of new opportunities at content, vertical niches and building websites around those and also around very specific audience where, I think, who are looking for meeting places to come together online.

Jeff Jarvis: A lot of folks have tried local and have failed at various – I’ve made experiments that didn’t work when I was at Advance, back fence – over your back fences is going through some changes right now. There have been some others. What do you think the secret sauce is, if you’re willing to say, to what’s gonna make hyper-local start to click?

Mark Whitaker: Well, I think Curley, you know, has been very successfully at it and he’s teaching us a lot of lessons. I think a big part of it is consumer generated content and allowing that in and allowing that in an interesting way, that that doesn’t get totally out of control, but makes, you know, the users and the community feel like they have a stake. I think mobile actually is a big part of it. And increasingly will be so as people get, you know, their information and their alerts and so forth, you know, through their cell phones and text messaging and so forth. You know, I think they’re are passion points locally around sports, around entertainment, around local politics. I think, you know, those are the things you need to focus on.

[End of Audio]

Mark Whitaker, Newsweek Interactive, Jeff Jarvis 

Mainstream Media Must go Multimedia or Perish, says Tony Perkins of AlwaysOn -- "Startup.com," Documentary about the Dotcom Boom is On Google Video

Tony Perkins, Publisher, Upside

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[Start of Audio]

Tony Perkins: Well a really interesting thing has gone on. We’ve seen a whole new generation teach us about why the internet is actually really cool. And there are two things that have come out of the last couple years. One, people like to post and share information and they like to be able to see each other and be seen on the internet. So, if this is the case, which is being proved now in overwhelming numbers, media brands need to adjust to this new reality. The way they adjust to it is they don’t just pump content down your throat on a one-way basis. What they do is they pump out content, but they also aggregate other content, throw it all up for discussion and have the courage to do video, to do audio and really create a multimedia environment. Because if you don’t have those three components, interactivity, community and multimedia on your network – your online network for the future, as a media business, you’re not gonna survive. It’s as simple as that.

Well, we’ve just relaunched AlwaysOn. First and foremost it now looks professional. It’s cleaner, it’s been designed by our art director, it’s fully functioning, but the real power is that we’re introducing several sub-networks which cover green technology, venture capital and money, global technology, entertainment and media. So we’re gonna be pumping a lot more content. We’re also starting a daily video program with the illustrious Adriana who we just hired and is video blogging here at this conference. And so, again, we’re trying to practice the principles that we preach, that you have to be community driven, you have to be multimedia throughout and just open it up for discussion and debate.

Andy Plesser: Speaking of which – Adriana – hey! Tony, you’ve got to do your intro. Who is this lady?

Tony Perkins: And here we are because –

Adrianna Gascoigne: Oh, Beat-TV – my favorite.

Tony Perkins: Because I’m spending way too much time holding conferences, I’m getting very exhausted and, you know, I believe in the new generation and that’s not me so we brought on Adriana to be the new face for AlwaysOn and I think you’ll agree that’s not a bad face for our AMEs to tune in to.

Adrianna Gascoigne: _________ hard pace to follow. I mean –

Andy Plesser: Are you gonna be ___ making ____ so tell us about the video on AlwaysOn and what you’re gonna be doing too.

Adrianna Gascoigne: Well, we’re basically covering all the conferences so OnHollywood, AlwaysOn, OnMedia, Java etcetera, etcetera. And we hope to do a daily video blog and launch that pretty soon, just giving the news and just tech updates and things like that, bring on some CEOs do to come CO profiles and just, you know, make it exciting, make it fun.

Tony Perkins: This girl – this girl’s got come cojones.

Adrianna Gascoigne: We like to call them cojones. I’m kidding.

Tony Perkins: That’s why we hired her.

Andy Plesser: This is a family show damn it.

Adrianna Gascoigne: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Andy Plesser: And Tony, thanks man.

Tony Perkins: Alright. 

Andy Plesser: And I just want to say on behalf of the audience it’s great to be associated with AlwaysOn and Tony and this conference and the presence of our Beat TV clips on AlwaysOn have been fantastic. So wish you guys were here. Alright. See you later.

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Tony Perkins, AlwaysOn, Adrianna Gascoigne, Startup.com