Live-blogging this RTNDA session. The description is, “Your customers are changing the way they get their news. So why does your newsroom still act and look as it did 10 or 20 years ago?” Steve Safran is moderating…
Packed room, standing room only. Clearly, this web thing is catching on.
Caroline Bleakley, news online manager, KLAS-TV and lasvegasnow.com: Pageviews up 223% in the last year. WorldNow. Notice their URL is not the TV station brand. “We wanted a bigger footprint. We wanted to be more than being a TV station’s website.” Just launched six Las Vegas neighborhood sections in hyperlocal effort. Adding new web positions in the newsroom including a reporter covering “the very, very local events that are not covered in your newsroom” for a community guide.
Bleakley continues, our web producers are very aggressive, not waiting for reporters to feed back information. Steve Safran asks, “would you change that if you could.” Yes, she says. Better to have more reporter interaction. “You have to keep the information flow moving.” She says they send out daily metrics reports, “keeps it top of mind for the newsroom what the audience” is clicking on.
Decisions that have “paid dividends” at KLAS: Hired director of digital media, strict management of P&L (separate from newsroom), innovation mindset, people investment. For example on the last, they found an assignment editor who has his own blog, so gave him a “homicide blog” for Clack County. Also has a map, crime prevention tips, etc. Has become an online memorial of sorts, getting story ideas through comments on it. “Look in your newsroom, there can sometimes be hidden gems” for the web.
Now Adam Symson, vice president/interactive, E.W. Scripps Television Station Group, Cincinnati. Says they’re on Inergize and Dayport. “Our vendors are partners,” not just technology providers. Talking about balancing vendors or owning your own content management system. “A vendor relationship is very different than this notion of pure partner.”
Symson, continued. “We are efforting being the news and information leaders in our markets…” but still with a TV mindset. A lot decisions stations have made have been workarounds. Says the burden lies with news directors to enact change. “If we have to keep layering on resources” then we’re in trouble. Web producers “should be producing” not doing everything including covering stories.
Now Marian Pittman, news director, WSB-TV, Atlanta. “If everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.” Our website is our other channel. No longer the red-headed stepchild. Reporters send in scripts, photographers feed in video, there is no workaround.
Symson: talking about newspapers with video cameras on the streets. “As soon as newspapers realize it’s not about features,” but breaking news… “if we don’t do this before we do, they’ll eat us for lunch.”
Pittman: “Technology is changing so fast…” if you people aren’t learning fast enough, you’re in trouble. We’ve had to reinvent our (video) editors. Put in Avid editing a year ago or so. Recreated workflow using one person: a “pre-production news editor” as a liason between graphics and editing using Avid Symphony, Photoshop and After Effects. Works on a lot of VOs to add some spice. She talks with producers for vision on opens and other effects. “Keeps your look under control.” She also leads Avid training in the newsroom.
Taking questions from the audience, and the first question is how to do all this with limited resources. It’s all how you prioritize it, says Pittman.
Great question: What makes you different with local news/information online than other TV station sites and other newspapers? “How we make ourselves different, that’s a challenge for everyone, I’m not really sure (how),” said Bleakley.
Man from Fox Interactive Media (missed name) says the key is to find people in the newsroom are get excited by the web and get them involved, to help spread change from within.
Another person from the audience told his GM that if they build a site he likes, it will fail. “You said that?” Safran said. “Take the microphone!”
Bleakley points out that a big chunk of their online audience doesn’t watch TV.
Someone just asked about legal issues/reputation of user content submitted online. (Geesh. These are the same questions from two years ago.) “For the most part people police themselves,” says Bleakley. Pittman adds that WSB did a lot of policing on the Michael Vick story.
More questions of the same old thing. One asks, do you really believe that your website will be the place where most people get their news and where most the money is generated in five years? Ok, next.
Here’s a good question, about high anchor salaries and the new realities of local TV news. “Some salaries will be frozen, some will be cut drastically,” says Pittman. There will be a “two-tiered newsroom” with a few very valuable talent and then others coming up. There will be some talent that don’t accept that they won’t be worth that anymore and they’ll end up leaving.
Safran is talking about the TMZ model of covering news. “Their TV show is a summary of what they’ve been reporting all day online.” That’s the new model. (He just gave me credit for this line.)
End of session