Involving Niche Audiences
Presenter: Retha Hill, Vice President, Content Development
Chief Editorial Officer, BET Interactive

MS. SCHAFFER: Now, for Retha Hill.

RETHA HILL: All right. Thank you. Sorry for the technical difficulties. I’m sure all of
you have been to bet.com, which is the online service of Black Entertainment Television.
Essentially what I wanted to talk about is how we have to be very creative in getting our users or our network viewers to participate on bet.com principally because our audience is very young. With MTV, BET, VH1 to a certain degree you have younger people, Generation X, who check out the network and who come to bet.com and, as we know from the studies, these people are notoriously not engaged in traditional newspapers or network news.

What we try to do when it comes to news and newsgathering is to involve our audience as much as we can up front when we’re about to do a story. A good example, which, of course, I cannot show you, last week when we were at the Democratic Convention, one of the things that we do is what we call a DIY, do-it-yourself, where we post on the web site and then we have a throw on the BET network for people to come to the web site and ask their own questions.

So, it’s an opportunity for them to kind of be at whatever the main event is and to get some of their questions answered. And then we have our producers take those questions to a relevant person and get taped video answers to those questions.

We do this for entertainment reporting as well as news reporting. So, at the Democratic Convention, for example, we had people send in questions they wanted to ask the powers-that-be about the Democratic party platform, and then we tracked down people, such as Al Sharpton, representatives of Congress, party leaders. and got them on tape answering those questions for our users.

What we try to do is to have them respond directly to those people. So, say Mary Lou, 28, asked: What are you going to do about racial profiling in the country? We would try to track down some people to talk about that and why that answer is not a part of the Democratic Party platform.

That’s proven to be very effective because again we’re using the power of the network to say: Go to bet.com, participate in the story by getting your questions up front and we close the loop by getting people who are in a position to answer those questions and then we post that on the site. We do that for news events and for entertainment. If we’re going on a junket, for example, with Halle Berry or Denzel Washington or Spike Lee or someone like that, it’s very effective because people want to come back to see if their question was answered.

Another thing that we’ve been able to do successfully is – when we’re embarking on one of the major projects like our year-long look at the African-American family or a project where we looked at the impact of crack cocaine on the African-American community -- before we even start our reporting, we try to get some views from our users for them to tell us their story, tell us what they want to see as part of the series.

So, we’ll solicit through message boards -- with the crack project, for example: Has anyone in your family or your circle been affected by crack? Or do you know people who were affected by crack? You have to remember that crack cocaine kind of came through the brown and black community like a tornado 10 or 15 years ago and just completely changed everything from the music industry to children, to families. It tore relationships asunder. Before crack was definitely moving forward, we were having so many more people join the African-American middle class and then crack kind of came along in the early '80s and arrested that development to a certain degree.

So, we had hundreds and hundreds of people sending us these stories and not just like, “yeah, uh-huh, people are on crack,” but really going into detail about how it affected that uncle or how it affected their family or how it affected their neighborhood.
From there, it helped us to plan out our project and we did reports on different aspects. Again, how the music industry changed. You know, many of the top hip-hop and some of the R&B artists came out of the crack gang, as they say. They got their start, some of them, slinging rocks and then they used money they made to sustain themselves in the music industry to see if they could do this rap thing.

Then, from there they were able to go legit.

Sort of similar to the Kennedys with the bootlegging of booze. They used that to fund their otheractivities. Let’s know our history here. And so many of the clothes that young people wear, of course, we all know the stories of how they emulated the way people in the jails wore the baggy clothes because you didn’t have a belt in a jail because it’s considered a weapon that you could commit suicide. So, the clothes that we’re still wearing to this day came out of that whole thing.

We looked at, for example, crack babies. You hear a lot of about crack babies and what would happen. We went back and examined to see if these children who were born with crack in their system did indeed turn out to be psychopaths or are they disrupting school systems across the country or what happens with them. And a lot of the mainstream media didn’t go back to look at that.

We found of course that some children are not doing too well, have attention deficit disorders and other issues, but we also found children who are doing very well, honor roll students and so forth. So, by using the voices and the stories and the suggestions of our users we were able to do this project that won some awards, won NABJ, Scripps-Howard and the Nancy Dickerson Whitehead, one of their awards for special projects.

So, we can’t be as hyper-local as Mary Lou although I’m very fascinated in her project. I’m wondering if that will work on a larger national scale with the black community and the Latino community. I’m going to explore it to see if I can do something like that with bet.com, knowing that it won’t be local, but it’s still a community, just to get people to contribute because I know they’re in our message boards contributing what’s going on in their community, so how can I elevate that?

When we look at the issue of community we try to involve our users as much as possible to direct not only our reporting on bet.com, but to also feed that back to the network and help them decide what’s important.

What can they do with special reports that will resonate with their fairly young audience.

A huge thing with any Internet site, but particularly on bet.com, is our message boards. We realize that we’re not the end-all and be-all when it comes to a story, whether it’s Kobe Bryant or the war in Iraq. They just get a lot of feedback from our users: What do you think should happen? Where do you want us to go next with a story? We put message boards up at the end of every story that get hundreds and hundreds of posts from people.

These are the voices that are often not reflected in a lot of newspapers, even newspapers that reach large urban audiences and black audiences. And we really invite people to debate the news, whatever tangent they want to go off on. It’s amazing, I go down into the message boards, looking at the level of sophistication and discussion and what people are really interested in, and it always amazes me. You read the reports that folks are not engaged.

Well, as Mary Lou and Jan said, they are engaged, but they’re just engaged in a different way. You know, again, unfortunately I don’t have visuals to show you, but I think bet.com is a really good example of how an Internet division of a major company can help lead the way in terms of how the older media, the broadcast division in this case, can change the way they do things.

Jan was nice enough to give us a grant to do the black family project. It’s so psyched the network that we were able to reach out to the community, really tap into what they think. We were doing this first ever national poll of African-Americans, the largest national poll of African-Americans, I think, in some time on a range of issues. And the network has started doing this more and more.

We just did a big national poll on political attitudes leading into the Democratic Convention. We are going to release a poll next week looking at African-Americans’ views on health and exercise and low carb diets and all this stuff that you just never read about but people think about it if you’re not white and skinny and blonde.

So, the network is so psyched and we’ve been able to lead the way in reaching out to this community that so many other media outlets ignore. So, I’m going to stop there.

MS. SCHAFFER: Well done. Do you have a URL you want to share with people who might want to look at this stuff?

MS. HILL: Sure, bet.com is the URL for BET Interactive. So, when you go to bet.com we have all the channels -- news and women’s and entertainment and music. We’re really trying to do some innovative things. One of the things we are looking at is the whole blogging phenomenon. We have areas where people can post their photos. We have areas where artists can post their music, integrating that into the network. So, we’re really open and we’ve been able to try and be more innovative, to have wireless voting on issues that are of concern to the African-American community. We’re pushing it and because BET is a smaller network, they’re able to move a little bit faster than some of these other larger networks in terms of “Let’s try it. “ Questions? Yes.

SPEAKER: Surveys are probably one of the easiest ways to form audience opinions, yet they can also be not very easy – with cookies and what not, how they effectively can go back into time or whatever. How do you use the surveys?

MS. HILL: We do the unscientific surveys. We put them on the site and say that this is an unscientific survey. Then the largest surveys that I’m talking about were scientific surveys where you would find the entire news side did polls of the viewership and we’ll spend about a night talking about the election, Bush and Kerry...

SPEAKER: So those are phone polls?

MS. HILL: Yes.

SPEAKER: Do you have any bleed over from bet.com that helps you to understand what kinds of activities your consumers like interacting with and what the outcomes are of those categories? And does that help inform decisions at the network level?

MS. HILL: Yes, we’re starting to do more of that collecting of data. But we’re finding that since bet.com launched in February, 2000, that there has been a corresponding increase in viewership on the network including some of the news channels. When we were doing the government rules project, every Tuesday we would do a segment on the Nightly News, and then there was information on the web site, and during the weekday you will see that spike on Tuesday in terms of viewership going up on Tuesday Nightly News from people who had heard it. You know, that was important for them to see how the dot com was working.

SPEAKER: What is the relationship, if any, between your reporting side and your technology side?

MS. HILL: We have about 45 people currently. I think at one point we were up to 70 people. And you said the technology?

SPEAKER: Yes, what’s the relationship between the reporting side and the development of your interactive component or is there any?

MS. HILL: Right. Well, the programmers are part of the bet.com, BET interactive staff. So, we have a group of programmers, as well as our graphic designers -- some of them are programmers, as well – and we sit down and we develop these projects together. One of the things that I’m in the process of doing is looking forward over the next six months to twelve months. What are some of the new applications out there that we want to try and either build ourselves or buy and customize, like the one Mary Lou is using.

Would it make sense to buy that and modify it or to try to build something ourselves? Of course, that would be impossible but some other things we have built in-house.

MS. SCHAFFER: Thank you very much. Now let’s hear from Sree.