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Transcript for Monday,
September 15, 2003 Panel #2: Dynamic Interactions -Help People Actively Engage in Public IssuesOne expected, but still nice surprise, was the type of people who
used "The Balancer" were somewhat different from our typical
radio and, even, Web audience--much younger audience.
Generally, just 10 percent of typical public radio listeners are
30 or younger. Forty-three
percent of "The Balancer" users were 30 or younger.
Now, obviously the medium, computer use, has something to do with
that. Also, we were reaching
the 0 to 18. We were reaching
a lot of school-age children, because teachers bought into this in a very
big way, and we were pleased with that, because that's a group that public
radio almost never reaches. But
the large number of 19-to-30-year olds fits with a notion that I hold
that this group wants involvement in all aspects of their lives, whether
it's managing their finances online, or actually managing and being involved
in the news that they get and helping shape the news.
That there is a new ethic that's occurring where people expect
to be able to get involved in a little bit of everything, from shopping,
managing their health care choices, all of that. And we think part of the energy we're trying to tap into is
this shift in a younger generation.
From user comments in the popular budget choices, we got an outside perspective on our coverage, which is part of what we were trying to do, and a sense of the important issues that weren't being covered. Heidi talked about that as being a very explicit goal to get a sense of what isn't being covered, so it was similar to the "Two Cents" project in that regard. A popular choice on "The Balancer," for example: as we dug into the data, we put every response into a database. And what was different between this being a kind of cool simulation--mainly a calculator on the Web--and being, what we call, interactive journalism, or making our journalism smart, is every answer went into a database along with the demographics we collected. And we ran a bunch of analyses to try to find trends in it, going into it knowing this is self-selected, this is a survey, we can't report any of this. We never reported any percentage on the air. What we were hoping to do is to get some information from outside the editorial table, as it were, and try to shape our thinking about how to cover the budget process. So, when we heard that a lot of people were attracted by the Oregon plan, we actually did a very early story on it, and then Democrats ended up proposing it, putting it on the table. I'm not saying that we were linked to that, but it was an issue that no one had been covering that we were able to cover early, and we did a couple other pieces that related very much to what we were finding in "The Balancer." Taxes were a huge issue. Eight-five percent of those who came on
"The Balancer," chose some sort of tax-raising option against
all polls in the state. We actually created a poll based on this to test
our hunches and got some surprising results in a poll with the Pioneer
Press, which was that, if you ask people "Do you want to balance
the budget by cutting or by raising taxes," over 50 percent say,
"Only by cutting. No new taxes." But
when we actually post visitor trade-offs as we did in the "Budget
Balancer," we found 70-to-80 percent of people, on very specific
issues said, "I'd rather raise taxes than cut in this area." And we actually found out the types of
taxes they were willing to raise and that added to the budget debate. We were actually able to advance the budget
debate but beyond the ideological "no new taxes." or "let's
increase taxes to pay for spending."
We've gone on to continue engaging this group. We've tried something wildly different. We did a series on obesity, and we sent an e-mail to "The Budget Balancer" [participants]--as we have about 5,000 in our database--and we got a 2 percent response, which wasn't huge, but people shared personal stories. They also shared their expertise, which is part of what we're looking for. Identify yourself if you have knowledge in this area. At the end of the budget debate, we sent out a survey that we've created--kind of an interactive survey form that we use quite regularly now. We sent it to the group, and we got an 18 percent response rate. This is the result of one individual survey. We've blocked out the names and identifying information, and we use these to create reports that go to the editors and the reporters to give them a sense of what's going on. But 18 percent of this 5,000 database responded to that, and we were very pleased with that. We have this current survey on the health
of American democracy, and this is being used across the country as part
of a nationwide public radio collaboration that we'll be, from November
3-9, looking at the health of American democracy. So, we've had stations across the country
using it, feeding into a national database, and also each individual station
gets information from the users that click through their station site
to get to the survey. And
we are doing other interactive events, not necessarily online. We were just at the Minnesota State Fair
pulling people into a glass booth. I've run out of time, so we won't talk
about that. But we're experimenting
with a lot of different avenues
The biggest challenge for us has been
that this involves a change in the newsroom culture--a change from editors
and reporters thinking that they're the arbiters and they're the ones
whose great judgment determines what the public needs to know, to a sense
that the public's got a wealth of information that informs our opinion
inside the newsroom, that we then use our editorial judgement to determine
what goes back out. But it's
a change in the way we think about it.
Happy to answer questions. [Applause] Michael Skoler:
A lot of skepticism mainly on the "we're-overworked-and-this-is-more-work"
side, but as we've done each experiment, more reporters have gotten involved,
and this stuff makes reporters look good.
On that obesity study, one reporter did this beautiful piece that
he found the central character from the 179 responses that we got back
to that survey. We sent two
hosts out to the state fair, and we had this steady stream of people coming
in to answer specific questions about what's changing in your neighborhood,
what's working and what's broken in the schools. And they told other people
in the newsroom. We thought they were kind of silly going to the state
fair where people hold their hotdog on a stick and beer in the other hand. You're going to get them into a glass booth to talk about issues?
As they reported to the newsroom each time people are getting excited,
and we're finding that we're creating champions one at a time. Jan Schaffer: Great. Questions,
audience? Female audience member: What was the cost again? You said you did it in three-and-a-half weeks? Michael Skoler:
We did it in three-and-a-half weeks, which raised the cost. The external costs for the software were
about $12,000. We had a lot
of people in it, and we didn't tally up the internal costs, because that
could come back to haunt you, but that's the money out of pocket. And a lot of it was, because it was rush,
we had to pay more. [Male audience member asks question indistinctly]
Michael Skoler:
This was my biggest fear was that just everyone would start criticizing
us on every side, and what we did is went through a process of engaging
key leaders across, not just political parties but a part of the spectrum
of political parties, as well as key agency heads in reviewing "The
Budget Balancer" before it went public.
And people identified for us language that they said was biased,
and if we agreed with them, we changed it.
And they had caught things, and it's mainly in the consequence
boxes, because options are about "these are the options on the table,"
but it was the consequence boxes that were a problem.
And we tried to keep it to rather factual statements about what
this could mean. And in some
cases we'd actually say, it could mean 10,000 teachers unemployed or a
cut of 5 percent in the school library, but we tried to explain, because
we didn't know how those choices would be made.
But we tried to give a sense of the magnitude of the cuts. And we didn't get complaints on it, acouple, but not what I
was fearing. Yeah? Male audience member: So, you didn't report it at all? We didn't report on any of the results
from "The Balancer." When we had people that came to us from
"The Balancer" who we interviewed because of some interesting
comments, we mentioned that they'd filled out this Balancer outline, but
we didn't report the results. Male audience member: Think there's funds for this topic? Michael Skoler:
We learned. You know,
our aim was at making us smarter at choosing stories. A big argument at the newsroom was, "How can you do this?
It's a survey. People can do it more than once. You can't trust any of this. Don't even do it." And my argument was, you know, we need
a way to actually get some information.
Everyday we get hunches about what the real story is, and we discuss
them at editorial meetings. Let's
get some other input, and let's actually make sure that we have reporters
or polls that go out to test the hunches we're getting before we report
on them. Yeah? [Male audience member asks question indistinctly]
Michael Skoler:
Two. What we really
wanted was to have this deeply affect our journalism. It affected some of it, particularly the poll. We were able, because of this, to change
poll questions in a way that we wouldn't have thought of before to get
at this underlying ambivalence that hadn't been reported. But I think the other important thing
is we were wondering whether or not people would be willing to engage
with us in this way, take the time to do it, continue to engage with us
later. And we're thrilled that we've got these
5,000 folks who we are now sending surveys to--you know, at varying intervals
(we don't want to burn them out). And we are trying to get more information, all of what "Two
Cents" project's doing so that we can start focusing e-mail surveys
on people's particular interests.
But that was the other big lesson was that people are willing to
engage with us in that way. Jan Schaffer: Question from Dan over here. Michael Skoler:
Yeah? Dan Gillmor: You mentioned a couple of times teachers taking this seriously. Is there any sign of organized effort
among any interest groups like teachers, for example, to skew the results
in any way? Michael Skoler:
No, and that was one reason we avoided ever talking about the results,
because, you know, if people felt like any reporting would come of this,
any benefit would come of it, we couldn't. There were no signs that this
was happening. We did a lot
of on-air radio promotion, and the spikes related to the promotion. We didn't see any unusual spikes, but
we can't be sure of it. And,
as a result, we're skeptical of the results. The most we had to lose, I felt, on that
was that we would tell a reporter, "We're seeing this interesting
thing. Go check it out, go
use normal journalism techniques to find out if there's really a story
there. So we might lose
some reporter time, but the notion was that none of the information we
were getting told us anything like a poll. It merely identified some topics that
might not be covered that we would then need to check out, and we're still
really sensitive about not viewing this as an honest pulse. It's more,
"surprise us with things that we'll check out and see if it's true."
Thank you. Female audience member: This actually is a serious question: Speaking of on-air, have
your on-air [fund-raisers asked for access to the participants]? Michael Skoler:
We anticipated that problem, and our membership department did
ask, and we said very explicitly that the names of people that came in
and the participants would stay in the newsroom.
We created this as a separate database. We even installed all sorts of protection. When we wanted to find out how many of
our current members--the crossover between our membership list, people
who gave money to Minnesota Public Radio, and those who are using it and
membership said, "Oh send the list over and we'll compare it for
you." We had them send their data, and in the
newsroom, we did that comparison.
But that's been a very important thing, and every chance we get,
we say,"This will not leave the newsroom.
You will not be solicited by us or anyone else." But that's a huge concern, and there's
a danger that at any point as we try to build this awareness, that if
people get convinced--just because they happen to get a direct-mail solicitation
after they've signed up, they'll associate the two even if there is no
link. So, we're very concerned
about that. Jan Schaffer: That's a good question. Thanks, Michael. Very
good. [Applause] Jan Schaffer: Ashley Wells and the MSNBC.com team have created, what is probably
the most multi-multimedia project that we have seen around, with a lot
of bells and whistles, on engaging the public. Actually, we'll show you. I will mention while he's setting up
that all of our presenters today are either finalists or semi-finalists
in the Batten Awards. We
could've gone all day showing you neat stuff. Ashley Wells, Senior Interactive Producer,
MSNBC.com: Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate being here and having an
audience to tell about what we've created, and that was "The Big
Picture." How many of
you have seen this on our site at all, anywhere? Okay, quite a few of you. For those who don't know, "The Big Picture" is our
three-show broadband experiment where we try to do a lot of merging of
media. Where we combine slideshows
and videos and interactive sidebars and votes and feedback, all kind of
in the same seamless place--the dream, "the Holy Grail of convergence."
And they're topical. It's a very large, almost TV-like window,
and they're topical on "Big Picture" subjects like the context
of the story surrounding Iraq, or--we did one on Oscars, which is more
entertainment-kind-of-focused thing, seeing if we got a different reaction
from that particular audience. So,
what I'd like to do is kind of recreate the thought process that we came
up with in making this, and I'll just kind of walk you through it. It'll hopefully be pretty fast and fairly
basic.
How many of you are familiar with MSNBC's
site at all? I mean, does
this page look familiar at all?
Oh, there are a lot of you.
Well, we've got a lot of things on some of these ongoing news stories.
The latest detail is the story, but off it you've got a video and
a vote, interactive features and slideshows, and all of those things. Which is great, because all those things
put the story in context and allow you to dig deeper and get engaged with
the latest news. But, if
you're like me, you look at the story and your eye goes all over the place.
Do I read the lead or do I watch the video first?
Do I vote? Do I have
enough information to make a decision yet?
What's this interactive sidebar?
And so my eye just jets all over the place. And maybe all that information on the
page, aside from the story, would be great as its own package of context
for those people who come into the story, maybe, halfway through it. They
didn't get yesterday's news, or the day before, and they can't keep up
with all of it. So, they
need someone to tell them, here's the basics of what's going on. What if we took all that stuff out of
the page, ditched the story, and just started with a line. We thought: "What if we start putting
this stuff and arranging it along the line in kind of a sequential order?
Maybe we'd start with a video and then we give you some more details
and we ask you to enter in your opinion or something like that?"
Sounds pretty good, but inevitably the problem is that you don't
have all the content to make a complete picture, so you have to say, "Mm,
what can we add to this? What
original journalism can we create at MSNBC.com to make this a more complete
picture? And so maybe we'd
add a little original video talkback segment. And maybe we'd create an animated map and we add that in the
sequence where it kind of makes sense. Well, all those things are in a different format.
Some of them are HTML, some are video,
some are Flash. So,
"Hmm, guess we've got to reformat those things to all be the same
size dimension and maybe the same look and feel so that it's all consistent--it's
all comfortable and approachable.
Well, a video is a very different experience than voting or clicking
an interactive sidebar.
How do you get people to know when they
should sit back and watch and when they should grab hold of their mouse
and participate and think about things?
Well, maybe we add an audio track and stitch this together as a
narrative arc--sounds pretty good--like a narrator. And we're starting to get, maybe, a little
like television here, which is okay because we're half NBC. And speaking of NBC, they actually have
a lot of anchoring talent, people who are paid really well to communicate,
not just in audio but visually on the screen. They make eye contact, and they're good at getting the message
across." So we thought:
"All right, maybe we take the idea of an anchor and we put all of
this content together in a sequence.
We put it in a big window, almost like a television screen. And what else can we learn from television?
Well, how about if we made the content larger, because larger is
often more compelling? And we're going for a broadband audience
only. This is an experiment. We're going to see how people use it--so
we'll make it as big as our bandwidth can afford. And the other idea is, "Maybe we
give it a name, we brand it, and we give similar graphics across the board,
so that if we're going to do more than these, you come into the second
one and you've seen the first one; you're going to know what to expect. Just like a TV show, it's got a name.
We want to call it something obvious like "The Big Picture,"
because that's what it is on the topic.
What else can we do that TV can't do,
because we're the Web? Well,
how about we put the rundown of all the segments that are in this little
interactive show all in one easy 0place?
Tells you where you're at, and you can click ahead to the other
ones, because online, you never know, some people don't have that much
time. They're going to want to go straight to
the things they know, or maybe they've seen this before and they came
off a story about Israel, and they wanted to know how that related to
the conflict with Iraq. They
remember seeing something in here, and they want to skip right down to
it. People are approaching this from all different
perspectives. You really
can't control it, so you might as well allow for it. What else could we do with the Web?
Well, you know when you're watching TV and people say, "Go
online for more information at this site," and I can never remember
to write them down or by the end of the program, I never remember to do
it anyway. But since we're online here, we can say, "Hey, there'
some content that we have that's related to what's going on right here.
That's down at the bottom next to the
anchor, or it could even be in the front--the full screen. But if you see it and you think, "You
know, that would be interesting, but I don't really want to interrupt
the narrative of what I'm going through right now. So you can click a button. You can save it off to the side. And at the end, a list of everything that
you saved that's related during the show that you might want to spend
some time with afterward would be there for you in the place where it
makes most sense--after the show is over.
And wouldn't it be nice if my television could allow me to get
more than, let's say, a 12-second sound byte out of one of these guys. I mean, we shot the video; they talked
a lot. So maybe the user
can participate in the show and they can ask follow-up questions, and
if they do, once the person's stopped talking, he just continues talking
about whatever you just asked him.
It'll pop up at the bottom there, and all of a sudden, the show
gets longer and kind of expands on the fly but without any kind of interruption
or pause or awkwardness. That would be, I think, really interesting
if my TV did that.
The other thing I'd like my TV to do
is ask me my opinion, because you ever watch television and all of this
information's kind of washing over you constantly, and your eyes kind
of glaze over and you kind of zone out?
And you don't really think about things, because you don't have
a chance? The show just keeps on going. So, how about we put a vote in there?
In fact, how about we put lots of votes in here?
After every few segments, we'll ask people what they thought of
something--break down the issues.
It gives them a chance to digest what they just saw and react to
it, by pushing "yes," "no," or "unsure"
on the screen. You know, for those who have a really strong reaction, maybe
they should write us. And
if they did, maybe we should put it at the bottom of the screen so that
people could see what others are thinking and that the people who enter
in comments could become part of the show.
It's, in a sense, everyone's show, not just something we produced. One of the things TV doesn't do that
kind of bothers me is, if you want to know how each of these countries
stood on the Iraq war or inspections, as it was at the time, they could
never record all of that information.
They could never have an anchor talking about all those things. It would take five, ten, twelve minutes, and they have a timeslot
that they've got to fill. Well,
on the Internet, we don't really. I mean, people have a limited attention span to a certain degree,
but we can have the anchor lead into this and say, "Now, we've just
told you a lot of information. If
you want to see how these countries stand on these issues, go ahead and
take a few moments to click around.
Now, if you don't want to click around, it's just going to move
on after a brief time window, but if you do start clicking, it'll wait
for you as long as it takes. Then,
when you're done, just kind of moves on. You could get really creative and maybe
even create a game, an interactive kind of simulation. Here's something we did with the show
we did on the Oscars where you'd play the role of a Hollywood film producer,
and you've got an Uncle Murray who's going to help you learn the ropes,
and so you make some decisions along the way.
And the game is actually a segment just like a video, and it's
animated, and he talks to you, but his reactions are based on all your
reactions along the way. I
want to create a horror film. I
want to hire an independent writer.
In the end, it predicts how well your movie did, but that's just
an idea of the kind of content that you can put in a show, because now
it can be participatory and adapt it to the medium.
Some people get interrupted, and there's no way to stop that. They're halfway through, the phone rings;
they've got to close out. You
know, maybe we could put a window in here that says, "Alright, give
us your e-mail address. We'll
send you a link right to your inbox, and if you click it, it will start
this presentation just exactly where you left off (reach people where
they live). And if we were really
smart, we'd put an ad in there or something to make some money, so that
we could keep it subscription-free.
We actually did all of that, and we did it with three different shows: one on the election last November, one on the run-up to the war with Iraq, and one on the Oscars this last March. And, from a TV sense, these were kind of our ratings: We had more than a million unique users who watched all three shows combined, and those were broadband-only users, which is about 50-to-60 percent of our total audience, and that's a lot, you know. From a ratings perspective, what is its success? Well, a million people's pretty good, but we get maybe 20 million unique users per month on our site, so I don't know. I can't really measure that, but as someone who creates this stuff, I don't have any control over where it gets viewed--you know, what pages link to it and how much traffic comes to it. What I have control over is how it flows and how the content blends, and so I want to know how successful it was in holding viewers. And so what we've done with this particular
project--and lots for the past, maybe, two, three years that came before
it--is kind of call it spying on people though you don't know who they
are. It's anonymous. As
people go through this thing, because it's a flash presentation, it can
record every single thing you've done--what segments you've skipped, where
you've voted, how long you've spent, even what your screen resolution
is. And it sends it back
to us once you close out of the presentation as an anonymous e-mail. We get thousands of these, so many that
it's statistically accurate how people use these things. And we can sort by time of day, by day,
by screen resolution, by how many segments someone skipped, and whether
someone watched segment one and then voted in the very next one. And we know a tremendous amount of data,
exactly how people have used this.
The format's changed a little bit over the past three shows to
adapt to the knowledge that we've gained.
Just a quick kind of audience poll: In terms of keeping people watching the show, because they last anywhere between ten and twenty minutes, which topic do you think held the audience the longest: elections or the Oscars? Show of hands. Oscars, you think? No. Iraq. And here's some of the hard-earned kind of trade secrets we've gathered from a lot of this tracking, and I'm not going to go into specific numbers. If you want to know some of those details, I can tell you, but I want to put it in context so you won't think that it's going to necessarily apply to your site. We broke down users by how much time
they spent on each of the shows, and it was really interesting that people
who watched the Iraq show--more than a third of them--spent more than
ten minutes watching it. Online,
on our site where people average, what--two, three minutes on a story
or even a site view when they come--ten minutes is an eternity. Some people went far longer than that--twenty
minutes or so--and this is something that you watch.
It's constantly going on. Actually, if you're on a smaller screen
resolution, it takes over your screen so you can't really do anything
else until you close it out. But
you can see that there always is a population of users who: they open
it up and they spend less than a minute, they see what it is, and they're
like, "Yikes, it's big."
And maybe they're not the kinds who want to watch video, or in
all honesty, since we're trying to push the envelope, maybe it didn't
work on their computer. They didn't have a fast-enough processor,
or their bandwidth--they're file-swapping songs while they were doing
that, and it just couldn't keep up.
Well, if all we could track was how people
used it, that's one thing; but still, as a producer, I don't know if they're
spending ten minutes there because they can't find the information that
they're looking for or because they're really into it. So another thing that we started to do
is, when you closed out, we polled people about what they thought about
the presentation. We asked
them lots of questions: what they thought of the quality of the content,
presentation format, how interested they were in the topic, and even what
features they liked and disliked.
Having a little anchor in the corner: did it freak you out or did
you like it? Well, what we found was, at least in the
one that we did on "The Big Picture" (and then we've done smaller
versions of similar presentations post-Iraq war asking the same questions),
is that people rate the content and the format really, really highly,
particularly those who stay more than two minutes.
People who stay less than two minutes, a lot of those, it probably
didn't work for them in the first place and they closed out. It's interesting that this is for the
Oscars, specifically, and people rated the format and the content very
highly even though they weren't as interested in the topic. And then, the subsequent ones we've done in polls like this
and sometimes the content about the Iraq war--people were highly interested
in the topic, but their rating of the presentation and the quality was
the same. So there's something
to be said for making the experience kind of engaging and interactive. A lot of this research that we're doing
is paving the way for the day when TVs can do these things, TVs merge
with the Web. And when they
do, maybe we'll know enough about it so that we can kind of transform
television news in a way that makes it more interactive, more engaging,
more in-depth, and really kind of help evolve journalism.
That's something I'm, personally, pretty excited about. So--any questions? [Applause] Female audience member: How long did it take for you to put all of this together for
your first "Big Picture"?
I know you had all the different pieces...
Ashley Wells: Well, we didn't necessarily have all the different pieces
actually. About half of every
"Big Picture" is original content. You can only do so much with all the things that you've put
on the stories to fill the holes that are there to fill on the stories. The first one we did, we had already come
up with the concept, in general, and we came up with it for some other
project that didn't really fly.
My partner and I, who was a designer at the time, came up with
this idea and we went to our senior editors and they said, "You know,
this makes a lot of sense. This
is the evolution of everything we've made in the last three or four years
of making interactive experiences. We should apply this immediately."
They said, "All right."
Then, there was a lot of debate about which project.
In the meantime, we were refining the format and designing it. So, when the project came along, we were
fairly ready to make it, and it took, I think, two weeks for the election
one. The election one was
only ten minutes long. Iraq,
I think, took two or three weeks, and it was almost twenty minutes long. And then the Oscars, I think, took about
a week-and-a-half to two weeks. Female audience member: What are the demographics of the users that completed the poll? Ashley Wells: We have not yet asked them what their demographics are in
a presentation specifically like this.
As for what they are on the site, I'm not the best person to speak
to that. I would imagine
that the people who come to this are affluent enough to have a broadband
connection or at least work somewhere that does, and I think our site
kind of skews toward decision makers, people who are managers and make
quite a good bit of money Female audience member: Do you ever find people who actually
participate in the polls--how long they've stayed in the Web site?
The people who chose to stick around and view and fill out the
poll questionnaire, were they in the Web site for ten minutes or do you
have that information? Ashley Wells: You mean, where they came from before they saw the presentation
and where they went afterwards? Female audience member: Exactly. Ashley Wells: No, I don't know. Female audience member: Or how long they were in the Web site? Ashley Wells: I don't know how long they were in the Web site. I know how long they spent at each of
the shows. Female audience member: Okay. Ashley Wells: And, for me, as a producer that makes these things, that's
what I really want to know. Female audience member: Right. Ashley Wells: And I don't think I, technically, have the ability to find
that other stuff out at this time, but I can probably figure it out. Female audience member: Were you able to say that, "We know that 75,000 people,
let's say, went to this one particular web site and this is how many people
who actually stuck around to do the polls? You have that-- Ashley Wells: We know how many people opened it up versus how many people
actually participated. Female audience member: Yeah. Ashley Wells: And the way I kind of broke down those numbers is: I saw
everyone who voted in a poll or sent in feedback, because sometimes full
screen we would say, "Send us a comment.
We'll give you a few seconds." Female audience member: Right. Ashley Wells: And then how many people, participated in clicking around,
the depth-kind-of-participation stuff, and it was in the area of 85 or
90 percent did at least some; but, also, you'd be surprised that with
a presentation like this, it moves from one segment to the next, and it
gives you time to vote and then it automatically moves on. And if you let it alone, you didn't touch it, it would play
for twenty minutes, beginning to end.
Female audience member: Okay. Ashley Wells: Now, there are some people, in a larger percentage than
a lot of you might think, who will just sit back and they will watch. That's why you want to give a time window
for a vote, because you don't want to force anyone to have to vote before
they move on. Female audience member: How do you [sell] advertising space in your [interactive
programs]? Ashley Wells: Man, if I only knew that question, I would be upstairs to
the advertising people telling them exactly what I thought. Actually, our ad folks did try to see
if they could get--what they were thinking was streaming videos in there,
the same kind of streaming videos that appear before videos on our site,
just larger like a thirty-second spot.
And so we stuck an advertisement in each one of those. Now, sometimes we didn't end up with an
ad, and we stuck a flat banner graphic but it could be a flash ad. It's a very large space and you could,
essentially, put almost anything you want in there. The problem with this kind of thing is that it's way far out
ahead of what the advertisers are doing, and they don't want to have to
create original ads just to fit this one application of their sponsorship Female audience member: You showed us that those who voted could
send in questions to the on-air personalities. Are they video or live? Ashley Wells: No, you can't send in questions to the on-air personalities.
What you can do is you can ask follow-up questions.
So, let's say we interviewed one of the people on there, and we
asked them, like, six or seven questions; but we only used three clips
of them talking, because we felt that we wanted to edit together that
piece. They actually said some other things,
and so what would happen is while you're watching it, a little question
would pop up and you could say, "I'd like to ask him that question." And if you click on it, then after he's
asking he'll talk about that. Jan Schaffer: Thank you, Ashley.
That's great. [Applause] Jan Schaffer: We're next going to see a CD-ROM presentation, and Tony Majeri
from the Chicago Tribune will tell us, I hope, why you decided on a CD-ROM versus online or
another iteration of all of this information. And this was a retrospective on 9/11. Tony Majeri, Senior Editor for Innovation,
Chicago Tribune: Yes, that's correct. Thank you.
The CD-ROM is a time capsule, a time
capsule that's meant to capture a year later after 9/11 the experiences
that we all went through--remembering the background, remembering also
how I experienced the story, because I was over here a few miles away
at American Press Institute, talking to a bunch of people. And at 8:46 in the morning, my lecture was interrupted and
they said, "Hey, you have to stop.
Something happened."
And so, all at once, as a newspaper guy, I experienced a story
very much how I learned a language, through all of these senses, and through
shock, and all these emotions. Well,
anyway, a year later, we were asked to come up with some ideas about how
we might recapture that time. I want to share, basically, what the Tribune
did. The Tribune decided to gather a team and, within about four weeks, put together
a fairly rich multi-sensory time capsule that allowed us to gather, from
all of our sister and brother media outlets, information, bring it together,
harvest the best of this information, and provide our readers--again,
remembering that we know something about what people do with newspapers.
The first experience I had was I had
a chance to lay out the Nixon resignation page and remember afterwards,
I was mere youth. I remember
that as I was walking in the street, people were hoarding these newspapers
and putting them in their drawers, you know, putting them underneath. Now, when I go to garage sales, it's kind
of neat to go and see the page that I laid out many of years ago is still
being kept by people. This
is sort of the notion of: "Isn't it possible that the characteristics
or the qualities that people find so compelling about a newspaper, this
so-called historical document, that they keep it, because it's possible
to use some of the new technologies, use the newspaper as a vehicle, and
bring together a lot of sensibilities that appear to be sensibilities
that people bring to the newspaper?" So, we took that, and we took the multimedia
approach. And we produced
a 9/11 CD-ROM that we gave free to our readers--which accounted for about
a million readers on Sunday. I don't know if you call it success or not,
but we sold an extra hundred thousand newspapers and are still be asked,
to this day, to send people these CD-ROMs.
We gave them to all the schools and all that other stuff and had
an enormous contact with our readers.
I want to take you through it and show
you what we think were the levels that we felt. Let's hope this thing works. I'm going to click through this.
This probably could take you, literally, a week to experience.
Remember we have a bunch of TV stations, a number of newspapers, and radio
stations that we were able to turn to for getting the assets from this
thing. Oh, it starts off--a lot of good branding... [9/11 CD-ROM footage starts] Male reporter:
We're going to break in here.
There's a breaking story going out of--is this New York? Male reporter:
It looks like a plane crashed into one of the towers of the World
Trade Center. Female eyewitness:
I heard the plane very close to the top of the building. I looked outside, and I saw it hit. Male reporter: Black smoke is pouring out of some of the upper floors. Male reporter: It had to have been at least one plane, possibly two. Male reporter:
It is horrific, a second plane the size of a passenger jet flying
into the second tower of the World Trade Center. Female eyewitness: What was like this enormous explosion in the sky, which must've
been the first tower going down. Male reporter:
And now, another story out of Washington, that the Pentagon was
the target of another plane. [EMS sirens wailing in the distance] Male eyewitness: I did hear a large explosion, and the ground here in Brooklyn
shook. My windows rattled... Female eyewitness:
Firefighters screamed, "Stop!
Run!" and I turned.
And as I turned, I saw this enormous fireball rolling down at us. Male reporter: And a fourth jetliner, apparently hijacked, crashed about 80
miles from Pittsburgh. Male reporter: Four blocks north of the World Trade Center, the entire building
has just collapsed. It folded
down on itself, and it is not there anymore. Female eyewitness: By that time, we were engulfed in the thickest black, acrid
smoke and particle mass. We
couldn't breathe. We couldn't
see. Male voice: September 11, 2001 is another day that will live in infamy. President George W. Bush: America united. The
freedom-loving nations of the world stand by our side. This will be a monumental struggle of
good versus evil, but good will prevail. [9/11 CD-ROM pauses]
Tony Majeri: ... If you believe in this process of the emotional response and all that, of people and how they learn, the first thing we wanted to do was take you back, in the heartfelt sense, of those hours that forever and ever probably changed most of our lives. What we did is we went into this notion that after you have an emotional contact, there's some reason for you to respond, to react, intellectually pursue--Why? How? What for? What was this all about? So we took the ten days and we created a timeline. The timeline, again, is rooted in what the Chicago Tribune took each day as the lead story. And we took the lead of the day, whether it was "Attack on America," day one after the shock, and each day you were able to go through ten days and see what was, each day, the topic of the day...Then each day, you were able to drill down after you did this and see day one of the Chicago Tribune. [9/11 CD-ROM continues] [9/11 CD-ROM pauses] Tony Majeri: From there, you were able to take that day's lead story,
and if you chose to, you could read what the Tribune proposed was the context of that day's
news events. You were able
to read that story by physically maneuvering to the story. You were able to see, throughout the entire CD-ROM, a selection
of photo galleries that you could click on. You were able to go through the days and look at all of the
images that we thought gave you the sense through visuals--this is a very
powerful experience, for me, in particular. We spent many nights looking at these things, and to this day,
you still feel the emotions of this.
You also were able to take, through graphics,
a tour through that day's events. In this graphic, you'll see there are three graphic fields.
Up in this corner, there's a little map that tracks the events
and the place and the geographic location.
This here will end up showing you, specifically, how these events
impacted on the geography. Then there's this sort of animated graphic.
You can, minute by minute, trace the events of the four airplanes. At 8:14, United 171 takes off from Logan--8:20, 8:38--and you
see, as the animation of the images takes you closer and closer to the
relevance of the various elements. At 8:42, United takes off from Newark, and if you keep an eye
on the graphics, you'll see that those graphics--175, at 8:43--what we're
trying to do is show you how these events, minute by minute. You saw the plane impact the building.
8:50: the second plane deviates.
9:03: the second plane impacts.
Again, this is a very potent, very powerful way to see. What you were able to do, through graphics throughout the entire
story, you were able to see or tell or understand the happening of these
things. You can return back,
and as you return back, you can go to the timeline. You can go to day one, and if you choose to go to day one,
all the stories of that day. The
lead stories you can click on and they'll take you to the actual story,
and then you can read those stories.
So, you can manage several hundred stories through this. [9/11 CD-ROM continues] Male voice:
After a shaky initial response, the previously untested President
George W. Bush vowed... [9/11 CD-ROM pauses]
Tony Majeri: I'm going to turn that off. Obviously because we're a newspaper and we think there's a
certain value to get textualizing and creating hierarchy of that day's
events, you'll always see the newspaper page itself. We used the newspaper pages throughout to try to play off of
that instinct--that tactile instinct--but also the sense that a newspaper
takes events, and through hierarchy and through the relationship of size
and scale, gives you some sensibility about how important and not important
something is. The CD-ROM proposes to do more than just linear navigation.
It also allows you to do other things.
There's a second set of navigation on the bottom here, and what
that does is it takes you day by day and, again, it takes you into the
newspaper. Based on the newspaper model, it takes you to all the stories
that ran in the newspaper that day, having to do with the event. So, you 're going into the main sheets.
You go through the metropolitan or the business section.
See, I'm just running you through this one time, so you just get
a sense of the depth. I mean,
we literally took all the sections, all the stories, and allowed you to
go back and experience those stories both through graphics, through pictures,
etc. I'm going to drag you through that.
Then, there is a graphic library, which allows you to go through
all of these things. We made
several dozen graphics, and these graphics were asked to show you or explain
to you, step by step, how certain things happened. This probably would be better for you to experience it; step
by step, shows you why and how the building actually collapsed. You can go on in the world of graphics,
you can go back to the original, and you can see one more. This one here, for instance, takes you
to the building. Jan Schaffer: I
'm sorry, Tony, but we need to move on anyway. Is that okay? Tony Majeri:
Yeah, that's okay. Jan Schaffer:
Thank you very much. Tony Majeri:
Thank you. [Applause] Jan Schaffer: We're going to wrap up with Elizabeth Harper from The
NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, who really tried to create an interactive vehicle to teach the
public about the whole question of media consolidation--media merging. Elizabeth Harper, Media Editor, The
Newshour with Jim Lehrer: Here's our home page,
and the site we're going to look at is called "Merging Media."
This is the Media Watch site and as media editor, I oversee this
site. This is "Merging Media," how relaxing FCC ownership
rules have affected the media. Our
main goals included educating the public on this important issue, FCC
regulations. People's eyes
usually glaze over when you talk about, you know, federal regulators in
the media industry and such. So,
we wanted to break out existing rules, and here we list the key ownership
rules that, on June 2 this year, the FCC voted to revise--to relax in
general terms. So, we go
through the existing ones and the new rules, so you can read through those.
Now, what's so interesting about this
Web site is that it allows people to say, again, FCC regulations, your
eyes glaze over, it seems really boring.
Who cares? How does
it affect us, you know? These
people in Washington, D.C. are making decisions.
Does it really affect people all over the states? For instance, my 33-year-old brother who's
a repo man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania--he really could care less.
However, he's concerned about what he's watching in the media on
TV. Stopping at this page, you say, "Okay,
how are these huge FCC rules affecting what we watch, what we read on
the local level?" After
looking at the key FCC rules background, which is in the yellow link--you
can click there to read more as we just did--you can enter the site high-bandwidth,
low-bandwidth options. Now,
here is the local angle, and we highlighted, or rather we talked about,
the top fifty market areas. My
brother, for instance, in Pittsburgh is suspicious that only a couple
corporations own everything that he's watching and reading in the news.
He's very skeptical about news information and so--here's a list
of who owns what media properties in Pittsburgh, which ranks as the twenty-first
largest market area in the states.
And then you can also see the percentage of U.S. households--a
little over one percent. And you also see the broadcast TV stations
and their owners--Viacom, Hearst, Cox, WQED, CBS Station, another Viacom
station, and so on. And then,
below, you see newspapers. You
see how many--their weekday circulation statistics. Pittsburgh Post Gazette obviously has the highest circulation,
so you can click on "Block communication." My brother would think, "Is this one of those huge media
conglomerates? They must
own everything around the states."
No, they really don't. They
own a couple stations in Louisville, Kentucky, and then they own the Pittsburgh
Post Gazette,
so that's a piece of information.
Now, you go back to broadcast television
stations and you see Viacom. Viacom
has been in the news a lot lately, lobbying for greater relaxation of
FCC rules prior to the June 2 vote. So, you click on Viacom. Well, who are these guys? Do they really dominate national media? Well, here's a little profile about Viacom's
CBS station, so you can read and get a sense of what they own when they
were created in 1928, way back when. Right below that, you see the list of everything--all of the
stations that they own. These
are just the local stations. You
also see in the profile of Viacom CBS, you see their cable holding--MTV,
Nickelodeon, BET, and so on. You get two different views: You can have the local view of
who owns what in Pittsburgh, for instance. Then if you want to learn more
about one particular company, like Viacom, you can click on Viacom and
you get to see everything that they own across the nation.
Now, thinking we could go to...something
more relevant--Washington, D.C. It ranks number eight in terms of the top fifty market areas--two
percent of U.S. households. Who would like to learn more about GE, Fox,
Gannett? We'll try Gannett.
You can click on Gannett, and, again, you get a profile of Gannett
Company, basically its history, how it came to be a major
media player in the industry. Jan Schaffer: Elizabeth, tell us how many people use this. Do you know? Elizabeth Harper: You mean traffic hits to the Web site? Jan Schaffer: Yes. Elizabeth Harper: It depends. On the low side, it's about 1,200. To the high side, about 3,500. It depends, when the FCC's rules were locked by a court several weeks ago. Jan Schaffer: And how long did it take for you to assemble this, put it all
together? Elizabeth Harper: This took about three weeks. We had help from our interns at The Newshour--our media reporter, Samara Abbermen;
our former news editor, Greg Barber; and our Web designer, Scott Anderson. Jan Schaffer: And what kind of feedback did you get from both the public and
the FCC? Jan Schaffer: And was this the most extensive thing you've done to date that's
interactive on The Newshour or not? Elizabeth Harper: Oh...no. Jan Schaffer: No. Okay. Elizabeth Harper: I don't think so.
The executive editor, editor-in-chief of the online Newshour's Lee Banville back there, and we've done
a lot of interactive type of things. Jan Schaffer:
Carol? Carol, from audience: In your summary of the companies, do you talk about the
acquisition rumors, with the FCC rules? Elizabeth Harper: You mean, since June 2 or once the stay is lifted? We haven't talked about that yet. I think we were trying to stay away from
rumors or hearsay. Sure we
know that, let's say, Univision and the HBC merger's likely going to be
approved maybe this week--but no, we did not talk about that. We sort of update the site as things are
actually approved. Any other
questions? [Female audience member asks question
indistinctly] Elizabeth Harper: I would like to give more attention to
radio ownership. I would
also like to give more attention to Internet sites, because one of the
main arguments for relaxing the FCC rules, as stated by FCC Chairman Michael
Powell, was that there's a great proliferation of new media out there,
such as Internet sites. It
would be interesting to see what the most Internet sites are and who owns
them; if they are indeed, you know, independently owned and run and supervised
web sites; or if they are actually run by major media companies.
Yes? Female audience member: Two questions, I guess. One is: what do you use when you
run a source's holdings? Elizabeth Harper:
Yes. Female audience member: And then there's from Block Communications--you were looking
at a couple of newspapers of theirs, and they're quite extensive. Elizabeth Harper: Right. Female audience member:&n | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
