Transcript for
The 2004 James K. Batten Symposium
& Awards for Innovations in Journalism

September 10, 2004
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.

Introduction and Session One: Interactive Election Coverage
Gary Kebbel, AOL Online News Director
Sue Gardner, Deputy Director and Managing Director of CBC.ca

Jan Schaffer, Moderator: This promises to be a day full of technological glories and technological challenges I’m sure. I’m Jan Schaffer, and I want to welcome you to the second annual Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. I’m Director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, and some of you know me from my previous life. As Director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. J-Lab is the proud administrator of the Batten Awards. They are fully funded by the Knight Foundation and we warmly thank Knight for its support and, if the grant gods are smiling, next week we’ll get a renewal of the Batten Awards for a few more years.

So a lot of people ask me, "Just what are the Batten Awards, and how are they different from ONA and the Digital Edges and the EPpy Awards, and how do you win one?" It’s not an easy answer. It takes more than just excellent journalism. It’s more than a beautifully produced package. It’s more than a lot of multimedia bells and whistles, although all of those are very nice and good. A Batten Award can go to big-J journalism, big reporting initiatives; they can also go to small-j journalism, simple but very novel ideas that could be easily replicated by other news organizations.

I think key to the Batten Awards are innovation -- it’s got to be new, different, fresh in some way, a fresh idea for journalism, and engagement. The Batten Awards reward journalism that uses new information ideas and technologies in very innovative ways to involve citizens very actively in an issue, an event, a community problem. Importantly, I think it looks for journalism that provides what we call "entry points," ways to involve people that stir their imagination, invite their participation.

So, in short, the Batten Awards seek to draft a roadmap for the future of journalism, a very ambitious goal, and their hope to help news organizations travel that road so that in making the awards we want to be rewarding something that other news organizations could do too. So let’s move on and sort of see what we mean.

We have a wonderful line-up of speakers today, and they consist of both Batten Award winners and what we call “notable entries.” I think we’re the only awards program in the country that seeks to share all ideas that are good, even if they’re not necessarily the top winners. We do that both in our symposium here and at our Web site, www.J-Lab.org.

Because of the season, we’d like to start with some fresh ideas for election coverage. So let’s move to our panel.

It strikes us as one place where journalism could use some new fresh ideas is in covering campaigns. I don’t know about you, but for me this year I’m reading and seeing coverage that strikes me as simply adding a lot more noise to an already noisy media environment, rather than adding value and useful information for voters.

The Campaign Desk, which is an online initiative of Columbia University’s Grad School of Journalism, is tracking reporting on this year’s presidential campaign. They are calling journalists to account for their mistakes and oversights. I think one of their recurring observations is that we seem to be stuck in a kind of he-said and then he-said paradigm, in which reporters do nothing more than parrot campaign attacks without really truth-squading any lies that candidates are putting forth.

Now today’s panelists, I think, will propel some other models for campaign coverage. And with us are two top online thinkers. Gary Kebbel is AOL’s news director. This is his third shot at presidential campaign coverage. A couple of weeks ago, AOL just made it among the top 25 finalists in Politics Online contest for the 10 who are changing the world of Internet and politics. He has been news director at AOL since 1999; he is responsible for news, government, politics, election, and weather areas. MediaMaker says AOL News is the largest news site on the Internet. Before coming to AOL, Gary was a homepage editor at WashingtonPost.com; he was on the launch team for Newsweek.com; he was also on the launch team for USAToday.com. So we’re pleased to have him today.

With him will be Sue Gardner, director of CBC.ca. That’s the Web site of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. CBC is not only Canada’s public broadcaster it is also the country’s largest news organization, and so has a deep history in public broadcasting. Before moving to CBC in 2001, she worked for more than a decade as a radio and television journalist making documentaries, producing talk programming at both CBC and its "As it Happened" show on prime time on Sunday morning for the BBC and for NPR. So we are pleased to have both of them. I would like to start with Gary today and have him show us a little of what AOL means by election coverage. Thank you.

"AOL Election Guide 2004"

Gary Kebbel: Thanks Jan, I appreciate it. This speaking invitation frankly is a hoot because I’m always going to remember the fact that I was asked to submit an entry. We submitted an entry, we won nothing, absolutely nothing. And then I’ve been asked to speak about it. So all week I’ve been telling people that we’re losers. I like “notable entries” a lot better.

So in this category of notable entries we wanted to point out the fact that one of the things that we tried to do is to build upon everything that we did in our previous election guide, which was election 2000. So in that we had all the functionality, we had the Zip code lookup that allowed you to put in your Zip code, find your congressional district, match it to anyone running in your district, match it to your voter services, have a link to women voters and democracy nets, issues guides on the election, and all of that in one place with the Zip code lookup.

So we wanted to build upon that and try to do something different and distinct and unique so what we decided to do was to focus on what everybody's sort of lamenting, the 18-to-35-year-old vote, and the 18 to 35 year old core. What will attract them? What will help them get interested in politics, educate them a little bit, and where can we go to get them? We decided that the place to go is where they are--comedy. And consequently we made a deal with Comedy Central and with the Onion.com for our election coverage.

You’ll notice from the site map here we have lots of the other stuff. We have all of the serious stuff: we have the presidential page, we have deals with Congressional Quarterly, a national journal. Anything you need about the election, you can look it up here. But what we felt we wanted to do was to try, in the idea of civic journalism to see what we could do for the 18-to-35-year olds. So our first attempt was a little comedy. We hope we can both educate as well as make people laugh or visa versa, and let’s hope it works. If it doesn’t, you will understand why I’m a notable entry.

And then there’s that sound issue.

[AUDIO: ... and what I can only assume is a warm-up to the frogs and locusts. Our streets are swarming with suburban Republicans. But at least I know these Republicans hate being here as much as we hate having them. But if there’s one thing Democrats and Republicans in the other 49 states can agree on, it’s how much they hate New York. Even President Bush is only coming by for one night. If it weren’t for the all-important Ground Zero photo op, I think he would rather just conference call in his acceptance speech: "Sorry folks, I’d love to be there, but the sagebrush on the ranch isn’t going to burn itself." Anyway I finally bit the bullet and went to the convention today. And get thi, with all the security and crowds, the Republicans have managed to make a trip to Penn Station even more depressing. If there’s anything worse than a bunch of shops selling cheese-stuffed pretzels, it’s having machine guns pointed at you while you’re buying a cheese-stuffed pretzel. Come on. I’m eating a cheese-stuffed pretzel. I already have a death wish. At least I finally got to visit the convention floor and rub elbows with the GOP. What a wacko bunch. And I thought all the zeroes were in the national deficit column. Boy. The GOP saves all its glittery stars for the Wednesday afternoon post-lunch speaking spots. You know if I want to be bored to death in Madison Square Garden I’ll just go to another Emerson, Lake & Palmer concert and fall asleep into my wine skin.]

Gary: So Comedy Central did several of these for us through the primaries, and they’ll be doing it again on election night. So we have a deal in which we can use these. We also made a deal with Bill Maher for audio commentary, and I’ll show a quick one here. Not quite as funny, but perhaps a little more educational.

[AUDIO: Hi, this is Bill Maher with a new, new rule: Deaniacs Unite. Now that Howard Dean has dropped out of the race, everyone is wondering what all the Deaniacs will do, other than return to their parents’ basement and the Lord of the Rings chat room. Will they work for Kerry, Edwards, or just stay home on election day? Well, let me be the first to say, that all the years those Deaniacs, in case you didn’t learn anything from the 2000 election, the big neon-lighted lesson was that you have a choice to make. It may not be the one you like, but that doesn’t mean you should be like the disgruntled right-wingers who won’t vote for Bush because he hasn’t proposed a holiday for the rapture yet. You vote for the person whose platform comes closer to what you believe. There will never be a candidate who will be all things to all people because Bill Clinton can’t run again. So don’t act like idealistic college students, even though most of you are probably idealistic college students. Now for his part, Dean said he won’t endorse Kerry and Edwards until one of them comes up and beats him in arm wrestling.]

Gary: So we had several of those from Bill Maher, particularly through the primaries, and we’re hoping to have more of them. But as we were building the site and deciding to focus on elections, we also decided, you know, a lot of the bare stuff of election coverage is frankly boring. Primary schedules, what do you do with that? And so as we were thinking about our election coverage we thought, what we really need is an 8­year-old to tell us what they like about games. And then let’s listen to that 8-year-old and build the site accordingly. Well, we didn’t have an 8-year-old, but we had executives, and so they were the next best thing. So our executives were like, bells and whistles, bells and whistles -- can you get sound? So we ended up doing as much of that as we could and that’s how we ended up with the site that we have. It’s not only comedy, but we also have editorial cartoons, and I, we have animated political cartoonists that use Flash to also make their point.

[AUDIO: ... Minister of Fear: Look out. Oh my God. Remain calm. Code Yellow. I repeat, Code Yellow. As you were. You never know where the terrorists might strike. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida ... Look out, we’re coming, we’re coming. But in a non-specific unsubstantiated way. Still. We might have to disrupt the democratic process because terrorists want to disrupt the democratic process. Minister of Fear. Citizens remain calm. Everything is fine. Oh my God. Oh my God. Go about your business. Remain calm. Code yellow. Repeat, Code Yellow.]

Gary: That’s by Mark Fiore from San Francisco, one of our political cartoonists. To show that we’re not all fun and games, and we do actually believe in the seriousness of the process, we have what many have started to do which is an election guide type of tool that steps you through the issues, lets you vote on where you stand on the issues, and then matches that to the candidates white papers on those issues.

The nice thing about this is that, it allows you to rate the intensity of your belief on any of these issues, and there are social issues as you can see here, crime, education, security, etc., outlaw partial birth abortions--do you oppose strongly, favor strongly, or are you in the middle? Equal rights for civil unions -- oppose strongly, favor strongly, in the middle. And we step people through every issue area on that. Then what we think is unique and different in ours is that we allow you to rank your overall opinion on the issues themselves and then all of that is combined together to tell you that you are an 82% match with so-and-so and a 16% match with so-and-so.

This was particularly helpful during the primary campaign when we had -- what was it -- 10 or 11 candidates. We will be retooling this and doing it again very shortly for people as we get closer to the election.

Something else that I wanted to emphasize is our convention coverage, which is a combination with ABC News Now. You might have heard that ABC News Now is their entry into digital television and 24-7 is their attempt to have a cable network without having a cable network. One of the things that they did on that is a lot of convention coverage.

So during the conventions, they would have a four-or-five-hour show, Peter Jennings would be broadcasting, but it was only on either AOL or Real or anyplace that subscribed to AOL News Now. As Tom Brokaw says, the six other people in the country who could get it via TV. What was good about this for us was that it was a combination of AOL and ABC in which we were able to work with them and have one of our editors in New York City at ABC taking questions from the members so that they would be read on the air and then answered by Peter Jennings or any of the others.

So this is Matthew Greenberg, one of our AOL news editors, in New York — you can see he dressed up for this — and within one hour he had 10,000 e-mail questions from AOL members during the Democratic and Republican national conventions. He would go through these on the air and say, “Well, I see a lot of e-mail here from AOL members who are saying, Sam Donaldson, is saying frankly something sort of the opposite of what you are saying. What AOL members are saying about this issue is such and such.” Then that would set up a debate with Sam Donaldson who would basically say they were stupid and here’s the answer, and it would go on and on. But the back and forth was nice and in the fact that AOL was participating with ABC on this was incredibly helpful.

While this was going on and later in the night while ABC News Now was broadcasting the speeches themselves, we would also do this insta-poll. We would send up sometimes up to 24 polls a night, based on what someone was saying and what people had just heard. This is where we made our executives happy. So that’s what people would see. While the video was going on the viewers would be alerted that there is a poll, they would see the countdown clock, they would have 90 seconds to vote, after 90 seconds they would see the results displayed. And it worked out very well for us, and then we would continue the evening with that and on here on the page itself is the place to submit a question for Matthew. So we tied all that together and again tried to do as much of interactivity as we possibly could.

Another element of that interactivity is the delegate diaries. We rounded up six to 10 AOL members who were delegates at the convention and had them in essence blog during the convention, write their opinions, and then we would trail them with our photographers at the convention and have both a photo gallery of their activities as well as their comments about not only what’s going on on the floor but what’s going on after the floor -- New York City, the parties, you name it.

Jan: I wanted to ask, what were the traffic patterns? What was the most popular thing that was on this site? What really got people going and conversing?

Gary: Conversing was this combination of the video and the insta-poll, because you could submit, you could vote, and you could listen and watch, and at the same time through other areas of our coverage we had the usual message boards and chat rooms. During the Republican Convention we had more than a million, on-demand streams that we had at the end of the convention each night.

I need to mention that Kathleen Hayden, who runs the site and Andy Kozac, worked incredibly hard to make all this work. It’s two people on this whole site, and they would work with ABC to break the live stream down into on-demand segments, and these on-demand segments we would feature later in the evening along with a lot of votes — you know what did you think about Bush’s foreign policies, domestic policies, overall — we would have audio clips on his “I accept the war on terror” jab at Kerry and then video highlights. Those had about a million streams and for the live on-demand, it grew every night during each of the conventions and was an all-time record for AB. They are so flipping out over it that for the debates they're now telling us “What can we do for you?”

Jan: Do you feel that people got informed? Do you see people saying, this made me smarter in any way about what I need to do as a voter? No? You’re just following your gut.

Gary: We get feedback in the sense that in one hour we get 10,000 e-mails in an hour and those e-mails are informed questions.

During the Republican convention we are not getting e-mails that say "Thank you for doing this, I now feel smarter." But the questions that they are submitting were wonderful.

Jan: I want to go to the audience and see if you have some questions.

Question: [Partly inaudible question about how the political comedy featured on AOL is left-leaning]

Gary: Well, it’s not all on the left because I didn’t have a chance to show everything, but you’re right, I mean that is sort of what I showed. We have also a deal with six comics, three from New York, three from LA, who we auditioned and we made them say you got to be either pro or con Democratic or Republican in your jokes. And so I don’t know how they did it, but several of them were on the Last Comic Standing this past time. So we were very conscious about trying to have a Democratic/Republican mix . . . It turns out the clip I have right here now is sort of down on the Republicans because it was made during the Republican convention, but during the Democratic convention [the comics were] attacking them as well.

Question: Do you have the ability to track your users and where they are writing from?

Gary: We don’t have a demographic breakdown. I would kill for that. That would be wonderful. What was going on during the 10,000 e-mails, you’ll be surprised. It was 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on any night of the Republican convention, because our show, the AOL part of the ABC News Now, was 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. At 7 pm Peter Jennings or Sam Donaldson or somebody would come on to anchor. And so we were the pre-show for that. But again it was the back and forth of letting people know that we were going to take AOL members questions, we will answer them shortly. And we had promos for, you know, submit a question now. But at the convention itself at 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., squat wasn’t going on.

Question: If I was a non-AOL member, could I still access the coverage?

Gary: Yes, and thank you for bring that up, because one of the things about AOL’s election coverage is that the AOL upper management has always felt that this is part of its civic duty. All of our election coverage will be on the Web. The election URL is www.electionguide04.com, free, open on the Web.

Question: What is the impact of your project on a nationwide scale?

Gary: If you had asked this question next week, I could give you a little better answer. I’m leaving tomorrow for Korea, and I’m going to be talking to the Korean Press Foundation there, showing them this, getting their feedback, and learning from them from their portals. So I’ll get a little better sense of that later. Right now the only thing I know is that a certain percentage of AOL membership is throughout the world, number one, and number two we have a very high percentage of members who are in the military. And the military use AOL a lot to keep in touch with their family, whether it’s AOL or AIM. So we do have a lot of users around the world. I don’t have specific feedback from Ghana or Germany.

Question: [Partly inaudible question, re: demographics of AOL's election coverage readers.]

Gary: AOL News has 24 million unique users a month. At that, you pretty much reflect America. You know it’s that large that we’re not skewed in any noticeable way. Those who go to AOL News are skewed slightly different from the AOL member. AOL News users are slightly better educated, slightly older, tend to be more married, tend to have kids, and own a home and have a higher income.

Question: A little bit — what’s typical?

Gary: If it’s slightly more male it’s like 52/48.

Question: [Partly inaudible question about making news content accessible to non-AOL members]

Gary: Well, with elections we’re always in HTML; in 2000 our elections were in HTML . . . But you’re right, it was only a year ago that AOL news switched to HTML out of our proprietary publishing system called Rainman. Despite being the largest news site on the Internet that’s only based on the at-home audience because we are not accessible at work because business computers, educational computers and government computers are not allowed to download the proprietary AOL client because they are afraid the businesses are going to be charged for it. So we were locked out of the at-work audience until last year when we went into HTML. That’s why we went into HTML. That’s what we are doing is attacking the at-work audience now.

"Canada Votes 2004"

Jan: Sue, let’s see what you do.

Sue Gardner: Okay, we are also one of the "notable entries." I am from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and I’m going to walk you through a little bit about the broadcasting corporation so you know who we are, because lots of Americans don’t.

I believe the reason I’ve been asked here to talk to is because we had our national federal election June 28, and you are in the midst of yours now. So I’m going to talk a little bit about what we did, which may be interesting for you as you cover your election here. I have a quick PowerPoint. So that’s what our site looked like. I’m not going to walk you through the whole thing; obviously it was a massive endeavor.

Essentially this is our third election campaign that we were covering, our third federal election campaign, and we wanted to throw a bunch things at the wall and kind of see what stuck. So we did an enormous amount of things and I’m going to take you through a few of them.

But I’ll tell you about CBC first. We were founded in 1936, we are Canada’s only national public broadcaster, so very similar to PBS and Public Radio except we are the only one and cover the whole country. We offer radio services, we offer television, and since 1993 we’ve offered online as well.

We are the biggest newsgathering organization in the country. We have more than 800 journalists, depending on how you slice and dice the numbers. And our reputation, not unlike all public broadcasters, our reputation is for credibility and trustworthiness. We are thought to be a little stodgy, a little dry, quite different from the stuff that Gary did. We wish we could do more of that kind of thing -- we’re not very good at it. We are best known for our coverage of Canadian federal politics, and political junkies love us. They may not always like what we do, but they love that we exist.

CBC launched in some form in 1993. I believe the first thing we did online was try to sell hats to people. It didn’t go over very well. Our news section launched in 1996, and today we are happily the number-one news site in Canada. That means for news site most visited by most Canadians, ahead of BBC, ahead of all our newspapers, ahead of CNN. We get 2.4 million unique visitors monthly. That’s in a country of 30 million people. We covered our third federal election online on June 28.

So I wanted to talk a little about what’s new since 2000, since our last federal election. We all know about the big trends, 24/7 news coverage, all-news cable channel, CNN, and stuff like that. Even just since 2000 I think all of these have come to pass since then.

... [The] environment has changed a lot and the upshot of it is there is more information available. People are starting to have an awful lot more control over when they get their news, where they get their news, and in what form they consume it. So the big question for the CBC was: coming up on this federal election campaign, what role do we play in that world? What is it that people want from us in this news universe? So we go back to our core principles. Our mandate from the government is to inform, enlighten and entertain Canadians -- that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

Our goal in this election, not a surprising goal, is to give people information, to give them news, context and analysis that helps them better understand the choice that’s facing them. We want to give it to them in a way that suits the online media as much as we can. We want to be fast, we want to offer news 24/7 obviously. A big chunk of our audience is the at-work audience, so it’s people getting the news when they don’t have a TV, they don’t have a radio, they want it in the middle of the workday. We want to offer people depth, we want to offer them some control over what they get.

The Internet as we know is good at raw facts and data. Anybody who works in broadcasting here knows broadcasting is very poor at facts and data. It doesn’t convey information, hard information, well. So that’s a new thing that CBC can give the audience.

We want to do that online, and we want to offer a measure of interactivity and we struggle a lot at CBC with how much interactivity the audience wants with us. There are different kinds of interactivity. There is interactivity with the machine, the computer. There is interactivity with the CBC, with the journalists. And then there’s interactivity with each other. We struggle with what to give them there and how much emphasis to put on that. So I’m going to walk you through four things we did that we thought worked pretty well.

The first was candidate-riding profiles. It’s not a new idea, broadcast can’t do it, newspapers can’t do it. It’s too much shelf space. We had 15,000 candidates in the Canadian federal election, and we offered profiles of every single one of them, which was an enormous amount of work. We also offered writing profiles of our 308 Canadian ridings, so this was information if you just moved to a location or whatever, you could look up how many people live in this riding, maps, obviously am I in this riding, yes I am, how many people live there, what’s the ethnic breakdown, how much money do people make, do they tend to own their own home, all that sort of basic information.

Jan: Riding -- is that a precinct?

Sue: Yes, you don’t use that word. The British use it too. It’s a precinct. So basically just a lot of information, a lot of context, an enormous amount of work to create one of the most popular things on the site.

We also offered a feature called the Daily Answer. Slate magazine has something very similar, the Daily Explainer. Do you know that? Do you know the Daily Explainer?

Canada CBC radio had a similar thing in the '80s. Essentially what happened was you would call in and leave a voice mail on the radio station’s answering machine, asking a question about anything, and then the journalist would go and find you an answer and go and broadcast it the next day. It was okay on radio. It was kind of clunky. You might not be listening when your answer got broadcast. It works a lot better online. It’s a nice use of the medium.

We thought it was a really nice use of the medium for CBC because it meshes together two things. The audience gets to interact. They get to drive the coverage. A lot of this information actually would be driving later stories on radio and television. The audience got to dictate where we went with things, which was nice.

The other nice thing, though, is that it taps into what people like about CBC: that they do find us credible and trustworthy. [When] they ask us something, they get an answer that they can believe. So that was nice.

The Red Book: in Canada, the liberals have been the governing party for quite some time. When the liberals campaign, their campaign promise is the Red Book. So if you look here, there are 17 categories of promises. Within each of those categories there are 5-10 individual commitments made to Canadians. This is an accountability exercise.

One of our journalists spent almost a month and went through every promise made in the Red Book, went back to the government and said "Did you keep the promise?" and then went to outside organizations as well. In this case, on the environment, they went to the Sierra Club and they went to the organization of economic development. They got outside views, they sent people off to links, external links if they wanted to go and find out more information on their own. So it was a massive exercise. Probably 150 separate articles, maybe 500 words long each. A massive endeavor, and a real public service, like accountability. Useful for people.

And then probably the most important thing that we offered is live riding-by-riding results on election night. Our traffic on election night was huge. This is what people came for and we got tons of positive feedback on this more than anything else. I think this is really nice.

All it is, you’re watching the election. Most people watch the election on television, some, very few, listen to radio. What they get there is the overall unfolding narrative of the night, the big story. At the same time they could go onto our Web site [and get results] at exactly the same time that the journalists get them. So we are really opening the door. They can get them instantly. And they can follow it themselves. They can see what’s happening at this second as the results come in my own home riding, in the riding where I went to school, in the riding where my mother lives ... I can follow the key races, you can slice and dice it however you want and track it as it comes in.

So those are a couple of things that we did. This was the result. This was the overall traffic for the vote section. So we found that interesting, and perhaps slightly disheartening in a way. One of the things about the Internet is, as we know, it’s the ultimate channel-surfing environment. You can’t make people care, which is why we're so interested in Gary talking about getting at the youth audience, because we have an extremely hard time with that. There was not a lot of interest in the run-up to the campaign. Like we’re offering all this stuff. I mean those are not bad numbers. Those are okay numbers. But they are very flat.

By contrast, when we did the Olympics, the numbers were huge, straight through. We can’t make people who don’t care about politics care about politics. By contrast, on election night the numbers were enormous. Election night and the day before and the day after. Contributing to our fourth and fifth highest traffic days ever, our highest traffic days are always Wednesdays ... following the Olympics; that was our highest traffic date ever.

... Anecdotally, the news is much greater lately. Public broadcasters have a warm and close relationships with their audience, so we got really nice response. They were really very happy with the Web coverage provided on election night. A lot of people used it the way we expected they would – they watched us on television and were on the Internet simultaneously. ... And interestingly, 20% of our traffic on election night came from outside the country. Mostly patriot Canadians who were living abroad, but also people in other countries interested in the election and interested in Canada.

So, good results. Three or four quick things that we want to do better next time. ... We want to offer more control on election night. We basically want a player [where] you can load in your own riding and watch [the results] change all night. We really have not the control over that. It’s so much part of the response we want to be able to do that even better. People really like that. We’re considering the possibility of offering some kind of instant analysis on election night that would be similar to the big coverage on TV and radio. Kind of a play-by-play message for the election.

We are also considering forums. Message boards with guest experts, not live chat, but we would have a guest expert for a week, and they are there and drifting in and out and corresponding with the audience. It can make it a kind of a little fun too because [these experts don't like] answering questions, which is why they don’t like to do this. But as the Internet becomes more and more a playe,r we can more likely be able to get [these] folks to participate in that kind of thing.

... The candidate selector thing, I think, is the most interesting thing happening in our election coverage. We did not fare badly, despite our best effort. We want to do it next time. I think it is a huge public service, very engaging, very attractive and a lot of fun.

Questions

Question: [inaudible]

Sue: I’m interested to see where that technology progresses because I think it’s going to get really interesting. If you look at some of the commercial applications of a similar thing where it’s really sophisticated technology, and we can start using that, that would be a really interesting place to go ...

Question: [Follow-up, re: the difficulty of getting people to specify their own views on the issues]

Sue: ... Yeah, that’s the new part, that's the part a lot of people are not doing yet. Which is, everybody’s rating the issues but then in that group of four questions on the economic issues, how does that group relate to corporate culture issues and security issues.

Question: You mentioned, how much do the changes of the American media seem to impact with the Canadian people?

Sue: What’s happening in the American affects the world. So we are always interested. We are just now in this past election trying to make our own kind of thing. We are very conscious of changes here, and try to learn from it so we can enter the market ...

Jan: Questions from the audience?

Question: [How can you reach people who don't care about politics?]

Sue: ... A political junkie could care a lot, right? What the net has done for those people is incredibly powerful, because you have access to so much more, and you can follow in so much more detail. The part that I struggle with is how the net can [engage the unengaged,] right? I know that your voting level in America is even lower than ours in Canada. And how you can engage the unengaged is a challenge, but if they’re not out there, they are just not looking for it.

Gary: And I can fully agree with Sue. Engaged users and voters, obviously the Internet allows you to search and vote and dig in and find sources that you never would have found before. So it’s wonderful there. For the non-engaged user, AOL’s experiment this year is to reach them through comedy. Will that work? I don’t know. But that’s our attempt, and it’s a very serious attempt so to speak to reach the unengaged user and to try to educate them. We’re hoping that way, we don’t know yet.

Jan: Final questions?

Question: My question is for Gary. [Will significant messages get lost when disguised as entertainment?]

Gary: No, I think you are both sort of asking the same question: how will you know if this is working? Honestly, we don’t have the tools to evaluate that to give you a very good answer. So we have taken a half step of saying we feel we should do something other than what we have done before. We feel we should try very hard to engage the 18-35-year-olds. We have guessed that comedy is the way to do it. How that’s going to turn out, we’ll have to do surveys after the fact or even during it. We’ll have to do surveys to find out if it was effective. At the moment, the only thing I have is anecdotal.

Jan: I’m going to play traffic cop because we have to wrap up. We’ll take a five-minute break and our next panel will come up. And thank this panel very much.