Transcripts: UNITY 2004

 Mary Lou Fulton, Publisher, NorthwestVoice.com, Bakersfield, California

Hi, everybody, thanks for coming out. I’d like to begin by talking about something that’s very important to me and something I believe in and that is community. I believe in community because I believe that in each of us there is a need, a longing, something that wants to be part of an effort that’s larger than what we are as individuals. And that’s really all about participation.

“I think journalism is terrible at participation.”
-Mary Lou Fulton

I think journalism is by and large terrible at participation. I don’t think we do a very good job at all of interacting with our leaders and listeners and viewers in trying to understand what’s important to them. And it was in large part due to my frustration with this culture in newsrooms that led me to leave the newspaper business ten years ago and I went to the online world for a while, which is all about participation and interactivity.

But I came back to newspapers last year and was fortunate to go to work for the Bakersfield Californian, which is a family-owned independent newspaper in Bakersfield, where community and participation is highly valued. So I feel very much at home there and when I was asked as one of my first assignments to look into creating a community newspaper, I thought to myself: Well, I wonder what would happen if we created a community publication in which readers contributed almost all of the articles and pictures and events? What would happen if we turned it over to the community? I wonder what would happen if we had a policy that said “yes” to everything? Instead of being gatekeepers and telling people that what was important to them really didn’t matter, what if we just said: “You know what: If it’s local and it’s legal, we’ll take it.”

“If it’s local and it’s legal we’ll take it. “
-Mary Lou Fulton

And what if we could leverage the strengths of the online medium and have everything submitted through our web site? We’d publish everything first online and then we’d take as many items as possible and we put it into a print edition and we’d distribute that for free to every household in the community. Well, that’s what we’re doing in Bakersfield with Northwest Voice. I’m going to be telling you a little bit more about that today.

Now, as you might imagine, I get a lot of questions about this idea, and when I talk to my colleagues, particularly those in the newsroom, some of the looks I get are like: What? What do you mean by that? I’m confused. And the composite reaction goes something like: Well, that’s really nice that you’re doing that. Good for you. But, come on, you’ve worked in newsrooms before, you know that this isn’t really news because all the school plays and the youth sports and all that stuff, that doesn’t really matter. It’s not that important and don’t they really have better things to do?

“I don’t care about being nice . . . I care about being relevant.”
-Mary Lou Fulton

And I’m sure because all of you here are interested in interactive and participatory journalism that we don’t have anyone here who shares that opinion, but in case you should run across someone who does, I would say that you tell them to please pull your head out. You are not the only ones who know what’s important. You are not the only ones who know what matters.

I don’t care about being nice, not that I object to being nice. I care about being relevant. We have a big problem with relevance in our media today because people don’t see enough of themselves in what we do and, as a result, they’re checking out of what we do in numbers that are really scary.

And so, I think it’s a necessity for us as an industry to explore new ways to connect with readers. It’s not just something that we do because it’s nice; it’s something that we do because we care about being relevant and surviving into the future.

Now, one of the things that’s happening that’s good news for us is that our readers and viewers are not dropping out, they’re just sort of checking out of what we’re doing and they’re checking in to other places. And one of the places that they’re checking into is online. Now, the online content revolution is generally described as everybody’s doing e-mail and booking their flights online and all of that is true. But there’s also something else that’s happening that’s really quite amazing. There’s an explosion in creativity and in self-expression that’s happening online today.

“There’s an explosion in creativity and in self-expression that’s happening online today. “
-Mary Lou Fulton

A Pew study earlier this year found that 44 percent of Internet users had created some type of online content. That includes things like pictures, posting on message boards, having blogs, participating somehow in the online world. That is really pretty remarkable to me.
Why is this happening? Well, people are much more familiar with the Internet today, they’re not afraid of it anymore. Everybody’s got a digital camera, more and more people have broadband access at home, and computing horsepower and web publishing tools are really easy now. You don’t have to know much of anything to publish to the web; you just have to be able to type.

And so, individuals are saying: Hey, you know what, if my local media doesn’t do it for me, I’m just going to go do it for myself, and they’re going out and doing this as individuals. They’re also going out and participating in community efforts. So, I think the real challenge for us is not to say that this doesn’t matter or that we don’t care. It’s how do we plug in? How do we participate by harnessing the power of all of this creativity that’s going on out there and creating better content that’s not just about bloggers ranting, but it’s really about community. And it’s about participating and adding something special and new to our local efforts.

Just to share with you a few examples of what’s happening out there: In Korea there’s a site called ohmynews.com where there are some 33,000 content contributors. And these individuals contribute articles and, if those articles are accepted onto the web site, they’re paid. It’s been going on for a few years in Korea. I would say — would you agree, Jan — they’re really the pioneer in terms of participatory journalism.

In Long Beach, California, where I spent part of my life, I signed up for a site called lbreport.com. And this is a guy who sends out seven to ten e-mails a day about everything under the sun. Just one guy. He goes to public meetings, he does audio files, he sends out pictures when the jacaranda trees are in bloom, he sends what we call impact reports to raise money, I mean, everything under the sun. This is just one guy.

Jan mentioned GothamGazette.com. They do a great job being good community watchdogs and keeping track of government and providing that civic focus. We have a number of community sites that are also springing up. There is one in Vermont called mybrattleboro.com. There’s one in Maine called villagesoup.com. These are all kind of community, newspapery-types of sites that are inviting readers to participate by submitting content and whatever they want about what’s going on in the community.

NorthwestVoice is part of this sort of family of new community sites. It was launched in May of this year. As I mentioned, all the content is submitted through our web site, northwestvoice.com. All submissions are published to the web provided that they’re local and legal. And we include as much as we can in the biweekly print editions published every other Thursday and distributed for free.

There are extra copies up here if anybody’s interested in taking one home. These are created independent of our daily newspaper, The Californian. So, branded separately and distributed separately.

So, how do we go about doing this? Well, we started out first by looking at this area of northwest Bakersfield, which was the fastest growing area of our community and saying: What is our target audience? Who are we doing this for? We decided that we were doing this for homeowners with young families. We have a lot of young families moving in, buying homes. They are moving into this area because the public schools are good and we wanted that to be the focus of our effort.

So, if that’s the focus of your effort, then that leads to count your priorities like schools and churches and youth sports and local celebrations. We did a great deal of personal outreach to community leaders to tell them about this idea, to ask for their participation and support. We met personally with every school principal, every parent/teacher club, every kind of a youth sports organization in town and, and asked them to join with us in this effort.

“Having predictable forms of content makes it a lot easier.”
-Mary Lou Fulton

We also looked at what were the community’s interests in town. So, in Bakersfield off-roading is really popular, horses are really popular, and cars. We identified people who wanted to write about these topics regularly. We also have an editor who writes a cover story every week and a few other little items, but her job is really to be an evangelist for this concept, to be out in the community, to look at the content when it comes in, make sure that the spelling and the grammar are okay and put it out there on the web.

One of the things that is really important in doing an effort like this is having some predictability in the content. One of the things that’s very scary is: Oh-oh, we just put one issue out. What if nobody sends us anything? So, having predictable forms of content makes it a lot easier.

For columnists, we have a half dozen provide about 30 percent of our content. This is our horse columnist. Our editor writes 10 to 15 percent of what you see in the paper. The rest of it just kind of comes in randomly from the community. And by the way, all of our community columnists and contributors are volunteers.

So, what are we getting? We are getting a wide range of stuff coming in. Pictures are the most popular form of content; about 30 percent of what we get are pictures. School news is about 14 percent, the columnists are about 15 percent. We get everything — from an 86-year-old guy sending us his recipe for chocolate chip cookies to a local professor writing an analysis of the No Child Left Behind Act in Kern County and the effect it’s had on schools. and everything in-between. It’s really kind of fascinating to just kind of watch this thing evolve.

The people who are contributing, about 60 to 65 percent are women — and I guess we didn’t really think about this a lot before we did the publication — but I think women do tend to be a little bit more closely tied to community and tend to be a little bit larger part of the social fabric. And so, we are seeing, at least in the initial stages, a little bit more participation by women than men.

“…that feedback loop is really important.”
-Mary Lou Fulton

How does all of this work? We have a web publishing system that’s really at the heart of our operation. It was built by a Canadian content management company called iUpload. What readers do is to type in text and send their pictures through our web site. We review it, we assign it to a category and we e-mail the contributor when their content is online. It’s very important that when someone takes the time to send you something that you always be polite and get back to them and tell them: “Thank you, yes, here’s your stuff on the web. Or no, I’m sorry, it’s not local or we need you to modify it in this way.” So, that feedback loop is really important.

Also, when we approve content we can queue the content for print. So, we say, this would be good for the next print edition or this is about an event that’s coming up in three weeks. So, we’ll just put that in the hopper for the next print edition. We also have a way to designate trusted contributors who can publish directly to our web site so our columnists and others who we know and have a good sense of what they do and what they’re capable of doing, they can just publish directly to the site.

I wanted to keep a pretty tight rein on it at the beginning because I just wanted to make sure that everything was local and appropriate, but I believe over time we’re just going to loosen that more and more and more and we’re going to have more people who really have ownership of the site and they’re going to be just out there doing this thing on their own.

So, just to give you a sense of the process our readers go through, if you go to northwestvoice.com, at the top of every page is a graphic that says ”Share your Voice.” And if you click on that you see this page and you just simply select the type of content that you want to contribute, whether it’s an article or a picture or a letter, whatever it is. We do require you to register so that we know who you are before you submit content.

You just fill in the blanks, put in your headline and your description. If you know how to type you can do this. No special technical skill is required and then you click the submit button. It comes into a queue where we see who sent it, when they sent it in, what’s the headline, what type of content it is. This is how we manage all the inbound content.

When we open up an individual piece of content, we can edit it right on the web. This is where we do all of our writing and editing. We don’t have an editorial production environment other than the web. And we choose a content category. So, we put it in school news or put it in sports, and we can also queue it for print. So, we choose a date for a future print edition from a drop-down menu. And, at the top there is a way to e-mail the contributor automatically. So, when we hit that publish button it goes out to the web, the contributor gets an e-mail, it gets queued for print, distributed for print and we’re done with that piece of content.

Just a few operational notes. We do this with a staff of three and a half people. There’s a salesperson, an editor and an office manager, a part-time production artist and me. Here, we are at a community yard sale in Bakersfield where we were handing out balloons and talking about The Voice. We do a lot of grassroots marketing that way.

“This is not a replacement for our daily newspaper; it’s a complement to it.”
-Mary Lou Fulton

We are read and distributed separately from The Californian, the reason being that this is different from The Californian. This is not a replacement for our daily newspaper; it’s a complement to it. But because its standards and approach are really different, we just wanted to have it be separate.

And for those interested in crass things like money, I’m happy to tell you that our revenue has increased 33 percent since we launched the product in May. We’re six to eight weeks away from starting to make money with this newspaper. One of the great lessons for me in being involved in community products over the years is that you have to think about the business, too. Even though we may be in editorial, we have to have a strategy for how this thing is going to make money or else all of the great things about community won’t survive. I’ve had that unfortunate experience before.

So, some advice for those of you who might be interested in taking something like this on. Look at your community and choose an area where there’s a strong sense of community or an emerging sense of community. Make sure you know who your audience is and build the content around what they care about. Community outreach is really important. You have to be out there talking to people, making sure they know who you are. Support community organizations, be at community events.

This model is different in that we have to also train our readers and contributors to be active participants rather than passive readers. One of the things that happened to us a lot in the beginning was that we would go out and introduce the concept and invite people to participate and, and we’d inevitably hear: “Well, okay, but can you come out and cover this event for us?” And we would say: “No, but if you would like to write something up and send it in, then we would be happy to publish it.”

One of my observations about all this is how passive our readers and our viewers have become. They don’t expect that they can participate; they don’t understand that whole model. And so, we’re trying to turn that around and get people thinking about how then can really become part of this effort.

You have to also give the community ideas for how to contribute. We are constantly publishing suggestions in the paper. Send us this, we’re looking for that, we’d like photos about this and we’d like articles about that, and each time we do that we start to get that stuff in. And so, we’re giving people ideas for how to participate.

It’s just a lot of fun. You know, we give people a way to share their stories with the world and I find that to be incredibly fun and interesting and inspiring and we’re really having a great time with this product. I would just ask all of you to think about how you can say “yes” to community. And when someone calls and asks if you can cover something or if they can get some information in the paper, instead of telling them, “Well, we don’t cover ground breakings. We don’t do this,” just stop and just ask yourself: Is there a way that you can say “yes?” Is there a way that you can ask them to submit something, a picture so you can somehow integrate what’s important to your readers and viewers and listeners into what you do. If you do that, they’re going to start to see themselves in what you do and that’s going to create that relationship that Jan talked about, that personal and emotional statement of product that’s so essential if we’re to be relevant in the future.

Just as some resources, I created a site called opensourcejournalism.org, where you will find this presentation later today as well as all of the business planning and technology information, contact information. So, I’m happy to help anyone who’s interested in starting one of these things in their community or interested in talking their publishers into doing that, please call me.

There’s a great new book out by Dan Gillmor called “We, the Media” up here. It just came out last week. Dan is the technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and he’s really nailed it with his book. So, if you’d like to have a better understanding of this whole revolution, I’d really recommend that book. And, again, I hope you’ll contact me if you have any questions or want to talk about it some more. And if anybody has any questions here, feel free. Yes?

SPEAKER: I have a financial question. Who are your advertisers and do you have a set staff and Advertising Department for selling this and a front-page analysis in terms of the number of FTEs dedicated to Northwest Voice?

MS. FULTON: I’m talking mostly today about the content strategy, but one of our important business objectives was to get more small and medium-size businesses into the paper because those are the businesses who either can’t afford the daily paper or don’t like it. And so, we track all this stuff very carefully and about 60 percent of our advertisers are either brand new to the company or are very frequent advertisers in the daily publication.

So, we have one FTE for our Voice sales. The ads are very highly trumpeted in the print edition. We price them lower so that we can afford to get more folks into the paper at a cheaper price. And we also pick up ads from the Bakersfield Californian, from the daily paper. so, all of that stuff together comprises our revenue stream. And we sell web ads, too. Go ahead.

SPEAKER: Can you tell us a little bit more about the editing process and what you emphasize in terms of the content?

MS. FULTON: We edit primarily for grammar and spelling. Most of the things that we get are very personal in nature. So, there are people writing about something that happened to their neighbor down the street and so I don’t feel the nature of that content really requires a lot of fact checking.

When somebody comes in like the No Child Left Behind Act, yeah, we do look at that. If anything comes in regarding local government or any kind of public issue, we look at that a lot more closely. But if it’s very personal journalism, we feel that’s really the responsibility of the contributor and if there’s a problem with an article, we refer people back to them.

SPEAKER: You say you’re trying to target an audience…What other kinds of information have you collected in terms of income level and other kinds of things?

MS. FULTON: We do have a lot of demographic information about the area — 30 or 35 percent of the population is younger than age 17. We have a lot of young kids and that’s why we’re really emphasizing the school and the sports stuff.

The household income I think is relevant as it pertains to generally being more likely to have Internet access, generally being more technologically literate. This is not the highest income area of Bakersfield. It’s the fastest growing and one in which our daily newspaper penetration was not keeping pace with the market. And so, we wanted to make sure that, with folks who are traditionally good newspaper readers, homeowners with young families, that we have something for them that they really connected with.

SPEAKER: You talked a little bit about the reaction you got in the newsroom, but what was the reaction you got from people in the community?

MS. FULTON: It’s been extremely positive. I can’t recall another project I’ve worked on where I get calls every time the print edition, in particular, comes out. People are saying, “Thank you.” I rarely hear that. We get letters. People say thank you for this publication and when we go out to the community the response is positive. It’s very positive.

We’re starting to get — and I think this is just part of having a publication — people saying you got this wrong, you got that wrong. But that’s fine. That’s good because that’s participation, too. And so, it’ll just evolve that way, but people feel a sense of ownership because they see pictures of people they know and places they know and they feel emotionally connected to it and that’s why they really like it.

SPEAKER: How does The Voice show up in the daily paper?

MS. FULTON: It does not. It’s distributed independently.

SPEAKER: But is there any effort to promote The Voice in the daily paper?

MS. FULTON: Very little, very little. Every once in a while there’s a shared item, but it’s really entirely independent. We also have racks in the community that help us. Yes?

SPEAKER: What about for a particular news item, would contact them for that? How does that work?

“You have to have this as a standalone model in the beginning to prove that it’s viable because it’ll get smothered in traditional newsrooms.”
-Mary Lou Fulton

MS. FULTON: Yes. I say we have no relationship and we don’t, in terms of what the consumer sees. In other words, they see something called the Northwest Voice that’s different from the Bakersfield Californian. But we’ve already had a case in which an oil well blew up near our horse columnist’s house. That’s not something we can really deal with as a breaking news story. So, we sent it over to the Californian and they wrote it up and they handled it. I think we’ll see more of that, too. Yes?

SPEAKER: Can you say something about the financial aspects?

MS. FULTON: Yes. It’s printed in The Californian, but we have all the costs allocated back. So, rent for the office space that we use and the newsprint. the printing costs, and carrier delivery, other things on that order. Miss Jodi?

SPEAKER: How much of your coverage is e-mail driven?

MS. FULTON: That’s a good question. I don’t know and I should know. I hope a lot of it will be. What we’re seeing in the traffic patterns is something that you often see in community sites, which is that the traffic pattern is just kind of a mile wide and an inch deep. So, you see lots of three and four views on a single page and not hundreds and hundreds of views on any one page. which tells me probably that stuff is getting forwarded around.

MS. SCHAFFER: Any more questions?

SPEAKER: It seems like we have the momentum to move forward with this as a new era of interactive reporting. How do you see this playing out in the future? Do you envision both kinds of reporting coexisting with the other?

MS. FULTON: Yes, I do. It’s the next generation of community journalism. We’re just taking advantage of the medium and trying to not inherit a lot of the legacy habits from daily newspapers in order to be more efficient.

“It’s the next generation of community journalism. “
-Mary Lou Fulton

SPEAKER: How do you see the two types of newspapers existing in the future?

MS. FULTON: I see integration in the future. You know, I’m not standing here saying that we should stop publishing our daily newspapers and replace them with Northwest Voices everywhere. But I think you have to have this as a stand-alone model in the beginning to prove that it’s viable because it’ll get smothered in traditional newsrooms. And once you kind of hang out its own identity. I predict everything will sort of come back together .

Retha Hill, Vice President, Content Development
Chief Editorial Officer, BET Interactive

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.

“Before we even start our reporting, we try to get some views from our users.”
-Retha Hill

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 bet.com is our message boards.. “
-Retha Hill

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.