AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Sanjay Trehan is the CEO of NDTV in India. Speaking at the Online News Association's annual conference in Washington, DC on Saturday, he spoke excitedly about the tools of the new media revolution. This is a man who is launching 14 TV stations, mind you. You would think the Web would horrify him. It does not.

“The future is going to be a combination of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, along with more – a seemless ecosystem,” said Trehan.”  “You will consume news in this way. Not because it is fashionable to say so, but because the consumer is doing this.”

Trehan pointed to Qik, the live streaming tool that lets you stream in real time from certain mobile phones. “This landscape that is emerging is going to be device and platform-agnostic.” He referred to 12seconds.tv as the “Twitter of videos.” You can do everything you can do with Twitter, but in video at 12seconds.tv – instead of being limited to 140 characters, you're limited to 12 seconds of video. (12seconds.tv is currently in private beta – you can sign up for an invite.) Don't go to 12seconds.com – it's a weight loss site. You know – unless you're up for that kind of thing.

Trehan pointed to online experiences like Lycos Cinema, where people can gather online to watch a film at the same time at different locations and comment. This is a pay model – if I want to watch “National Lampoon's Bag Boy” with five friends in five different places, it's $6.00. Not too sure about this one…

The point is that the head of this massive organization – at the building stage — is embracing these technologies. He knows his video will be on YouTube. Heck, he's anticipating it. Trehan is building for the future, not hoping it will look like the past. Trehan isn't reinventing at all – he's simply inventing.

(Note: Trehan concluded his remarks here, and opened the floor to questions. I had to leave to prepare for our panel on Mobile technology that followed hot on the heels of this presentation.)

Everything you need to know about what stifles creativity in newsroom online environments – along with how to overcome those frustrations – was on display in the ONA session on how the Las Vegas Sun rebuilt its Website.

The name of the session was “Las Vegas Sun: Site Redesign.” The two panelists were Josh Williams and Tyson Evans, the guys who went in, got their hands dirty and built the site. They are the brains behind the code. (See correction/amplification below.) They are two of the many great minds behind this project who have created what we have pointed to, time and again, as the model for a modern news and community Website. They are not the business development team, the sales team nor the marketing team. They were given parameters for traffic models, and that was it. These guys explained how to blow up an old site and build something better.

And there were some in the audience who just couldn't get it. These are not the guys to ask about the money. And they're especially not the guys to shake your heads at and “tut tut” about being in start-up mode.

First things first. The Las Vegas Sun website is kick ass. Its video is far superior to any you will find on any TV site. They have pieces in HD, which you can also get on iTunes. A demonstration of the video on a widescreen plasma screen put to shame any news video streaming you've ever seen. This… was HDTV.

The number of interactives the team has developed for its site, is a homebrewed CMS (built on top of Django,)

When you have the opportunity to learn from the minds behind a terrific piece of work, you listen. You ask questions about how they did it. I wanted to know about the cameras they used and how they get content into the system. To learn about their business model? That's for another day – the business manager wasn't there. Don't blame these guys. Blame, if you want, the ONA for not inviting him/her.

But people wouldn't let it go.

“Are you making money?” is among the first questions.  This is fair to ask. The audience doesn't know, at first, whether these are the guys to ask. Josh and Tyson explain they are not. The session description bears this out.

Josh answers, “We're in startup mode.” This gets too much of a snort from the audience. Part of the laugh is recognition – we know how hard it is to make money on line. But part of it, too, is this mentality that “see – there's no way this will make money! It's another startup!”

So many companies fear the startup mode. Every company fears the startup. Name a company that starts making money the moment you turn it on. The web is about startup. We have to get there if we are to compete. Yes – when you launch a company, it may lose money. As opposed to the money the companies are currently losing?

It's not that we don't care about the money, and I'm not at all being glib about it. You need a budget, and you need your people working within that budget. But once you establish that budget – let them go. Free them to be creative and reinvent. They are not putting the paper online – they are building a new business at the Las Vegas Sun. We will find out whether they succeed or not. Right now, it's like arguing with the carpenter, when you want to be asking the architect questions.

NOTE: A much needed correction and amplification comes from the comments here, where “photon” writes:  “Josh and Tyson are great guys, but I wouldn't call them “the brains behind the code”. Gotta give credit where credit is due. The brains behind the code are Doug Twyman and his brilliant team of programmers– Kit Dallege, Tim Thiel, and Sean Stoops. These guys are wicked smart!”

I give bonus points for the proper use of the term “wicked smart,” and agree. Thanks for the note, and props to the whole team.

Tina Brown started off kindly enough, calling for a sort of hegemony online. But you knew her true colors were bound to show through, and they came after the formal keynote. She railed against non-professional Web content and the companies that use it. She called the “time we're in” a terrible period for reporting and journalism:

“There has to be pushback – so many media companies think that they can replace their journalists with lower paid kids, and this will lead to their fall. They will destrory their brands if they keep making their reporters put out far too much than they can do well. I think that will happen. It will be a very painful period in between.

“I think this period where people thought than any old person could write a reputable posting is over and it has been a terrible period for us… talent has been exploited by technology. There should be more vocal pushback on this… I don't want to be the union voice, but it's a pretty sad state of affairs.”

Then there's this. Tina's starting her own site, the dailybeast.com and is “looking for editors who will put aside the wisdom of the crowd.” Bold.

Once again, it's Us Vs. Them.

Jeff Jarvis got up to ask Tina about the business model of this new editor-driven site of hers. She refused to discuss it, apart from saying “people will see.”

At ONA on Friday morning, Tina Brown raised a very good point – journalists are so buried in competitors' products that they hardly do original reporting. There's so much fear that they're “missing something” that they play it safe. I saw a great example of this recently when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was questioning Andrea Mitchell about why her report different from one in Newsweek. We're so afraid to take risks. “What can we do in this crazy age to cut through the static and fake stuff and noise? We have to go back to thinking to what editors can do in an age when algorithms are ruling the day… ” She praised Drudge, HuffPo and Real Clear Politics for finding news nuggets and editing them for points of view. In talking about going back to revisit stories and rethink them, Brown said, “Just when you think you've heard everything about a subject is just when you realize you know nothing.”

Terry and I have often written about how businesses can be news centers, too. I have to give a special hat tip to the people behind GustavBloggers.com. Who are they? Just a bunch of tecchies at the Zipa datacenter in downtown New Orleans. They’re there, they’re working, they had to keep communications flowing during the storm and they had some damn good insight into what was happening.

I want to get something straight from the start: the news organizations that I could see online did a terrific job with storm coverage. Clearly, we have learned our lessons from Katrina. Terry wrote above about how some anchors reinvented themselves and how it showed during the storm. Websites were more prepared and had better information. The online effort was remarkable and laudable.

I just want to point to one small piece of the Web to indicate the change that’s happening in how we get information. Part of the news river came from techhies. If you look at their blog, it’s every bit as good and useful as a “professional” news blog.

There’s also a lesson here about search: look for “Gustav Blog” on Google, and GustavBloggers.com – a site that didn’t exist a couple of weeks ago – comes up sixth. The techs secured their own URL, dedicated their own space to the site and other sites began linking in immediately. Because they used WordPress, the site “speaks” easily with search. From nothing to sixth in no time – impressive.

The entries are excellent – the folks at GustavBloggers posted 53 of them on Monday. They had an excellent view from their datacenter, so we see plenty of pictures including some pretty dramatic scenes and a strangely pretty one. When we talk about the shift to Continuous News – this is it.

It’s not a matter of Us vs. Them. We’re in it together, especially in a crisis. News stations are excellent at giving the big picture during storms. The GustavBloggers gave us a slice of life – and one that was equally newsworthy.