Conference Index

Highlights from "The Future of News." This panel looked at new technologies on the horizon and the ways in which the public may get news in the future. It also examined how multimedia technologies will affect the way journalists report and present international news for print, broadcast and the Internet.

Moderator:
Martin Smith, Rain Media

Panelists:
Michael Moran, Senior Producer, Special Projects, MSNBC.com
Nick De Martino, Associate Director, Strategic Planning, American Film Institute; Director, American Film Institute New Media Ventures
David Underhill, Vice President of Intergroup Development, Tribune Company

	Michael Moran advises journalists to think about how their stories are going to "look like this" as he holds up a Personal Digital Assistant with video capability.

MICHAEL MORAN: I want to look at the actual contemporary reality and this is largely about the Internet and video and graphical interfaces that are coming to the fore now. The other thing is I would like to then show a very short bit about where we're going with wireless technologies.

What we are trying to do is invent something that is different. In subtle ways it gives you a sense that this is clickable or in much more sophisticated ways. These things are very common now on our site. These are the first steps into a kind of cinematic format for our news broadcasts. What we're trying to do is not let this get in the way of the story.

The story is here but it gives you a sense that you are entering something that is more than a daily news story. You are entering something which will give you a lot of different opportunities to explore.

This is the contemporary Internet. Broadband to some extent exists now. This is reaching a lot of people now to the point where even the stuffiest correspondents are not sniffing at our numbers anymore. We are getting much better numbers than the average cable show and numbers that now actually compete, or at least are on the radar screen of "Nightly News," of "Dateline," etc. Those folks are really engaging us in "how do we get our stuff to interplay with your stuff," and they are making their correspondents available to us for the first time.

A lot of what we still do, though, is original journalism. These things have had implications for every single part of our craft. Still photographers have had to learn to edit pictures that swept through and tracked audio. They've had to learn how to shoot with DV cameras.

Videographers have had to learn to shoot in a way that would not only capture the obvious conventions of video -- clearing frames, doing establishing shots. They have had to learn how to hold it for a second and say, "This will be the still on the top of the story." Or, "Let the camera run." That kind of stuff becomes twice as important where, in the narration portion of our presentations, we mimic radio much more than television.

Even TV correspondents have had to learn now to back away from what they can do on a big screen and to take into account that this is going to be viewed [on a PC]. Your narration matters more.

In essence, what you have to go back to doing is what I did when I first went from newspapers to video. I overwrote everything. The scripts were too long. There were too many words. I didn't let the pictures tell the story. People have had to cross-train and deal with this.

What I would like to talk about now is the wireless part of this. This [hand held Personal Digital Assistant] has video…it's got Windows Media Player or you could put Real Player in there for video for a handheld.

Ultimately now where is this going? What can I do with this? This is just one example of how our journalism is going to be propagated out into a million other little devices we can't even imagine. This is the speaker. It's pretty good sound for a little thing like this. Can you imagine me talking on a telephone like this? Can you imagine rather than this being a pointer, if this pops up and it's an antenna? What does it have on there? Television. It's got your phone.

There are a lot of implications just in a little box like this. We don't have to change. We're journalists. We should do what we do, but you've got to take into account that it may be in your interest to think about how it's going to look on this. This could be a big market some day. They are saying seven million people or so will have these kind of things by 2005. The growth in these things might be faster than people think.

Then there's also a kind of mutation of interactive television, TiVo, where you are able to kind of tell your TV what to download and what not to download. Imagine the implications for the ad side of our business. Right now I really think the Holy Grail is not necessarily interactive television, although that's an interesting thing that will develop. It's video-on-demand. This already exists on our site.

Essentially what you're looking at here is a page we put up every single day. This is content from the "Today Show," from the "Nightly News" show, from "Dateline." At the moment you just click through and pick which story you want.

It's not hard to imagine a world where pretty soon somebody goes, "Okay, I'll take three, six, seven, and five with an introduction. Run it." That's your "Nightly News" show. Here is the question for the journalists and the producers and everybody in this audience that cares about ethics. First of all, do we care that the top story of the day is missed by half the audience? Second of all, does this mean "Nightly News" does the same number of stories, or do they do twice as many hoping to pull in even a greater audience? I would imagine there's an accountant's answer to that and a journalist's answer to that.

What does it do to us? What does it say about the way we stack stories? Or in newspapers the things that we put on the front page? Where does that professional kind of choice and judgment get reflected? That's a problem I think that we all have to face.

In many ways this plus TiVo is "Nightly News" and other traditional formats' real nightmare. To their credit "Nightly News" is engaged as much as I think any other major old style format has engaged anything on the Internet but it's still a very difficult fit for them.

Part of this is demographic. In 1986 when they were number one their audience was upwards of 20 million people a night. They were number one recently. I think they are now again in the ratings and it's 7 million and that doesn't appear as though it's going to continue to rise. These companies have a very real challenge that they are grappling with trying to balance the questions that I just put out there about how you get the editorial voice and the news judgment reflected into these new means of doing things.

Here [is a place] where video is going. [Refers to video demonstration.] This thing is called "surround video." This is a six-lens camera which the cameraman carries [with] a hard drive on his backpack. If I click and turn, I can check out anything I want. It gives me the ability to [look] around at 360 degrees.

You can imagine at a political convention, for instance, you could put one of those cameras in the middle of the floor and let people drive and see what's going on. You are right in the middle of the Delaware delegation if that's what turns you on.

Nick De Martino foresses a "radical change in distribution" of news stories.

NICK DE MARTINO: I was driving to the airport yesterday -- thinking what I might be saying and hoping that my technology would work -- when NPR came on. This is the 30th birthday of NPR, and they had by happenstance an interview with my old friend, Daniel Schorr.

I am one of the people who hired Dan after he [left] CBS, and before he went to Ted Turner. We did this independent live television broadcast [to-gether] using the public broadcasting satellite service for the first time.

When Ted Turner invited him to be the first actual editorial employee of the as yet unannounced cable news network, it was announced in the western cable show in Anaheim and we haddinner the night before. He turned to me and said, "Now, would you explain again to me what a satellite is?"

This was, I think, the quintessential moment for me. That is, the impact of new technology on journalism -- think back not just in terms of ratings and shares, but what the world was like before CNN, what journalism was like before our concept of time and distance was so radically compressed.

I would say that the major points are that it changed what you were able to get, how you got it to [the] mothership and how the rest of the world got it as well. Because the satellite enabled not just the distribution to cable systems and other outlets -- it changed the relationship between the news capturing process and what the journalist's employers could actually package.

Well, we're in something of the same boat right now because we are dealing with a radical change in distribution. That is sort of my major focus today. Our mission at AFI is to advance and preserve the art of the moving image, and my job is the advancement part.

I'm really here mostly to talk about enhanced television. I use that phrase with a certain amount of trepidation because there are a lot of different things that we were going to call it when we created this workshop four years ago. Was it digital television? Was it interactive television? What exactly are we talking about? We really thought enhanced TV was a good idea for two reasons.

First of all, interactive TV had such a bad name after many failures of trials. Notably the Time-Warner effort in Orlando, the full-service network that most people in television didn't want to hear about anymore. This million-channel universe that John Malone and others were touting had not really come about.

Also, I think because the phrase was so nice. Who could be against enhancing television? After all, it was a vast wasteland, and you needed to enhance it.

Television is going digital whether it's by the current deadline that the UFSEC has pegged or not. The inexorable force of technology will make the distribution form digital in one of a number of ways. The image you see on the screen is pixels instead of lines of resolution. It allows you to converge television and what we now call the Internet, but which is basically forms of data being distributed through wires right now.

This is an example of a newscast in San Francisco. What's being depicted across the bottom would be on the same screen, and users have already entered their zipcode and as a result, they get information in their viewing area that a user in another metropolitan area wouldn't necessarily get. It's called "micron," and in this case [the viewers] are localizing with their zipcode. Another feature that might happen is that you can choose a section similarly to what [Michael Moran of MSNBC] was talking about earlier. [Local news producers] find that their major problem is that people who care about sports care about it intensely, and the people who care about something else care about it intensely. But that may be 30 or 40 percent of the total audience, so the notion here is that you can eliminate sports or you can make it all sports. You know, some trends that we're looking at here include: customization and personalization that the user gets to actually apply to the medium; we also have the inclusion of communication by the user either among and between themselves or with the mothership; the mixed use of text graphics and data features with the video and, of course, the greater user control of that; the blurring of what a channel is; and really, I think, ultimately what news is.

	"You have an obligation to get the story, you have an obligation to get it out, but you also have a very high obligation to get it right," says David Underhill.

DAVID UNDERHILL: Tribune is a company that includes print, television, and interactive groups. And we have a variety of papers, a variety of websites and a variety of TV channels. And so as our company matured into being much more of a multimedia firm, the senior executives decided that it would be productive to empower some people to find ways to create new value for our journalism and for our businesses across those group lines. If you think about it, that's really the topic of your whole conference today. The web products that get created in a newspaper newsroom are by definition cross-group if you start to identify interactive as a separate business. And interactive is clearly a separate business.

I get to work among the different media. I spent, to use a Yogi Berra-type phrase, the first half of my career in radio, the second half in television, and now in the third half I'm moving to print.

The challenge for us is to find new ways to tell stories. The work that [Nancy Durham of the CBC] was doing that we heard about in the first session was a really good example of finding some new ways to tell stories on different media platforms. Because she's returning to what I was doing in tiny little local markets as a radio reporter, going out and really working it all by herself. I really understand the passion to edit it yourself, because that's really part of telling the story by yourself.

The cumbersome technology that was in place when I started in TV has been replaced with tools that are not quite as transparent as a notebook, but they're getting very close. So the challenge is: what does this do to our journalism? What does it do to the kind of stories that we can tell, and also to the resources that our companies put against that news coverage in their traditional media? We're in this evolution from one thing to another, and we're not quite any of them right now in our converged newsrooms, as Michael said.

In our company, we're going through this in a pretty bold, evolutionary way. Tribune has been very focused for the past 10 years or so on electronic publishing from our print newsrooms. And so the journalism has been evolving from traditionally covering a story for print with a once per twenty-four hour deadline. Basically you're focused on whatever time that story has to be vetted to make the press roll at midnight, let's say, to the concept that you will come out of a courtroom and you will tell the story of the verdict online, instantly, you will tell the story with a little more depth one hour later on our cable news channel, you will tell the story on WGN News at 9, and comprehensively in the Chicago Tribune Online and in the next morning's paper when it drops on your doorstep.

It's a difference from what a lot of newspaper companies started with, which was pushing everything they had published over to the website. We're really trying to change the culture in our newsrooms to be focused on 24-hour publishing. That changes your deadlines, and it raises a lot of ethical concerns about how quickly you get something to air. You have an obligation to get the story, you have an obligation to get it out, but you have a very high obligation to get it right.

In the past year a group of other newspapers merged into our company, so we now have 11 daily papers, 23 television stationswe operate and many dozens of web sites. And we're beginning these newsroom evolutions in all of our papers, now.

In Chicago last fall, a team of journalists at the Chicago Tribune went into production of a comprehensive series entitled, "Gateway to Gridlock." The series took a look at the effects of delays on the air traffic control system, and it investigated problems at Chicago's O'Hare Airport and how those problems rippled through the country. Over 50 reporters -- indeed hundreds of people in the aggregate -- worked on this series, which was published in the Tribune over a seven-day period, and multimedia reporters worked on it from the beginning. This is the point we're trying to make here. We worked on it for television and for the web from the beginning. Not re-purposing content, but producing it in parallel as a part of the initiative of "Gateway to Gridlock."

A lot of what you saw there was shot by staff photographers and videographers inside the Chicago Tribune. We are doing this work in tandem with our television station. One of those photographers in fact is in the room today and is on the staff of the Chicago Tribune producing video every day. We are producing television for our television stations, our cable channels and for our websites. When you take the journalism that went into that series and you can share it to a free, over-the-air audience, you can share it with the nation on the web -- the international community on the web. And by the way, "Gateway to Gridlock" was one of the four Tribune Pulitzer Prize winners this year. Not the television part, the story -- the newspaper coverage.

We think about our newspapers now in terms of their local markets, clearly, but also in terms of the international markets. And even better, we think about the resources in our substantial foreign bureaus, particularly for our big three newspapers as untapped ways we can get multimedia journalism back to the home community.

We're really in our infancy on this -- particularly in the foreign area. But we're certainly thinking hard about the different ways in which our international reporting can contribute back to our television stations and very definitely our website. I am a huge believer in the long-term success of the world wide web, of the Internet -- both in interactive slow-speed narrowband and high speed venues. I agree completely with my two colleagues who say that it is a "new medium." It is not television, it is not print. It's different. We're studying personalization -- we're looking very hard at ways that our content -- our journalism -- may end up on those little PDA's. We've been involved in the enhanced television experiments including the one with Time/Warner in the early 1990's. We are very committed to investing in the future ways people will see our journalism, because we really want to stay connected. We think that this is the way the newspaper will remain strongest.

QUESTION

JOHN GIANNINI: My name is John Giannini. I'm based in Paris, and I've spent most of my career in foreign news.

I was struck by your Tribune piece on China, and it seemed to me like you've got your reporter [Michael Lev] jumping around [as] a one-legged place kicker. You've put an enormous amount of pressure [on him] to feed all these various sources. How do you see that affecting the quality of the product?

UNDERHILL: The first priority for our journalist in the field is for the medium he's primarily assigned to work for. Michael's priority is to have that story in the Chicago Tribune tomorrow morning, and that's what he's getting paid to do -- and he knows it. Similarly, Sonja, the TV person who was reporting from Cuba on that particular day, is employed by the Tribune Broadcasting Company. Her job is to file stories for the eighteen stations that have nightly newscasts. So her primary obligation while she was in Havana on that particular day was to get television pieces filed.

Now, the pressure is significant and it's a tension that the editor has to help address. It's his editor's obligation -- and his as well -- to make sure that his primary job is the one he's focused on in terms of the story being done, and the story being right. A lot of the time these calls go out or the correspondent calls in -- the correspondent says "I've got five minutes, I can't call WGN radio and talk to the guy on the morning show." And when he has five minutes, what we do is flip him over to the operations crew at the Chicago Tribune. We get him on tape, we throw him to a file server and then he goes. Or he says: "I simply don't have time to do radio at all, or television at all." And that has to be respected, and the editor has to be in charge of the editor's product.

But if we allow this getting tugged in all different directions to hurt the person's ability to get the news coverage -- to literally get the story -- then we've blown it, big time. I share the concern.

MORAN: Let me just say that we have a similar situation over at MSNBC. We've had Moscow bureau chiefs suddenly covering the Ukraine, Belarus, places their predecessors may very well have never learned to spell, because [they] never appeared on the radar screen. So suddenly they have an outlet to look into the NTV story, for instance, which wouldn't necessarily make "Nightly News," but which we basically had running coverage of on the Internet.

I used to work at the BBC, and the thing we were told was that we were supposed to be "trimedial." Which meant we were supposed to get out there, do the televison piece, do the radio spot for the World Service, and then basically you'd write a "talk," an old-fashioned thing most of you have never heard of, and that would be translated into 500 different languages and that would go out on World Service. That was hard, because they have very little in common but the story. You can't use the script for the radio, and you can't use the radio for the talk -- you had to redo it. There's a lot of tension there. The individual correspondents eventually figure out whether they can do that -- they push that, they come to a happy medium, and on big projects you have to say, "I'm off the gerbil wheel. I can't produce for everybody." Generally speaking, that has worked so far.

QUESTION

JOE RUBIN: I'm Joe Rubin, one of these lone wolf guerilla video journalists. I'm wondering how much of a role you feel you are playing and can play in creating a dynamic environment where stories can be broken, and stories can be told in a different way? And how much are you under pressure because you are there to promote the newspaper, to promote the television corporation that you're working for. As a videojournalist I think it's a great opportunity -- I'm excited by it -- but I also feel frustrated because there's not really a niche to get in there and tell some great stories. I think there are lots of people out there who'd be willing to go and tell great stories for you guys.

MORAN: Every organization has a different take on that. We have been fortunate to do a lot of original journalism -- in fact my London bureau chief just got back from two weeks in Afghanistan. He shot on DV. His stuff will appear first and foremost on the web, because he can really go to town on a series that really profiles what's going on there. But video elements will appear -- I hope -- on "Nightly News" and "Brian Williams." They both kicked in money for the trip.

We certainly don't kid ourselves; we're at this stage of the evolution of the Internet -- NBC's in it for something down the road and to learn the reflexes of this new medium and to expose their long-time, veteran television journalists to what the implications of this medium are to them. And to have their flag planted in it just in case there's a way [to] make money. We have to service the Beast -- to steal a phrase -- but none of us got into this to re-purpose. As much as possible, we get people out doing original journalism. We break stories all the time.

UNDERHILL: We are a journalism company with something like 5,000 people around the country and the world covering news. We're very heavily invested in the web, and of course, in television. And I think it's fair to say that everybody in our dotcom operations wishes they had more resources. That's a serious reality. We're a business and we're a company, and we fully intend our web operations to be successful, long-term profitable businesses. And the challenge is to find a new way of telling stories on that medium, and so to the extent that that comes out of the core journalism -- that's great, that's smart, it keeps the papers and the television station's news operations strong as well. To the extent that it has to be totally different, we've got to be prepared to support that.

Next: "Keynote Address by David Fanning