All the News That Fits

Brandweek, Sept 4, 2000 by Verne Gay

Steve Jones, a veteran ABC News radio executive who--as executive producer of ABCNews.com--brought a breaking news urgency to the site argues, "We don't want to replicate the network but offer as many uses to the user as possible, so that they can watch Nightline or portions of World News Tonight. The great thing about the Internet is that we don't have to exclude content. It's not a question of putting up last night's Nightline instead of something else, but in addition to something else. That's exciting for the network, but also for the storyteller."

FROM COUCH POTATO TO MOUSE POTATO

And, says Bernard Gershon, senior vice president and general manager of ABCNews.com, "The basic nature of the human being is not going to change. People are still going to want the couch potato experience." There are reasons to go to both, he says. "Video will be a much better experience on TV than on the Web, but what you'll get on the Web is a fully interactive experience. It's audio and the video image. It's moving graphics. It's the ability to clip through a map, for example, or get a 3-D spinning image of the White House, or show the [political] route to the White House, or the greatest video clips from the conventions of the past 30 years, or click on a timeline and see a speech or watch a video of the rioting in Chicago in '68. The key is going to be to make it easy for users to find the stuff, as you put more of this content out there."

And the human animal is still evolving. According to a recent study released by Showtime and Paul Kagan Associates, people in about 25 million U.S. households log on to the Internet while watching television (90 percent of these watched sitcoms, sports and news.) That bodes particularly well for the major TV news hubs.

Studies like this tend to support what executives have claimed all along: Millions of users have effectively become ambidextrous, able to watch a video clip with one eye and digest factoids with the other. And so executives have constructed their sites to accommodate this new media consumer.

MSNBC.com, the behemoth of network TV new sites that boasts some 8 million worldwide users per day, was conceived with the basic idea that there can never be enough information on any one story. In the emerging world of online news, this would appear to be a particularly smart strategy-and the de facto model for all TV news sites-for at least one key reason. It keeps the user glued to the site, rather than forcing them to migrate to other sites for additional facts.

Michael Silberman, executive editor of MSNBC.com, says "We don't know a whole lot about how people are using video on the Internet in terms of what behavior patterns are. But we know how people watch TV and use the Internet, and we think the experience, even when both are on the computer screen, is kind of parallel." People, he says, "are comfortable with the idea" that if they see something on TV, "they can go to their computer and dig for more information that makes it more personally relevant."