| Articles or Radio Programs Where I Have Been Interviewed
Editor and Publisher
For its 2002 year-end issue, Editor & Publisher magazine asked me to talk about the state of online news sites and to offer suggestions for improving those sites.
An excerpt:
You’ve Got Advice
Editor & Publisher
Dec. 31, 2002
Q: Many news sites have cut back on reader forums and other interactive features as their budgets have shrunk. How can newspapers offer all of these features and still have profitable Web sites?
GK: I would vehemently argue that a nonprofitable site is not a failure and the paper should not back away from it or decimate it. Similarly, a local newspaper cannot decimate its local section and expect subscriber growth. The metro section is probably one of the most labor intensive and, therefore, expensive sections of the newspaper. It often has a small number of advertisers -- especially large-city dailies. No one is arguing, however, that because the local-news section of a newspaper is not an independent profit center that it should be eliminated. On the contrary, publishers know that without that section of the paper, the overall organization would not have as many subscribers and likely would not be profitable in total. Newspaper publishers should see their online news sites in the same way: as a core department of the total organization. Without that department, subscribers, revenue, and commerce go elsewhere.
Sites can be managed to profitability. One part of that is to eliminate the separate staffs and the walls between the online site and the newspaper. Those walls, and the reasons and attitudes that led to them, are legacies that keep the newspaper staff and the online staff from peak performance that could be achieved if they were one. I would use the newspaper's resources and particularly its database information to deliver what no other news organization could: targeted local information like e-mail or wireless alerts about school closings or sports scores. I'd create products like "How Dangerous is My Neighborhood? or "How Safe is My Child's School?" No one else has the resources to deliver searchable classified ads, say, for a three-bedroom home, under $200,000 on the north side of town.
In other words, I would use the medium's capabilities to create products that cannot be delivered anywhere else or by anyone else. The more unique and targeted those products are, the greater the chance they can become premium services for which the news organization charges. I would not charge for the basic information in the online site. I would charge for premium services that only the site could deliver. I would seek creative revenue sources from partnering with merchants, creating programs that use the unique interactive capabilities of the online medium for their benefit. (More)
National Public Radio
In October 2003 I was the guest on an hour-long NPR show about online news.
(Focus 580 WILL-AM, Champaign-Urbana, Ill., Nov. 12, 2003)
Listen online
Online Journalism Review
Online Journalism Review interviewed me about AOL News' unique position as a News aggregator and producer of the largest news site on the Internet.
The Manager: Our Users Are Telling Us They Want More News
Online Journalism Review
"Our editors have a dream job of creating a one-stop-shop news package of the best of journalism's best. They have the luxury of deciding who, at any given moment, has the better story or better audio or video or timeline. Sometimes it might be The New York Times, sometimes Time, sometimes CBS. … AOL News editors add photos and graphics and write the headlines that entice millions of readers each day. Then we add the 'AOL secret sauce' of interactivity: polls, chat rooms and message boards."
As a news aggregator, AOL practices what Kebbel calls "converged journalism" or the "one-stop shop," and it doesn't restrict its offerings to in-house material.
"It's the HBO approach," he says. "HBO did not become great by only showing Time-Warner movies. It became a winner by showing the best movies from any and all studios and making all the business deals and production processes invisible to the user, who simply tunes in for a great movie. The AOL News experience is analogous to that." (More)
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