JMSC@NYC 2010 Learning Tour

After leaving ABC, our last stop in New York was activist group Human Rights Watch, which provided us a different perspective into the news industry. As Media Director Minky Worden had said, one can think of NGOs like HRW to be “news suppliers”.

Employing many former journalists, HRW is engaged in its own field reporting and generates its own constant stream of media and research reports on alleged human rights violations. Operating from the Empire State Building (for rental prices have gone down much since the September 11 attacks apparently), HRW has many bureaus outside USA which are staffed by a good number of local residents, said Worden.

View from the top: Looking out from HRW’s Empire State Building office

Which is good, I suppose. After all, I would think local residents would be able to better handle the nuances of cultural differences in their reportage, theoretically-speaking. Regardless of location though, HRW adopts the same approach in trying to influence governments, including trying to talk directly to policymakers, as well as naming and shaming governments in their reports. This definitely got some of us thinking about the efficacy and effects that negative reporting, versus that of positive reporting, might have on societies and governments.

The visit to HRW was a great point of view to have after three days of exploring the heart of the evolving news business from within. While short, it was a great reminder about how the relationship between external news suppliers and news outlets is symbiotic. Yet, while activists –and other organizations and corporations for that matter- take on forms familiar to journalism, perhaps their biggest difference is that activists have clear agendas in their reportage, while journalism is still steering clear of trying to impose opinions… Ideally, that is.

And with that, we ended the tour of the media hub that is NYC, leaving us with much more insight into the world of American broadcast journalism.

(Written by: Liyi. Picture by: Pip)

Diddy- Dirty Money in concert at Central Park

On our last day of the official trip in New York, we got the awesome opportunity watch rap artist and entertainer P. Diddy live in ABC’s Good Morning America Summer Concert Series in Central Park. 

We arrived at Central Park at 6 in the morning and after much anticipation and stage rehearsals, P.Diddy came out with his co-vocalists (Dirty Money) and gave an amazing performance. We really enjoyed ourselves but most importantly, we realized what may have appeared to be a full concert wasn’t much of a concert for the audience at Central Park as it was for Television. 

The whole concert consisted really of only two songs. Before that, it was mostly sound checks. At times, the stage manager told the audience when the camera would roll live at a certain time frame, expecting us to cheer as loud as possible. The GMA show hosts also appeared on the stage before the two-song set, presumably to “report live” from the concert that really wasn’t happening just yet. Still, when the real thing began, it was a blast.

After the concert, we returned back to ABC studios and spoke to Marcy Lefkovitz, director of operations at ABC’s digital media centre, who gave us a thorough tour of the premises. Interestingly, while new digital technology is also giving rise to increased efficiencies through automation (live shows are usually transmitted from the studio to assistant editors in the playback room to the technical people in charge of actually putting things on air), keeping the seemingly inefficient layers of human control at each step is important should there be sudden changes to be made even during a show. In this case, it’s human reaction here that is needed sometimes, for a huge web of automated procedures may in fact be a liability for a TV station which needs a certain flexibility to handle breaking news etc…

Digital Media Centre at ABC New York

The next person we met was John Griffin, the coordinating producer of ABCnews.com. As manager of the website, he keeps hourly tabs on the number of hits and notes popularity trends, switching main stories around to generate more hits if necessary. 40% of all hits are directed from other websites, and if aggregators like Google News or Yahoo News pick up on their stories, Griffin said he basically needn’t worry about ratings for the rest of the day.

John Griffin, co-ordinating producer of ABCnews.com

Hovering around his desk, we saw the hourly distribution of hits on his site-tracking application reaching a peak at about noontime, which meant most people were checking for news at around lunchtime. Griffin added that Sunday’s distribution generally differed, increasing as the day went by instead of peaking at lunchtime, and that this was probably because people were catching up on news after their weekend breaks and before the new work week started.    

And if some might have thought the online realm was where broadcasters and newspapers would meet, Griffin said broadcasters have some assets that newspapers don’t, like television personalities. Understandably, the website is good way to promote and drive more traffic to their television programmes, so in this way broadcasters and newspapers can’t exactly converge even on the web.

With that, we ended our tour of ABC and said our goodbyes to the wonderful reception from ABC and Christina.

(Written by: Kirti and Liyi. Pictures by: Kirti and Liyi)

Arriving at NBC and ‘Radio City’ in the heart of NYC, just steps away Times Square, Broadway and that haven for kids of all ages, FAO Schwarz, one can’t help but feel that NBC got it right when it came to location, location, location.

Being in the center of the city echoes NBC’s ratings which are No.1 in the United States. In fact, NBC tried to re-locate some of its studios over to the New Jersey side, but that failed miserably when they realised that no-one wanted to go. So back to 30 Rockefeller it was, the same address that inspired the hit TV series written by Tina Fey, and the headquarters of NBC since 1930.

We were greeted by Alexandra Wallace, the Senior Vice President at NBC News. She stressed to our all-female group that women in media need to learn to sell themselves. She mentioned an incident years ago when she lost out on a position to someone who was not better than her, but who could sell themselves better.

It was exactly the same message that Allan Dodds Frank, President of the Overseas Press Club of America, had mentioned to us the day before at the club quarters. That we have entered the era of the journalist who hustles. And that the more skills we equip ourselves with, especially technical and language skills, the more competitive edge we have in today’s market as an all-emcompassing ‘information intellectual.’

Interestingly, NBC does not seem to have an major plans to grab more viewership in the Asia Pacific Region. Apart from a reporter in Beijing and Bangkok, there were no mentions of more permanent staffing in other areas. It seems NBC is content to stay top of the charts in the United States, but not in the rest of the world. They only recently started using British journalists as foreign correspondents. They are not even trying to challenge CNN’s stronghold on ratings in the rest of the world but do acknowledge sharing video content with the Al Jazeera channel especially as NBC’s presence in the middle east is sparse.

Wallace stressed an emphasis on encouraging more and more freelance video journalists on the ground in cities around the world, as providers of their TV content. They made a point that it will always be important to have an American national as the main reporter on the ground, as NBC reports from a US perspective and someone who wasn’t brought up or at least educated from the US, might not see the story from an American perspective or be able to link the event to a similar US story, which is what audiences relate to.

When asked about how new technologies in today’s world make it possible for one person to shoot, produce, write and edit an entire package at a substantially lower cost than before, and asked whether they had plans to down-size their operations, they mentioned that even the egos of cameramen, and forcing them to switch from a larger to lighter camera, could be difficult!

The afternoon at NBC ended with a tour of its major studios from the set of Jimmy Kimmel’s Late Night Show, to Saturday Night Live’s. Because NBC decided to set itself up in this historical GE-owned building, which never intended to house a TV network, it was interesting to see wires exposed and running along the ceilings and small, narrow rooms with low ceilings that were used as miniature sets. Very different from the studios of TVB and CNN in Hong Kong and that of Bloomberg in NYC which we had visited earlier that morning. What a contrast! But the history of NBC echoes throughout the walls at 30 Rock, and after being given the privilege of taking as many photos as we wanted, we left NBC with a feeling that we had been very well looked after and that we had seen a side to a great American network that not many people see.

Advice we were given 

Jeff Gralnick, consultant on international distribution:

• Before you pitch a story think: “who cares, why do they care, and why do they care now?” If you can answer these three questions you have a viable story.
• Stories can be discovered, researched and transmitted in three nano seconds these days but take an extra nano second to think!
• Learn to tell stories all all versions of media: online, audio, TV, and print.

Alexandra Wallace, Senior Vice President:

• Sell yourself - no-one else will!
• No decision is a bad decision, you have got to keep moving forward and trust your judgment.
• When you start out show a willingness to do whatever you are asked to do. Don’t feel like anything is beneath you.

Tim Peek, Vice President in charge of new media:

• Always volunteer: it will pay off in the end.

(Written by: Lorea and Pip. Picture by: Lorea)

After touring Bloomberg and NBC yesterday, today we visited ABC, our host for this NYC trip. Since many of us have been providing our video packages for them on the “ABC on Campus” project, we all felt excited to meet our editors.

Some of us with our main host and mentor from ABC On Campus, Christina Caron

Greeting us at the door was Christina Caron, who worked closely with us on many of our stories. Finally we got to meet her in person, after corresponding with her over email for six months!

We briefly toured Diane Sawyer’s World News studio, which was quite classic compared to some of the other studios I have seen before. What I found fascinating was that one writer and one producer were actually sitting inside the studio and next to Diane Sawyer, so that they could have efficient face to face discussions on scripts. We were told before each show they would go over the rundown with Diane and make immediate changes to the scripts if she requires.

Assignment Manager Troy McMullen talked to us afterwards. He answered our questions about feeding international news to American audience, ABC’s strategy of developing digital journalists and sharing contents between different departments. I’ve long heard ABC’s use of their digital journalists. They have many names, “one man/woman band”, “backpack journalist”. But the basic idea is to give the tusk of what used to be done by three or four people crew to one person. This way the expensive cost of an overseas bureau can be reduced to just the cost of one person. This person shoot video, stills and produce text and video packages, which is exactly what we are trained for at JMSC. One of our former graduates Margaret Connolly was hired by ABC as a digital journalist. She is now based in Tokyo. Another encouraging piece of news is that ABC is actually expanding the number of their digital journalists. That is the direction many media organizations are going towards. Maybe we will find our future here.

Later Mi Seon Lee, Associate Producer of ABC News Now shared her career development in ABC with us.

We took part in an ABC on Campus telephone meeting before lunch. It was interesting to listen to J-students from the American universities pitching stories. It was a fun wrap of the morning.  

In the afternoon we had half hour talks with ABC News staff.  First up was Tom Nagorski, who was promoted to be the Foreign Managing Editor two weeks ago. He has a background in field producing and most recently he was the World News foreign editor. He spoke of ABC’s presence internationally: 4 to 5 bureaus and 15 digital journalists.  ABC’s international footprint is the same as the past.

Ed O’Keefe, Executive Producer of ABCNews.com.  His role includes social media (Twitter, Facebook) and adapting the website to stream on new technologies like iPad.  The website ranks within the 10 newssites in the country, with 25-45 million unique viewers a month.  66% of their traffic is from search and linkages.  Their audience is in the mid-40s.  Cooking recipes are the biggest driver to the website.  The website has print, magazine and tv writers.  All find it difficult to write key words into their articles.  For instance, if the writers manage to write “sex” or “cheerleader” into their articles then the article is more likely to come up in a search engine. 

MSNBC is the number one newssite in Nielsen rankings.  Others on the top ten list include New York Times, Yahoo News, CNN, Tribune, and Fox.  With the exception of New York Times site, all have a search engine or broadcasting outlet attached to the site.

Ed O’Keefe, Executive Producer of ABCNews.com

Talent Recruiter Michelle Hord-White is responsible for recruiting for the news division.  She has 16 years of producing experience.  She is also responsible for development training programs for ABC News staff.  She said that there were U.S. staff positions available, and possibly international positions later in the year.

The EP of Special Projects and Development John Green was with us most of the day.  He developed the ABC News on Campus program two years ago because he liked working with students.  He’s been with ABC for 16 years and has a background in field producing, foreign language programming, and line producing.  His department is also responsible for special coverage (eg. Elections).

(Written by Zela and Li Li, Pictures by Kirti)

Mr. Mosheh Oinounou, a news editor at Bloomberg TV

Many of us had been to Bloomberg offices before (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Toronto, etc.) but I don’t think anyone was prepared for the New York headquarters. Starting off the tour, we were informed that 5,000 employees worked in the NY building - and, they were proud to note, Jay-Z and Beyonce lived in the penthouse. We stepped out of the elevator on the 5th floor to a massive rotunda complete with screens covering entire walls toting the prices of indexes around the world, Bloomberg terminals everywhere and even a fully stocked snack bar emphasizing healthy food and breakfast. After being briefed on the essentials (300,000 terminals and 10,000 employees worldwide; $1,500 for a terminal each month), our host Michael Serrill explained the company’s two publications - Business Week and Bloomberg Markets. He works on the latter as the Assistant Managing Editor. Yesterday at the Overseas Press Club, Bill had lamented the decline of Business Week from its “golden days” as an investigative magazine so it was interesting to hear what kinds of articles Mr. Serrill was working on. His most recent is an analysis of hedge funds and a deal in agriculture gone wrong - I didn’t fully understand it but it sounded investigative and interesting. 

Next, we headed down to the broadcast floor where Bloomberg TV (under new management) recently installed a multi-million dollar new studio. Standing just across the room from anchor Betty Liu and others during the live broadcast was a bit surreal after watching them on TV from Hong Kong. The studio and filming was unexpected - instead of the traditional news desk, it was often a hand held camera with a prompter attached following Betty around the open concept office talking to different people. 

After watching the broadcast for a while, we met Mosheh Oinounou, news editor at Bloomberg TV. He joined Bloomberg 10 months ago from Fox. He answered our many questions ranging from competition with CNBC to distribution to the threat of Google to the business model of subsidizing news with a more profitable business (i.e. the terminals).  

In brief, here were some of the points he touched on:

• On competition with CNBC - CNBC got the model right at the beginning. When Bloomberg TV started, they emphasized the terminal which a lot of people didn’t understand. When Oinounou came in from Fox, the channel tried to make financial jargon relevant to the average viewer. Bloomberg TV has become much more competitive since the overhaul.
• On “subsidizing” the news - Bloomberg makes most of its revenue from sales of its terminal. While the TV channel doesn’t pull in profits anywhere close to that, it’s a valuable marketing tool. Especially as distribution increases.
• On Google - Bloomberg has an entire team dedicated to watching trends and keeping up to date on what their clients (i.e. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc.) wants. They realize that it needs to stay competitive as other tools such as Google Finance and Yahoo Finance gain ground and make more information available.
• On Bloomberg culture - no name cards, no closed offices. Even the CEO meets in glass meeting rooms. Apparently, Michael Bloomberg runs City Hall like this too. 
• On Fox’s business channel - not very competitive at the moment. But when they get rights to the WSJ and Dow Jones newswire, it’s anyone’s guess as to where they’ll go. 

(Written by: Deirdre, Picture by: Liyi)

As the news industry in the US changes, new opportunities are arising for young non-American journalists. 

Identified more often to target than to protect, gone are the days that American foreign correspondents are held in high regard when on the job, said veteran journalist William J. Holstein, for whom we gathered in the Overseas Press Club of America (OPC) on Day 1 of all our activities in New York. 

And with significant structural changes and technological progress, gone too are the days that journalists get trained from within a news organization, he said. Instead, an aspiring foreign correspondent would need to know how to get in touch with the right decision-makers, and maybe hope to clinch a two or three month stint under a bureau chief.  

Have the technical skills, have the language skills, be mobile around the world and you might be off to a good start— as a freelancer. The portfolio is all the more important then, which Mr. Holstein notes should be non-competitive despite the many agencies a stringer may contribute to.

Reflecting his own expertise in global business issues perhaps, he notes that having a bit of business news reporting to add to the diversity of one’s portfolio is always good too.

Not too long after the afternoon chat session with Mr. Holstein, a hearty Mr. Allan Dodds Frank swung by too. President of the OPC, he shared his personal experience with the ups and downs in the industry as an “expensive” business investigative reporter and now a contributor to The Daily Beast, and he leaves us stringers-to-be with good advice: When you have a good story, do it as much as you can, as a long story, as a short story, for broadcast, for the internet, for the radio etc…

Much hustling to be done to earn a living out there, folks. Might as well milk this cash cow until it goes dry.

Mr. Allan Dodds Frank, President of Overseas Press Club of America

Us in New York, outside the OPC premises. 

(Written by: Liyi, Pictures by: Kirti)

Finally at the Big Apple after a very long flight from Hong Kong. We’re finally settling into the apartment (Thank you Amy) It’s nice and cozy. The girls are planning to start the day early tomorrow with a walk through Central Park and then to some of the museums.

The taxi ride to the apartment was amusing. The Chinese/American/Burmese taxi driver wouldn’t stop chatting- it really seemed that he was living the “American Dream” Happy to be living in a developed city and traveling around the world. No complaints at all.

Tomorrow is the start of our field trip and I’m looking forward to it.

-Kirti