Today’s New York Times has two interesting stories about Old Media bastions adapting to the fact that things really have changed.
First, ABC has been creating a compacted, more interesting, version of World News Tonight that is available on the web:
Huddled with a producer in an editing suite on a recent Friday afternoon, the ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore enthusiastically helped put the finishing touches on a video account of his recent trip to Greenland to see the effects of global warming.
The segment did not look like a normal network news report: It showed Mr. Blakemore riding a sled across Greenland’s ice sheet and casually addressing the camera while wearing a black North Face parka and sunglasses.
But Mr. Blakemore’s video diary, the first of three documenting his trip, was not being produced for “World News With Charles Gibson” — rather, it was aimed at the network’s afternoon Webcast, which is simply called “World News.”
Executives at the broadcast networks know they have opportunities online that they do not have on television — namely, to take chances by testing new forms of news delivery and new types of storytelling. They are also mindful that making their content relevant online is a good way to attract the younger audiences who are less likely to tune in to the evening news on television.
But ABC is the only major broadcast network that is using the staff of its evening newscast to produce a separate and distinct daily program for a Web audience. The 15-minute Webcast often features Mr. Gibson in the anchor chair, but the similarities end there: the segments can run long, and they purposely look raw and personal, as if they were made for MTV rather than ABC.
Over the course of 20 months, the Webcast has evolved from a basic distillation of the day’s news into an original program that incorporates video blogs, first-person essays and interviews. It covers many of the same stories as its television sibling, but often in a different way: in one example, the day after President Bush announced gradual troop cuts in Iraq, Mr. Gibson was shown debriefing the network’s chief White House correspondent, Martha Raddatz, in the Webcast for a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds — an eternity on a half-hour television newscast.
While ABC News modifies it’s old media format for presentation in a new media world, though, Business Week thinks that it can save it’s dead tree magazine by making more “web like”:
BusinessWeek, owned by the McGraw-Hill Companies, is looking for some magic of its own to raise circulation and keep advertisers interested. The Internet has hurt business magazines in particular, and the new BusinessWeek format — which includes more news summaries and fewer lifestyle articles — is meant to be more Weblike.
“We’re seeing a reader who is much busier than ever,” said Stephen J. Adler, editor in chief of BusinessWeek. “But if you really add tremendous value to the reader and they’re deeply engaged in the material, the broad premise is, that’s good for everyone: the consumer and the advertiser.”
The redesign comes from 18 months of planning, including a study of reader preferences. The main conclusions were that people wanted a format that was easier to navigate, as well as information culled from a variety of sources.
The changes include sprinkling articles on topics of international interest throughout the magazine rather than confined to a separate section and dropping lifestyle coverage, with the exception of Robert Parker’s popular wine column.
Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC news anchor, will contribute her regular question-and-answer session with a well-known executive every week instead of every other week, and it will run in the front of the magazine rather than the back.
All opinion articles have been moved to the back from the front, which is now devoted to news summaries. And the magazine will feature just two long articles a week, grouped together in the middle of the book.
The redesign did not involve many changes online, but Mr. Adler said that more articles would be starting out online and ending up in the magazine. And he said that the magazine would start reprinting more comments from readers that come in through the Web
So, the question, is which of these two stories represents the future better ? An old media icon making moves into Web 2.0, or an old media icon trying to keep its flagship magazine alive ? Personally, I’m guessing that ABC is right on this one.
