Q&A: An extended interview with Geoff, Artvoice
Geoff Kelly, Artvoice.
I’m anxious to ask you where you see the AV blog in terms of the overall online landscape.
Hopefully, our daily content complements the rest of scene pretty nicely. We upload a lot of video. We try to break news as we find it. We try to provide our readers access to story-related documents so they can, if they’re wonkish, reach their own conclusions. And we provide commentary. But we’re not an aggregator, really; though we have a very small staff and limited resources, we do our best to create new content rather than to reiterate.
Do you follow the other media outlets closely? What do you think BRO does well that maybe these others do not?
I read, or at least skim, just about every blog and news site in town, including people with whom I agree on virtually nothing. BRO’s great strength is its commitment to its mission to shine a light on what’s good about Buffalo. They’re very good at that. We do a bit of that, too, of course.
The Artvoice blog has seemed to be a really great breaking news source for awhile now. Talk a bit about what it allows you to do as a journalist, especially since AV is a once-per-week publication.
It’s actually terrific to have a daily outlet. In the past, we’d learn new information—about politics, about the cultural scene, whatever—and have to wait for the weekly print edition to get the word out. As a result, we rarely were able to break news, and instead aimed to be authoritative and thorough in our coverage. That’s still what we aim for in the weekly print paper, but now we can share what we learn as soon as we’ve confirmed it. I tell our writers to think of the blog as a sort of open notebook: As soon as you know something for a fact, share it with the readers, so they can share their reactions and information with you. Over the course of a week, or two weeks, working on a story and interacting with readers, you’re ready to put together the print piece.
How do you see audio and video assisting what you do, and what the blog can bring people?
For the most part, our video content is intended to shine a light on good things around the city: restaurants, bands, festivals, etc. These videos become a permanent record that the bars and bands can use to promote themselves. And they’re very popular with visitors to the site. The video and audio we capture also works into two other ideas about the blog: They are primary documents that our readers can interpret as they will, and they’re raw material that our writers may use to construct print pieces down the road.
How does the AV blog fit into the WNYMedia.net family?
In regard to online content, we’re one more set of reporters, a couple more video cameras. At AV we’ve got a couple full-time journalists to work on stories, while folks like Chris Smith and Alan Bedenko have to work grown-up jobs. This partnership is just beginning, so we have ideas about it that we have not yet realized, but AV has all this infrastructure together for gathering and relaying information about the city and region. And of course we have the print element, which is not yet irrelevant, despite all the gloomy pronunciations.
Can you give me a couple specific examples of stories that the blog really opened up for you in a way that straight print might not?
At the beginning of the year, I used the blog often to write about the tribulations of Syaed Ali, and the scandals that were developing around Brian Davis. On both these subjects, my posts generated useful tips that led to new posts, which yielded more tips, etc. [Seeing that develop] was fun.
How do you see the blog moving forward? Is it your hope to see more of a breakdown in the differentiation between print and online news?
I hope that we’ll learn to see AV online as separate, dynamic product that contributes to our weekly print edition. Right now it’s easy to look at that in reverse, especially since we rely on the print product for revenue. And of course I hope to see the website continue to grow as a revenue source as well, so that we can afford the resources we need to make it truly great. We’re in the midst of a long overdue site redesign right now, which is exciting. I’m hoping the new design will help us realize a lot of ideas for online content that we’ve been kicking around.
Tell me about Artvoice’s online future. How will it grow, and what are some of your specific ideas?
More invitations to our readers to contribute. Comments on the articles we produce are nice, but I feel like that limits the scope of the interaction considerably. We’d like a public blog. We’d like our readers to review area restaurants. We’d like our readers to tell us about their experiences of the region’s arts and music scene, in words, audio, and video. In the meantime, we’re trying to change the culture of this twenty-year-old weekly print paper, and to embrace the virtues of producing and presenting content every day. I’d like to create a site that it a must-visit every day, multiple times per day, for news on what’s happening in arts, politics, activism, and the re-engineering of this city and region. We’ve got a long way to go, but we know where we’re going.
