Q&A: An extended interview with Marc Odien and Chris Smith, WNYMedia.net
Marc Odien (left) and Chris Smith (Right), WNYMedia.net.
A lot has changed since we first spoke, for Spree’s May/June 2007 Issue. Tell me what’s different.
Odien: When we talked for that article we were doing a lot of online radio. We had built a studio over on Elmwood, focusing on podcasts and online radio and we did that through the summer. We had some personnel issues trying to maintain a twenty-four-hour online radio station. It was more than we anticipated, so at the end of the summer we dropped the online radio thing. I was in the middle of a huge documentary project, La Terra Promessa, and that we taking up the majority of my time. We kind of learned over those eight or nine months that people didn’t want full-form radio online—more short little bursts, podcasts at best. We realized, if they want five or ten minutes of audio content, why not give them video content?
Radio didn’t seem like the direction we wanted to go, so we nixed it. With that, we had a new website out that didn’t accomplish what we had hoped when we started. Things progressed, and then the documentary was over and I could focus back on the website. The vision was always to have a place online where we could partner with different mediums: a radio station, a television station, a print component. We tried that since 2005, partnered with a couple organizations that never really panned out. Some disappeared, some changed dramatically. Then in June we moved to our current space.
The vision was always there—it was never really dead. At that time we were just going through the motions with that office, and that stuff was working in the background, building relationships with different organizations, building our reputation. At the same time, things with the web and newspaper organizations dying, advertising rates down, all that stuff accumulated in this moment where we said, let’s try this again.
The problem was always our website; it was very disorganized, with fifty different arms going all over the place, not so much in the visual sense, but in the experience of coming to the website. We had blogs here, blogs there. Blogs on Wordpress, blogs on Blogspot, all coming together into this one thing. It had to be fixed, but it had to be cheap. Nobody could really see the vision that I had and I’d have trouble explaining it to web developers. Eventually, we sat down with someone and said, “This is what I want, I want this here, this here, Artvoice, video player, top stories …” It took him three months but now we have the newest version of WNYmedia.net. We have a collaboration between Artvoice, WECK-1230; in the next few months we want a video on demand channel on Time Warner cable.
Smith: I think our focus has changed. I think when we started out we wanted to be an actual citizen journalism operation. Over time it’s morphed into advocacy journalism, where we have things we support, politicians we support, ideas we support and push that with our readers. We try to get them to support the causes, not just read.
Odien: The most rewarding thing we do is when we make a video or publish something that results in people getting off their ass and coming out, which which we’ve done numerous times. Whether it’s about people getting out to register to vote, or to see a certain candidate, discussions, movie screenings that we do. It’s really rewarding.
There’s a guy we’re a fan of named Jay Rosen. He’s the dean of the school of journalism at NYU. He talks a lot about paradigm change in media, and that outlets like ours are forcing larger big outlets to change. The larger media outlets won’t admit it. What newspapers have devolved to in a lot of ways is “he said, she said” journalism. You’re reporting a horse race—who wins, not what happened, or why it happened. When we report on something, we focus on the why and the how, not the who and the when. The Buffalo News tries to make it seem like they don’t have a bias, but every reporter has a bias the moment he chooses the story. They’ve finally chosen to expose corruption in Byron Brown’s administration. Choosing to do that demonstrates a bias. I mean, they’ve ignored twenty-two previous scandals that we’ve reported on on our website. Now they’ve focused on the One Sunset one, and what a difference that’s had in the city, by just exposing that to people. Imagine if they’d done that all along. The investigative journalism that they’ve started doing is awesome, but they should have been doing it all along.
The scandal they’ve chosen to a lot of people says, “So what? It happened to Masiello, Griffin—big deal.” Griffin had the huge parks department scandal, Masiello plugged all the neighborhood planning groups with patronage positions. The city has a long history of corruption and the Buffalo News, if they’re going to write a story like that, should inform the story with some of that background. Also I think when they ignore all the other stuff they make it seem like it was just this.
Mayor Brown’s not all bad. A lot of positives have come out of it that they ignore. Is it balanced, is it fair, I don’t know. It’s tough when you only have so much column inches a day and we don’t have that problem. I can write a 7,000-word treatise on deviance in media whereas Steve Watson gets 1,000 words and it [might] get cut .
That brings it back to the technology itself. You mentioned the structure of the site was very important. Talk a bit about the technology—where it is now, and what it allows you guys to do, especially since adding video is so much easier to do.
Odien: It’s interesting you say video is so easy to do now. A lot of ways it is, but good video takes a lot of time, and a lot of editing. There’s still a big time factor. With that said technology has come a long way. I can go out with a professional video camera, but also with my iPhone. With a couple clicks of a button here, I can record someone saying something and send it immediately to a website and its all interconnected. So there’s a time and a place for those professional packaged stories, and there’s also a time and a place for raw, as-it-happens video. A perfect example was the auction of the Statler. I had my camera to shoot whatever video I needed, but also had a laptop, and spent more time running around with a laptop getting people talking about what just happened, and showing the whole scene, rather than focusing on a produced video that comes out hours later. It was all streamed live, and people we reacting to that. That’s just amazing. A couple clicks of a button and I can be live to 2,500 people on our Twitter account, plus another 1,000 on Facebook. And whoever is on the website that day is interacting, asking me questions. That’s where technology has gone. I don’t need a live truck to do that. I don’t need my professional video equipment in order to inform.
Smith: A big difference from three years ago when we last talked is the technology side. Most of the technology that’s available is about bringing technology to you. About a year and a half ago, Marc read a great book called What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. [The theme is] set your information free if people love it they’ll, get back to you. Among the various sites—between Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook—we’ve got 10,000 dedicated fans, people who consume our content on the network of their choice when they choose. We also have a significant number who come to the website, and that grows every month.
We put our information out in as many places as possible. We let people stumble into it, and they come to your site eventually. It’s what’s allowed us to grow significantly and move into a more reputable office space. It’s a slow broker for us, because we’re trying to embrace a new [mode] of journalism. But simply letting the information go is the hardest part for the establishment of media.
Odien: We don’t want to assume it’s easy. You have advertisers you’re responsible for, writers, publisher, all of that.
Smith: It’s very proprietary. We flip that model on its head and say, “We don’t necessarily care if you come to our site, but use our RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter. If you like a story click on it. you’ll be able to see it.” I think that’s a big difference in the way that we’ve grown dramatically in the last six to eight months.
Odien: There’s been a sea change. It used to be that you had a cloud of information, then you had journalists that filtered it for the masses. Now the cost of like-minded people that share and find information has been dramatically reduced. We’re taking that middle filter out and letting people filter for themselves but share. So they might find a story we like, and they might find something Jim Heaney does on the Buffalo News blog, and put them together. They read something Geoff Kelly wrote, they read something someone wrote on on a blog, and all of a sudden they’ve got five angles on a story. And they share that composite on their site with other people.
Our initial strategy was to simply stay afloat. We’ve done that, and succeeded beyond that. We had people adopt our technology, we’ve had people adopt our methods. We’re finding that we’re having a robust effect on news coverage in this town.
The whole concept of WNY Media Network was to be able to collaborate with different media organizations, with the print media, with the radio media, with the TV stations. Through the course of all the stuff that we talked about before, came conversations through talking to people, trying to figure who was on board with this idea of sharing content, of letting your content go free.
Smith: I think the whole environment just called for something like this. What this allows us to do is not only share stories, but also share resources, and that’s huge for a small organization like WECK or a small business like Artvoice. To cover more. To expand. To create new channels, so people that might listen to WECK and never come to WNY Media now have the opportunity to hear it on the radio. Same thing in Artvoice.
On our site, we probably have five to seven people working everyday trying to find stories. There’s other people who add to them—about thirty overall. At this point there are so many opportunities for us to grow. I think if you were to come back in 2011 and ask us where we are, we’ll have more employees, we’ll be a bigger company. I think just staying in business in this economy is the most important thing, and staying around. We’re still here, and we’re still growing, and we’re still changing. To me that is the most important thing, that through all the different things that change in our community, the media landscape as it develops and evolves—we’re a part of it, and we’re at the center of it.
Odien: Zince we’ve been around, in 2005, look who’s come and look who’s gone. And here we are, five years later, and we now have partners, and we’ve grown. Are we a million dollar company? No. We’ll never be a million dollar company. But we can do what we want to do, and do it well. In the next few years you’re going to see more radio shows and podcasts. And you’re going to see a lot more web based stuff. More people getting involved.
Smith: More civic activism … If there’s an event we want people to go to, or something we want people to flash around—whether it’s healthcare reform or political, if we want people to go out and canvas for a candidate, or there’s something we want them to sign a petition for—[we can reach them]. That’s an incredibly powerful tool, and it’s something we want to keep building. So if we can be advocates for change, and not just reporters, then I think we’ve really filled out our mission.
