Behind the scenes at ABC’s daily webcast

Brian Stelter over at NY Times has written a profile piece of ABC’s daily webcast, World News. “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,” Brian writes. The webcast’s senior producer is Jason Samuels, who has been urging ABC’s correspondents to escape the package formula that dominates TV news. “Do one long stand-up, do much longer sound bites, play an interview,” Samuels said. “Produce a story in any way you think is engaging — there are no rules.” Of course, it helps that there’s no “hard out” when producing it. “I don’t have to count the seconds,” he said. “I just try to put in a good show that’s around 15 minutes.” ABC says the webcast sees 4.5 million views a month, most of which are downloads through iTunes.

2 comments October 12th, 2007