Behind the scenes at ABC’s daily webcast
Cory Bergman October 12th, 2007
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 Add your own
1. Safran | October 12th, 2007 at 11:40 am
Just a caveat here on the numbers:
“…while “World News” reaches a tiny fraction of the broadcast audience — 4.5 million views and downloads a month, most of which come in the form of podcasts downloaded automatically by iTunes users….”
As we’ve written about before, automatic downloads do not mean the user viewed the podcasts. Many sit unwatched.
2. Brink | October 12th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I find it tough to believe that many people are actually watching a 15-minute internet webcast. I’d bet they’re watching only a part of it or, as mentioned above, aree not watching it at all.
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