So What Do You Do, Paul Slavin, ABC News Digital Senior VP?

So you had no training in journalism beforehand?
Like in any business, I had a lot of on-the-job training. I got tremendous opportunities to travel and to learn from people who knew a lot more than me, and that has been the way my career has gone. I find the very best people and I latch onto them, and learn whatever it is that they can teach me -- and hope that I can return the favor to other people who are coming into the field.

What was the transition like from World News Tonight and TV news to your current position as the head of digital?
The biggest change is really just a change that the entire industry is going through. That's [knowing] how ruthlessly we must understand our audience and our consumers. Understanding them, understanding the business, and understanding the technology. It's not massively different: It's still about finding the very best people that you can, giving them clear instructions, and hopefully letting them execute against it.

I really find this whole space flat-out fascinating. I think the whole silo-ing of digital or new media or broadcast is a thing of the past. As soon as our companies start realizing that it's all just one giant multi-platform content delivery system, the better for all of us. But it's complicated and chaotic and fascinating to be involved in it.

How is "understanding your audience" different online than it is in a network newscast?
A program like World News has been around a very long time; it has a loyal audience; you know who that audience is in many respects; the lead-in is the local news, and you understand a lot about that... So it's not as mysterious as when you get into the digital space. [With digital news] you have different consumers on different platforms, and they are in the process of morphing all the time.

A recent study found that the greatest growth in Facebook is in 45-and-older; it's no longer an 18-year-old demo. So it's evolving. Whereas World News has been a very clear group of folks that you got to know pretty well -- it wasn't changing platform-to-platform, and it wasn't changing year-over-year. If you were interested in the evening news, there used to only be three places to go at 6:30; and if you're interested in that kind of news, then there are really only a few more places to go. If you're interested in new media [news], there are three million places to go. So your competition is huge.

But of course you're still bringing the ABC News brand with you.
No question. But the ABC News brand is also competing with "Joe's News." And when someone goes to search on Google [for a news item], the story from "Joe's News" may show up right next to yours -- and it may pop up there with a better headline or something else. So, yes, we have a huge advantage and a powerful, historic brand -- and we have to emphasize that brand day-in and day-out to keep that moat around what it is that we do. But we still have lots of people competing with us.

There's been a big debate recently -- particularly as concerns newspapers -- about micropayments, and other ways of paying for news on the Internet. ABC News originally had a subscription service, which was discontinued. Is there any idea of reviving that?
First off, I cover ABCNews.com; I cover ABCNews Now, which is a 24/7 multiplatform-distributed channel; and I cover mobile and mobile WAP [Wireless Application Protocol], etc. So there's a lot of things we're discussing here. In terms of micropayments: we're again going to experiment with something -- I don't know if you'd necessarily call it "micropayments" -- like a sort of pay-by-subscription model on one platform. We do get paid for our content by places like Verizon and Yahoo and Sprint.

But it is not inconceivable that a reader will pay for content if it is of a high enough value and they are getting enough for their money. The question is, do we have enough of that content that we can create at any given time?... I don't know that much else that we do would necessarily lend itself to micropayments, but that doesn't mean you don't look into other content areas that might fit.

As old media companies go online, they have different kind of content that they are leveraging. How is television-backed Web news different than, say, a newspaper site?
Broadband penetration has increased dramatically since 2005, and that has really favored video producers. There is a lot of interest in video, and the cost of entry to video continues to be reasonably high, so it helps us moat off some of our advantages. It does reduce the number of people who can compete with us. I look at it as a distinct advantage as the technology evolves, and platforms like the iPhone come out that are really video-centric. Our skill set in video gives us a leg up. Text is still important in a lot of respects, but I think that we have to look at what we do better than most other people, and that's video -- and we need to emphasize that more as time goes on.

With this broadband and mobile penetration, do you think that there will be more of an emphasis in video over text in news?
It's hard to put a certain date on it, but -- for those people who are interested in historical movements and media -- in the last year or so, television has finally left the home. And that will have huge implications for our business. With Verizon V-Cast and its proliferation; with Sprint; with mobi.tv; with MediaFlow; and now with the iPhone application. Television is now totally out of the home, totally mobile and easy to use. And who knows what the implications of that will be.

How does social media fit into ABC's plans, and are you doing any kind of new stuff in that space?
We're looking at the Facebook Connect system -- we've been talking to them for some time. Everybody loves Twitter; I do. It's just fun, and maybe it'll turn into something more than fun.

We've not had a lot of success with social media to date. We were one of the first news organizations to partner with Facebook, and that was really successful for what it was -- but we haven't really figured out social media. I think it's important, but it takes a tremendous amount of resources for us to get involved in. We will continue to look at it, but I couldn't tell you 100 percent that social media is the way we're going to go for our news product. But I think it's incumbent on us to experiment with it, and have conversations with social media providers, and see whether or not it can be an effective driver for us. It's definitely a tool, [we just need to find out whether] it can be more than a tool.

What do you mean by "tremendous" resources? What's involved?
Just building and maintaining the social media. For instance, if you're going to have groups of people talking, you need someone to moderate that. We have comments, but I don't think that comments do much without a moderator attached. So there's a technology side, an editorial side, and from a resourcing point of view, we just haven't had enough resources to put against it to see whether it works. I'm not sure that any news or information service so far has really done anything sustainable in that area yet. But everything is evolving so rapidly, so ask me again in six months and I may have a different answer.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]