No matter where your media interests lie, it’s probably safe to assume that at one time or another, Merrill Brown has had your dream job. Reporter at a big-name paper? Check. (He covered
finance for the Washington Post.) Magazine editor-in-chief? Of course.
(He was nominated for a National Magazine Award when helming Channels.)
TV executive? You bet. (He was one of the original founders of CourtTV.)
Publishing strategist? Sure thing. (He was a consulting editor at both
Money and Time, as well as several other media companies, and now
runs his own consulting firm.) New media visionary? Been there, doing that. (He
was the founding editor of MSNBC.com, the launch director for DesktopVideo,
and is the chairman of Now Public, a Vancouver-based Web company that could
change the face of news reporting. “It wants to be the premium acquirer and
distributor of citizen journalism around the world,” he says).
So is there a method to Brown’s resumé madness? “My career switches are more
based on exciting opportunities that were presented than on some clearly well-developed plan,” he says.
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Brown’s also looking toward journalism’s future by helping to train
tomorrow’s reporting superstars. He’s editorial director of News21, a news
initiative sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation. In
that role he ensures that student journalists from five journalism programs —
Columbia, Northwestern, Berkeley, USC, and Harvard — have the tools they need
to produce investigative content on issues relevant to American democracy in
principle and application.
Position: National editorial director of News21; Chairman of
NowPublic.com; founder and principal of his own consulting business, MMB Media
LLC
Education: BA in political science from Washington University, St.
Louis, 1974
Hometown: Born in Philadelphia, grew up in Silver Spring
Maryland
First full time job: Newspaper reporter at the Winston Salem
NC Sentinel
Resume: Senior vice president of RealNetworks; founding
editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com; SVP of Court TV
Marital status:
Married
What’s your favorite TV show:Curb Your
Enthusiasm
Last book read:The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by
Frank Rich
Most interesting media story right now: The accelerating
decline of the American newspaper
Guilty pleasure: New York
restaurants
First section you read in your Sunday paper: “The reality
of reading the Sunday paper is that it begins on Saturday with the inserts, so I
guess Arts and Leisure.”
You’ve moved back and forth between reporting and publishing — you were a
finance reporter for the Washington Post, then the director of business
development for the Washington Post Co., and then went on to being the
editor-in-chief of Channels. Why and how did you make the switch back to
editorial?
I’ve gone back and forth as interesting opportunities
presented themselves, because I’m passionate about both media products and the
business components that make them successful. The other part of it is I
consciously decided that I wanted to leave the business of daily reporting
because I wanted to be more of a participant in making things happen than acting
as just an observer. I wanted to be one of the people pushing the boulder up the
cliff and solving hard problems, rather than observing other people doing so and
reporting on it in journalism.
You helped create Court TV.
How did that network come about, and what was your role in creating
it?
In the late 80s, I was quite exited about the opportunity to develop
new things in cable TV because the industry was booming. I wanted to be part of
the early stages of an exciting cable opportunity. I got to know, socially, the
guy whose idea it was, Steve Brill. He called me with the idea and said, “What
you do think?” It sounded like a great idea, and I went off to do it. I had
covered antitrust litigation as a business reporter, and I was comfortable in a
courtroom, even if I didn’t have any real legal training.
You seem to be involved in almost all aspects of media — from Web sites
to magazines to newspapers to television. Which medium is doing the best job
evolving?
That’s pretty easy. The Internet was a blank screen in the mid-90s, now it’s evolved in a short period of time to a very specialized delivery
mechanism for news, and it’s the best delivery platform for news that’s ever
been invented.
But has it found a way to make money?
The New York Times
continues to report rising and significant amounts of revenue on their digital
operations. The MSNBC and CNN sites are significantly profitable; evaluating the
profitability of a lot of newspaper Web sites is hard. When you see the revenue
of the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Boston Globe‘s site, you see
their revenue number and the cost of operations of the Web site, but you don’t
see the payroll that involves hundreds of journalists who write the
content. But the biggest standalone kind of news sites are showing good revenue
growth and margin. Internet news is making significant amounts of money in many
places.
Do you think your career path is an anomaly, or do you think future media
players are going to have to do it all — whether it’s editorial, programming or
business development?
I don’t hold myself up as an example of anything in
particular. However, in helping journalism schools develop curriculum, I’ve
realized that it’s important that journalists think of themselves not just as
people creating content but as entrepreneurs. In the brave new world, the
opportunity to start things and create business models exists for journalists.
People in journalism need to have serious knowledge about how the business works
and what the entrepreneurial opportunities are that the business presents. It’s
really important for today’s future journalists and young journalists to
understand.
Where has your diverse background better served you: does your business
knowledge better help your journalism skills, or does your journalism background
make you a more creative businessman?
I guess my journalism skills have
made me a fast study and have given me the ability to understand the art of
analyzing challenging issues in a very helpful way. On the flip side, in helping
develop MSNBC.com as editor-in-chief, the fact that I could assess the business
opportunities of starting from scratch on the Web was enormously helpful in
making MSNBC.com successful.
| I don’t think it’s inappropriate for ad sales people and editors and reporters to intermingle, as long as they know where the lines are. One of the failures of media today is the way “church and state” is implemented. |
Is there danger in crossing over from business to editorial and back
again? Did you ever feel undue influence from one sector over the other, or that
your loyalties to either the news or the bottom line were affect your ability to
do your job?
No, because job definitions are just that, and when you play
one role, your commitment is to precisely that role. Although when you’re the
EIC of a media property these days, especially on the Web, you need to both
influence the business process and figure out how to adapt to the changing
nature of the newsroom in ways that didn’t exist in the past. I don’t believe in
the traditional interpretation of what church and state means. I don’t think
it’s inappropriate for ad sales people and editors and reporters to
intermingle, as long as they know where the lines are. I think one of the
failures of media today is the way “church and state” is implemented. Journalists
with good ideas and sales staff with good ideas should be able to collaborate in
a creative process. I’m for a complete breakdown of what church and state means,
as long as ethics remain. I’ve walked that line, and I’d like to think that I
haven’t crossed it. Editors need to understand the right place to draw that
line, especially in the current environment.
You were the first editor-in-chief at MSNBC.com. What was the site like
then? Was it a very planned out, focused-group effort, or like the Wild,
Wild West?
Much closer to Wild, Wild West. We did research about users’
interests and how they were using the site and so forth, but the challenge of
getting pictures and words on an Internet page in 1996 was not insignificant.
The mere act of publishing had challenges in itself. Think about how easy it is
to start a blog today compared to what it took to start a Web page in 1996. One
of the challenges was to create work that took advantage of the capacity of the
Internet as a medium. It was really important to turn stories around as quickly
as possible — to be really good at breaking news. So if you hear something
happen, you come to the Web site and get the story, and your experience is
satisfying. Something happens in Congress, a plane goes down, war breaks out —
it was with those situations as a premise, creating materials for the medium was
important, and with those premises we set off.
Back then, mainstream media thought that Internet news was trivial, and
thought it was a passing fancy and would never be a major competitive platform.
Lots of friends couldn’t believe I moved my life from New York to engage in this
odd thing of delivering news to a machine on a desk. The public was curious but
not engaged. We had real small number of people in 1995 and ’96 using the stuff,
but there was already a community of early adopters into it, and their
communications with us helped the whole category develop.
In your career, you’ve done a lot of consulting. Is there a common problem
in media environments that arises from the same team working together for too
long, and which can be easily solved with a fresh pair of eyes?
The print
business in general has moved way too slowly to embrace and implement the
cultural change that the digital era requires. Only now with profit and loss
issues so dramatic are they waking up to the reality of the changes that are
required. Across a lot of my work, one of the things they talk to me about, and
I try to help them with, is how you can rapidly change the old culture of print
and turn it into more of a digital environment. People have a lot at stake; it’s
hard, but the process of doing it is accelerating and managements need to do it
more aggressively and add more resources to it.
Why are they so slow in embracing it? Is it a sense of superiority, that
print and old media is better than print? Or just unfamiliarity with the
medium?
There are a number of issues: one is the fact that for lots of
media companies, the bulk of revenue produced comes from print and that needs to
be protected and developed and not ignored. This is issue number one — the
traditional media business remains very large and can’t be ignored. Number two
is that there are still many executives and editorial people in key positions
who are not yet comfortable with new technology. There are executives who rarely
look at video online, and who certainly don’t have a strong engagement with Web
2.0 issues, like social networks, and who still see the Internet function as
being about distributing conventional programming rather than developing new
content. If you go to any number of newspaper and magazine Web sites for large
publications around the country, basically what you get is re-edited and
republished work from another platform put on the Web. That is totally wrong.
How did you come to work for News21?
I developed a project with the
Carnegie Corporation of New York to do a research paper on young people and how
they use the news. So I started working with them to develop that paper, which
got a lot of attention when it was completed. In engaging with Carnegie and in
the context of my relationship with them, I learned they were part of developing
this initiative with a bunch of journalism schools, and they asked me to sit in
on some meetings and participate in thinking about the initiative. When it
finally came together, I had a relationship with them, had been an adviser, and
had been networking for both the Carnegie and Knight Foundations. The initiative
came along, and the opportunity to run the program was part of the grant, and
they asked me to help put it together, and I was happy to. It was a natural
extension of the work I’d been doing.
My role is to help the universities and the faculty and the fellows to set up
a summer program — we have four newsrooms that allow the fellows to create
important stories around a given topic. The program starts with a course in the
spring or winter semester on the topic of the summer program. Students then go
out and report for ten weeks over the summer and with a goal of creating high
caliber content about those topics. I make sure that they get what they need to
create those newsrooms and the accompanying Web sites — the appropriation of
resources like cameras and Web application software. I do what I can to help
pull that together.
Obviously, the students get a lot out of the experience, but what do they
bring to the project that more seasoned journalists don’t have?
They
bring a sense of what digital media can do to improve storytelling that
certainly many of their older colleagues don’t have, because digital tools —
whether it’s flash or Internet video or animated applications — a lot of that
is second nature to many journalism grad students. They understand the world of
the Web, and have a somewhat different approach to conventional storytelling.
They see the world through a completely different perspective. That’s really
helpful in seeing and creating stories that work across multiple platforms.
What are some of the projects that have come out of News21 that have
impressed you?
Last year, the first summer, the project was on liberty
and security, the tension between the traditional American view of civil
liberties and the need for national security. We broke it down into topics and
products. We developed a deep relationship with the Associated Press, got seven
or eight stories on the AP A wire, one of which won awards and got lots of
attention. It was about the education department improperly going through
college funding reports and taking out data about students. When we revealed the
program, they discontinued it.
We did great investigative reporting, doing work about topics like that, or
like how outsourcing worked in military intelligence. I mean, really terrific
investigative stories that got a lot of attention. We did an hour-long
documentary for CNN on the lives of U.S. military men and women abroad. They
reported on immigration in Southern California, what immigration is like there,
the drama and the challenges people face. We had stories in many major
publications and TV shows — we did a series of stories on immigration on
California public television. We broke stories. It was precisely the kind of
media opportunity we were trying to create for them, and we hope to repeat that
success this summer.
Many journalists struggle with going back to school and learning
journalism versus just jumping in the mix, pitching and writing and reporting.
What benefits to journalists come from a formal education in
journalism?
The benefits of journalism grad school include access to the
best teaching they could possibly have. Journalism organizations are rarely
known for their ability to mentor people. Students are getting training from
world-class experts. There’s also value in allowing journalists to expand the
nature of their skills, and expand the level of those skills, whether it’s in TV
production or writing or new media. Journalism school can also give students
exposure to lots of different media opportunities. They get to engage in these
opportunities and mediums while they’re in school, which is valuable in shaping
career decisions. World-class teaching, skill development, and exposure to media
— all of this can do a world of good for the right kind of students in
journalism school.
Traditional media is at risk in part because younger people don’t consume
news the same way their parents did. How is the media industry going to have to
change as a result — and will the face of the media industry change when it’s
Yahoo and Google who provide people with most of their information?
There
is no evidence that Yahoo and Google are going to be major original sources of
news content. They remain distinct vehicles for the work of mainstream media
organizations. No matter how many people go to Yahoo and Google for their news,
their work is going to come from someone else. Yahoo News has a few dozen people
on staff, and most are in producer roles, not fact gatherers. Readers still
depend on wires and newspapers and TV networks for content, and that’s why it’s
so important that the business models evolve quickly. They remain the principle
source for what people read every day. The blogosphere is healthy and getting
healthier, and citizen journalism, like the site I’m involved in, Now Public, is really taking
off. But the news that we get from sites like Google and Yahoo comes from old
line, organized, mainstream media organizations, and that’s not going to change.
In addition to Now Public, you’re also an adviser to BackFence, which is a
Web-based, community journalism project. Leasing out news coverage to citizen
journalists is almost the opposite of the work being done at News21, where
students are given very specific training and guidance. Can both models
co-exist?
It’s critical that the two coexist and work as collaborative
enterprises. In order to make the newspaper model work, newspapers have to,
because of their declining resource base, use citizens to help cover large
metropolitan areas and communities. Around the world, Now Public has 90,000
registered contributors in 150 countries. NowPublic has the opportunity to fill
some of the void left by some of the major media organizations who are feeling
like they have to close down bureaus around the world. Now Public can be eyes
and ears in lots of places around the world not covered.
Figuring out how to make the old and new work together is critically
important, so I’m excited about Now Public. Now Public is a great opportunity
and a great enterprise. Now Public takes material in real time, whether it’s
from a camera phone or notepad or digital camera or computer and brings it into
public consciousness in ways conventional media isn’t and can’t. In the
presentation we just gave to investors recently, we showed pictures from
Heathrow Airport when Heathrow was closed after the liquid scare. The airport
was closed off, and media couldn’t get in, but we had pictures from citizen
journalists who could get there when the media couldn’t.
All of that needs to be put into a journalism and news content that makes
sense for those of us surrounded by a cacophony of stuff, and we now have a
public forum that is going to make that happen. It’s very important that the
journalism community get this right.
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