Vivian Schiller made headlines last fall when it was announced she would be leaving her post at NYTimes.com — where she’d led the team responsible for the Times‘ much-admired Web overhaul — to become president and CEO of NPR. Judging from Schiller’s rather unconventional and “random” career path through media, however (she tells us curiosity is what drives all her career decisions), the sudden leap makes perfect sense.

To wit: The first job Schiller took after graduating from Cornell in 1983 was as a Russian tour guide; it was a position which eventually led to her being hired by Turner Broadcasting as the company’s ‘fixer’ in the Soviet Union. Over the next 14 years, Schiller made her way up through the ranks at Turner, and at the time of her departure in 2002, she was in charge of long-form programming for CNN worldwide. She left CNN to launch the Discovery Times channel and spent four years as its senior vice president and general manager before moving over to head the Times online during a period which saw NYTimes.com establish itself as the standard by which other newspaper Web sites are measured. And now she’s taken up the helm at NPR, a role Schiller refers to as a “once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Schiller arrives at NPR at an interesting moment in the annals of mainstream media. It’s no secret newspapers are struggling to stay afloat; Amidst the current and dramatic decline in local and international newspaper reporting, NPR, along with its 860 member stations and 38 international bureaus, is well-positioned to step in and fill in the gap. Fast Company recently called NPR “the country’s brainiest, brawniest news-gathering giant,” speculating that the organization may well end up “saving the news.” Judging from Schiller’s tone of excitement and optimism during our interview, this may be exactly what she has in mind.

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Name: Vivian Schiller
Position: President and chief executive officer, NPR
Resume: Before joining NPR, Schiller was senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com from 2006-2008. From 2002 to 2006, she was founder and general manager of the Discovery Times Channel (a JV of Discovery and the New York Times);
1998-2002, senior vice president of CNN Productions, in charge of long-form programming for CNN worldwide; 1988-1998, held various positions at Turner Broadcasting, starting with production assistant/fixer and moving up to senior vice president of TBS Productions; from 1985–1988, worked as a Russian tour guide and interpreter.
Birthdate: September 13, 1961
Hometown: Larchmont, NY
Education: Cornell, BA; Middlebury College, MA
Marital status: Married, with two kids ages 13 and 14
First section of the Sunday Times: “Op-ed part of Week in Review, then Sunday Styles.”
Favorite TV shows: Mad Men
Last book read: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Guilty pleasure: “Glass of Chianti at the end of a long day.”

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You’ve been at NPR now since January 5, 2009. What’s been the most surprising thing to you about the new job? What’s your typical day like?
There has been no typical day. What has surprised me first of all is that some things are not surprising at all. I feel incredibly comfortable and at home there because the fact is, at good news organizations, there’s a certain commonality to the culture — people who are, for better or worse, very iconoclastic, very tough, very demanding about quality. That culture existed at The New York Times and it exists at NPR, so that feels the same to me. It actually feels very comfortable and very reassuring. So that was a good thing. What’s been different for me? It’s a completely new experience for me to deal with the station system, and it’s a really interesting challenge. It’s been really fun getting to know everybody. And also I’ve always been in commercial media — mission-driven — but nonetheless commercial media. And in this case [with regards to] a lot of our funding, I’m dealing with foundations [and] philanthropists, so that’s been new and interesting experience.

Did you originally intend to work in so many different areas of the media industry? What did you envision doing/focusing on early in your media career, and why did that change?

I didn’t know what I wanted to do. The only thing I knew — and it was such a pompous college thing — is, ‘I’m never going to be one of those people who go to an office.’ As if that was the epitome of evil. For me, my whole career has been about taking advantage of opportunities that intrigue me. Somewhere along the way, I realized the things I care about: journalism, media, quality content, a social mission. It sort of came into focus over time.

You can plan all you want but things are never going to turn out the way you plan them. So it’s about being thinking about what am I doing now, and whatever it is, what’s next? How do I need to be rethinking this? What’s another opportunity? Just when you get comfortable, that’s the time to realize, ‘Okay, I need to be figuring out how to make this bigger.’

“Change is happening so fast in the media and the economy that you have to be able to say, ‘Forget about what we did then — let’s look at what makes sense now.'”

You’ve gone from television to newspapers to radio. Describe the professional transitions you made from one medium to another — which jobs were you leaving/entering, and what skills did you rely on from each to ease your progression?

I don’t think it’s ever been intentional. You really don’t want to follow my path because it was very random, frankly [laughs]. The path makes more sense in retrospect than it did at the time: I see now how one thing has built on another, has built on another, and then I found greater and greater focus through that journey. One impulse for me has always been the same, and that is curiosity. The Russian [tour guide part of my career] was the result of intense curiosity about this — at the time — very mysterious place. Everything has always been about curiosity, which at the end of the day is sort of the fundamental quality of journalism. I realize that’s what drives me.

You said in another interview that you one day hoped to write a book entitled ‘Everything I needed to know I learned as a Tour Guide.’ What skills did you learn as a tour guide in Russia that are applicable to what you’re doing at NPR?

A lot of the skills that I use now in executive and management positions were the skills I needed as a tour guide. Public speaking was one. I was only 22 years old and speaking to groups of 125 people. Crisis management, because you know things on these trips would always go awry and this was before cell phones, before the Internet, in this strange, weird Soviet environment. Also, learning to prioritize and working collaboratively with people. All of these things which matter so much in these things I do now. It was a great time in my life. I had so much fun.

Some people seemed surprised that you chose to leave the NYT.com for NPR — can describe how you came to that decision, and what the NPR role offered that spurred you to leave NYT.com?

I’m surprised that people were surprised. It was a tough decision in the respect that I absolutely loved working at The New York Times. It was extremely painful for me to leave there. I had no plans to leave — I would have been there forever, except that this to me was a once in a lifetime opportunity. And the opportunity for me was to go from one really amazing news organization to another really amazing news organization — one that is really strong. What is exciting to me is not only that it remains vibrant but also the amazing opportunity that NPR represents. It is such a strong brand, and has such a loyal audience. I want to try and extend that experience to other forms of media. That is a really exciting opportunity. I get to be the president, and it’s an amazing team, and I know where we need to go. I don’t know all the details of how we’re going to get there, but I am so completely clear on where we need to go.

What are your long-term goals for NPR? With so much media moving online, including radio, how do you keep radio relevant in the Internet age? Is there an NPR site overhaul in the future? Describe what you think the site currently does well, and what do you think it can do better.

We need to do a number of things. We need to align, and as much as I wish we weren’t in a terrible economy, it is forcing all of us to focus on the high priorities. We need to align with the stations. NPR needs to do a better job of working with the stations and come up with a common vision so we can make this local experience better and better on every platform. How do we translate those qualities people love about NPR to other mediums? I don’t know the answer to that, but I know we need to do it. Not so much with video but online, mobile, whatever people want, podcasts — you name it — so that you have that same sense of the NPR experience wherever you are. As far as NPR.org — sure, I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org. The idea is to create this network. And then once that is set up, I want to count traffic for the whole thing, and aggregate that into one number. And you know what, once we do that, we’re going to be right in there with the top five.

There has been a lot of talk about NPR’s local strength. As local radio gets usurped by conglomerates like Clear Channel, and local network TV wanes as well, do you see NPR and its local satellites filling in the holes? How, exactly, does NPR capture the audience that’s left without the local news outlets they previously had?

They’re not actually satellites. Generally speaking the audience doesn’t understand this distinction, and frankly they don’t need to. When I tell people now that I work for NPR — and people love it, there’s not that many people who don’t like NPR! — the most common response is, ‘Oh, I love that station.’ Well, of course the funny thing about that is it’s not a station. The way that we’re structured, NPR is a central organization. We are a news gathering and news reporting, producing and distribution organization. We have 36 bureaus around the world. We produce programs, we also license and distribute programs. We also provide services to the stations in all manner of technology, lobbying — you name it. But each station is run autonomously, so they’re not really affiliates. They are members, which is a nuance. But it’s important to understand that because the reality and the culture is a justifiably proud devotion to the local market and the local station.

To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans’ local coverage. What we offer in the combination of NPR and the local stations is one-stop shopping for — and it’s not perfect — local, regional, national, international news. That is our big play. Some people in the past or outside NPR have said, ‘Why do you need the local coverage? Why not just have one national service?’ Answer: because our unique offering is the fact that we are local. The stations know their communities. There’s different demographics. There’s different sensibilities. So we enable them and they provide it. A lot of these are very small stations that don’t have reporting resources, don’t have Web resources, so we at NPR have to do a better job, and I think it’s part of our mission, to help them with training, with resources, with whatever they need. Now it’s costly — but that’s a whole separate issue — but I see our role as enabling all the local stations to thrive on radio and move in to other digital platforms.

Plenty of attention has been devoted to the demise of print lately, but what do you bring from the newspaper world, as well at the NYT.com, that you want to implement at NPR?

Several things: One is the philosophy about test and learn. At a lot of legacy media companies, there is a tradition from the past — you take months to develop a new idea or program. You do focus groups. You do pilots. You hire talent. It’s this long, elaborate process, and then it goes on the air and it’s either a success or it’s a failure. And if it’s a failure, you’ve taken up so much time to do it. What I learned at the NYT is to be much more nimble — it’s a test-and-learn philosophy. If something doesn’t work — okay, we tried it, no big deal, get it off the site, move on. And I want to bring the same sensibilities to NPR. I don’t think we need to be developing entirely new programs. But I think we need to be using this incredible platform we have, the news magazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and incubate new ideas. A perfect example of that is Planet Money, which is an extraordinary little project that is a co-production between NPR and This American Life. Now that it’s a success and won some awards, we are looking at how we can extend it. Test and learn! The second, and this is really tough to do in a bad economy, is that you have to give creative people space.

How do you prefer to get your news in the morning? Print? Radio? Online?

Oh, any multiple of ways. I still really like to read the newspaper in print, which I know sounds really crazy because I was running the New York Times Web site, but personally for me I just like to pick up the paper. I don’t actually read the newspaper till night, because I don’t actually have time to sit, and I love lying on the couch, which I can’t do in the morning. In the morning, I scan NYT online, I don’t really read full articles. I scan WSJ, WaPo, NYT. I get a bazillion blogs — the newsletters in the morning, about the trades. Obviously NPR. I have MyTimes.com set up with a bunch of RSS feeds, including mediabistro.com by the way, Romenesko, all of that. Then when I’m getting dressed and taking care of my kids, I listen to NPR on the local station, WAMU. I listen to it all the way to work. (On a side note, I want to be able to figure out a way that I can sample different station feeds from around the country.) During the day I scan email, and listen to NPR on the way home. And then when I get home, that’s when I actually sit down and read the newspaper.

How will NPR support itself? How do you keep it sustainable? Do you foresee any more layoffs?
We have multiple revenue streams: Sixty percent of our revenue comes from stations, and stations are struggling, though interestingly revenue from our pledge drives is up. Then we get approximately 20 percent from underwriting, and we also get money from foundations and philanthropy and gifts, all of which are struggling in this economy. We get less than one percent from government-supported entities. We also get some from earnings from our endowment which, like everyone else’s investments, are down. We are not immune to it; we are hurting in this economy. Everyone in media is — I’m not just saying woe is me. So what do we do about it? I think we have to be really clear about our message and about why we add value. We need to do a better job of working with the system of raising money together. And we need to have our audience up, so that the underwriting and advertising continues to come into us. And we have to tighten our belt. I think it’s inevitable that there will be more cuts, which doesn’t necessarily mean there will be more layoffs — I really want to differentiate between the two. There’s no big sweeping announcement coming.

Paid content, whether through subscription or micropayment, is a hot topic these days. Which do you think will work, and for what types of media?

You know, I was the person that led the charge to kill TimesSelect. I always said, TimesSelect was the right thing to launch at the time, and the decision to end it that was the right decision. I don’t know what the right decision now is for them. But it may be that there is another model. Change is happening so fast in the media and the economy that you have to be able to say, ‘Forget about what we did then — let’s look at what makes sense now.’ My gut is, no, the micropayment system doesn’t make sense; on the other hand, I don’t have a solution for how to save newspapers.

Do you plan on starting your own blog at NPR?

I’m taking baby steps to get there. My first baby step was that I launched an internal blog on our intranet for staff. And I blog on it all the time. I say, ‘Greetings from San Antonio! I’m here meeting with…, this funny thing happened.’ And I talk about business issues, but I also talk about what I am doing. I’ll put links to articles I think people will read. So that’s my first baby step. It’s been really fun, and people have really appreciated it. I think people like the transparency. I’ve been very transparent about our challenges and all that. The next step is, I’m going to launch a blog for the NPR stations system. So that’s now going from hundreds to thousands of people. And after that… we shall see. I mean I want to do this fast — each one of these steps won’t take a year.

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Glynnis MacNicol is editor of FishbowlNY.com.

Social media is fast stepping on the heels of big, traditional media: In April, Ning — which lets people create social networks around any theme they like — announced its one-millionth network had been created. While only some 200,000 of its networks are regularly active, a million of anything is worth noting. comScore reports Ning had some 5.2 million unique visitors in March 2009, an almost unbelievable 314 percent year-over-year increase.

The company is at the vanguard of Silicon Valley’s attempt to wrest control of the media world — and its advertising profits — from New York City. These days, digital media companies like Ning.com pitch ad sales around concepts like “highly-targeted” campaigns to the “right” audience. But if consumers continue migrating to digital media, it may someday sweeten its pitch with the huge audiences once reserved for print circulation reports and television ratings points.

We sat down with Ning co-founder and chief executive Gina Bianchini to discuss the pitched battle for control of the media landscape. True to her reputation, Bianchini talked directly about how media is changing, why the omni-media company is a relic, and the way Ning is organizing the topics people create networks around into a standardized database of pre-defined categories.

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Name: Gina Bianchini
Position: Ning CEO and co-founder
Resume: BA, Stanford University; analyst, Goldman Sachs; director of corporate development, CKS Group; MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business; president and co-founder, Harmonics; CEO and co-founder, Ning.
Hometown: Cupertino, California
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: The home page of NYTimes.com.
Favorite TV shows: Saturday Night Live, MI-5, Veronica Mars (“The greatest show ever!”)
Last book read: “I read a lot; I just haven’t finished any books lately. Right now I have open David Kilcullen’s book, The Accidental Guerilla, and a book on the history of Sesame Street.”
Guilty pleasure: “I love [the band] The Lonely Island. My husband will come in, and I’m listening to ‘Incredibad’ and I’m laughing, and he’s like, ‘Really?'”

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Social media is a real struggle for big media companies. It takes up people’s time and attention without a business model that supports the massive revenues they’re used to generating. Do they understand this new media category and how to harness it?

I would say traditional media companies really are experimenting. While I completely agree that we [digital media] continue to take lots and lots of people’s time away from more traditional media — which I think creates all sorts of interesting opportunities — I wouldn’t describe this as the move from radio to television. This is a pretty fundamental shift in terms of how people are connecting with other people, and what is entertainment.

That’s for sure. CBS just canceled the soap Guiding Light! From Glam Media through iVillage, digital media wants the female demographic, and apparently it’s winning.

But at the same time, [Guiding Light] ran for 72 years. It was built for a country that had a very, very different technology profile, a different work profile, and a different social profile, and change is okay.

That depends on where one sits in the marketplace… To put it simply, can social networking fit within the role of traditional media companies?

From my perspective, there doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct fit within a traditional media company.

What is Ning’s goal then?

We believe by graphing the world’s interests and passions — which is fundamentally what we’re doing — there is an opportunity for us to create an independent franchise company that can get very large and provide a tremendous amount of value to our network creators, as well as the members of different social networks across Ning.

And big, independent media companies are fighting just to survive. The editorial model of niche social networks seems to come down to more work for things such as community management for fewer revenues.

I think that’s looking at it in the wrong context. If what you want to do is [build] a traditional media company, one: [our social network creators] are not built for it. The second thing I would say is if the earnings calls are any indication, you’re comparing it [digital/social media] to a business model [traditional media] that may or may not be there. That question in and of itself sets you up to be miserable for the rest of your life.

There are a lot of miserable traditional media companies these days. Here’s the thing: social networks are focused on very small niches. Are they too small overall to build a company that can generate the kind of massive revenues media expects?

If you’re built from the ground up to have a cost structure, infrastructure and just general scalability that results in a healthy profit by people paying for subscriptions, as well as for an ad rate that is not a broadcast television upfront ad rate, then I think it’s a moot point.

“The entrepreneurs I know are looking to build a brand online, and they are going to do it through the most efficient means possible.”

But then how do you build social media and other digital media categories out into major businesses like News Corporation?

Wa-, wa-, wa-, wait: How many people do you think really want to scale this out into News Corp.? Because if you look at News Corp., there’s one person in the entire world that wanted to scale it out into News Corp.

Rupert?

Yeah.

But isn’t Murdoch just a really successful version of a good media entrepreneur, building a company that creates lots of editorial content that consumers crave?

I would suggest that the media model today is different. I don’t know a single person who — and this may just be because of where I’m sitting [in Silicon Valley] — who is thinking about your omni-media approach, where it’s print or broadcast or I’m going to have my on-demand cable channel. The entrepreneurs I know are looking to build a brand online, and they are going to do it through the most efficient means possible.

“When you have a company that is mapping the world’s interests and passions, there’s a lot of very rich, interesting data.”

The argument makes sense, but is it possible to take that cheap digital distribution that people employ for niche Web audiences and scale it into a huge media business like News Corp.?

I challenge the notion that it’s one or the other. I think the goal needs to be about empowering or enabling people. Only 12,000 of our network creators purchase our premium services; the rest do it because they love it. It’s not a traditional media model. I think the biggest thing is — and where we are different — is providing a means by which people can scale [their network on Ning]. So I think I challenge the notion that these things can’t possibly get big or that they can’t turn into News Corp. One individual network [on Ning] may not turn into News Corp., but I think that’s an artificial sort of structure.

In the case of Ning, how do you create a business model that throws off lots of cash? For instance, do you make a deal with a publisher to sell ads across Ning?

We certainly have had conversations, but at this point we’re making money in a nice way through both premium services, as well as targeted advertising [via Google AdSense].

What type of premium services?

I’m a member of 38 social networks today. I’m on a social network for zombies, and this is a social network that has paid us $24.95/month to take off our advertising. They are paying us $4.95/month to use their own domain name. They paid us another $24.95/month to remove a few Ning promotional links, so basically these guys are paying us $55 per month so they can have a little bit more freedom and flexibility for this zombie social network.

So you’re focusing on the recurring subscription-based revenues for technology add-ons, as opposed to the traditional media model of direct ad sales.

We actually think there are a lot more interesting and better ways [than ad sales] to make money by taking advantage of the Ning platform today.

How do you get at the concept of “graphing” the world’s passions?

We have over a million self-contributed [meta-] tags related to the one million social networks that are on this platform. So we know, for example, that networks across Ning span 10,000-20,000 unique interests and more.

But the problem with self-contributed tags is that the lack of standardization often means that elements are accidentally mis-categorized. Do you re-categorize them?

[Yes,] on our back end. That’s how we’re able to get at what are the interests and passions that people are connecting around across the Ning platform today.

So in effect you’re building a massive media-planning tool that can be used to categorize people across what initially look like disparate interest areas?

From a pure media planning tool perspective, we do not have something in place, but certainly again, when you have a company that is mapping the world’s interests and passions, there’s a lot of very rich, interesting data.

You still take big media seriously. When Viacom launched competitor Flux in 2007 in partnership with Social Project, you took the unusual step of writing Techcrunch to say Flux’s technology was inferior and Viacom partnerships often end in lawsuits.

I didn’t necessarily see it as unusual. I was just laying out facts in a way that I hoped was readable.

Would you call the move a success?

Sure. We’re sitting here talking about almost a million social networks on Ning and one does not hear a lot about… other companies.

That’s why they pay you the big bucks! When did you realize that you had the drive and vision to found and lead companies?

For me, it was really about I have an idea and a vision for what it was we can do and I want to go make it happen. I want to create software used by millions of people in their daily lives in a way that is meaningful and in a way that is completely and utterly innovative.

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James Erik Abels is a freelance writer based in New York City. Before founding Three Minute Media, a Web video news network, he covered the media/digital beat for Forbes.

How does one go from studying philosophy at Stanford to working in program management at one of the up-and-coming search engines on the Internet? It’s less of an unconventional career path than you might think. Just ask Mark Johnson, senior program manager lead at Bing.

You’ve heard of Bing by now; it’s the new “decision engine” from Microsoft, unleashed on the Internet in June 2009. Johnson, who has spent his entire career in product management, landed at Bing when Microsoft acquired his most recent employer, Powerset, the semantic search engine company, in 2008.

As Johnson prepares his presentation on the evolution of semantic search for mediabistro.com’s upcoming Web 3.0 conference January 26-27, the self-professed “philosophy geek” spoke to us via email about what it’s like being on the leading edge of search engine development and why it’s “never a dull day” in program management at Bing.

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Name: Mark Johnson
Position: Senior program manager, Bing
Birthdate: April 12, 1978
Hometown: Suburban Buffalo, NY
Education: Stanford University
Resume: Product management positions at SAP, TeleMinder, SideStep, Kosmix, Powerset, and now Bing.
Favorite TV show: Dallas (“I don’t watch TV.”)
Last book read: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Guilty pleasure: “Many.”
Twitter handle: @philosophygeek

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Tell us how your career began and how you ended up at Bing. Did you always dream of working in this field?

From an unlikely beginning studying philosophy in college, I ended up working in product management at the third-largest software company in the world, SAP. After the dust settled from the dot-com bust, I decided to go the startup route and ended up at a string of search startups: SideStep (acquired by Kayak), Kosmix, and Powerset (acquired by Microsoft). Two out of three acquisitions isn’t so bad! I ended up at Bing through the Powerset acquisition.

I decided to work in search because I knew that, whereas search was one of the most important technology tools I had ever interacted with, we’re only scratching the surface of possibility.

What’s a typical day for you?

My current title is a bit of a mouthful: Senior program manager lead. At Microsoft, teams are usually divided into a triad of dev[elopment], test, and program management, and I lead that third branch of the triad and a small team of program managers.

“In a broader interpretation of ‘semantic Web,’ when computers are better able to understand the syntax and meaning of sentences, we’ll be able to generate more readable, smarter summaries.”

Program management is a great field for people who don’t like typical days. We are the grease that keeps everything running smoothly. I work closely with my development and test counterparts. I interact with all our partner teams at Bing. I help devs when they’re blocked by some kind of organizational fluke. I write and review specs. I find bugs. I organize meetings. You will find me either in my home office in San Francisco or our Bing headquarters in Bellevue. Definitely never a dull day!

You are specifically responsible for snippets and the hover feature. What exactly does that mean, or why is that important for users to be aware of?

The relevance team at Bing is responsible for returning you the most relevant Web pages that match your query. The captions team generates the title, the snippet, the URL, and the hover for each of these pages. This is incredibly important to users, because we need to show you why a certain result was picked. In some cases, users will be able to glean that information from just the title of the page and the URL, but often times we’ll need to summarize a long page in a two-line snippet to give the user an idea of what’s relevant on the page. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult task and an area of research that’s only beginning to be explored.

(By the way, if this kind of project excites you, Bing currently has openings for three dev positions and one program management position. Click here for details.)

Hover is totally new to the search engine world. How did Bing come up with the idea? Did the company see a real need for something like this in the search engine marketplace?

Bing is always looking for new ways to innovate on the user interface. We found that the typical search result caption — a title, snippet, and URL — often wasn’t enough to convey all of the information that a user needs to determine when to click. However, we also know that adding additional elements to the page disrupts a user’s scan pattern and can cause visual clutter and complexity. The hover preview is an elegant solution to add more information density to the page without overloading the user with more page elements. We’ve already begun adding rich features to the hover preview (try a search like “Kelly shoes“) and expect to see a lot more experimentation with the hover in 2010.

“We expect the quality of captions to improve in 2010, but you probably will never directly notice: you’ll just be pleasantly surprised at how fast you’re able to scan the search results to find exactly what you want.”

How can Web content writers and editors use snippets and hover to their advantage for search engine optimization purposes?

The most important part of a caption is the title, so I encourage all writers to make sure that the “< title >” tag is filled out with a succinct, meaningful, unique description of the page. Avoid marketing slogans, jargon, taglines, and think about what a user needs to know about your page. In terms of the snippet and hover, just make sure your page has quality content and my team will do our best to select the most relevant content on the page based on your content and the user’s query.

What sort of technical innovations does Bing have coming down the road?

One of the reasons I like search the most is that the most complex and far-reaching technical innovations are often under the hood, completely transparent to the end-user. For example, we expect the quality of captions to improve in 2010, but you probably will never directly notice: you’ll just be pleasantly surprised at how fast you’re able to scan the search results to find exactly what you want.

How do you think the rise of semantic Web will impact your job at Bing specifically?

Captions is one of the best places to take advantage of semantic Web enhancements. For example, as more sites mark up their structured data, we can display the data as key-value pairs in the snippet. We’re already doing this for some sites and will expand. Also, in a broader interpretation of “semantic Web,” when computers are better able to understand the syntax and meaning of sentences, we’ll be able to generate more readable, smarter summaries.

Google has dominated online search for several years. What’s Bing’s strategy for making inroads in that market?

We at Bing see ourselves as a decision engine, not a search engine. When we’re designing features in captions or elsewhere, we’re always thinking about what the customer is trying to accomplish and how we can make those key tasks easier for them.

mediabistro.com’s Web 3.0 is convening leaders in the semantic Web area, but a lot of everyday users are still learning about the technology. How would you describe semantic Web and its importance in layman’s terms?

I’m not a semantic Web purist who takes the Tim Berners-Lee definition as fiat. I would explain the semantic Web in the broadest possible terms: “Enabling computers to understand our language.”

Where do you see Bing in 2010?

I’ve seen a lot of interesting ideas floating around Bing over the past month and I’m really excited to see the innovations that we deliver over the next year. Definitely keep searching on Bing and you’ll see some amazing improvements to your search experience.

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Jennifer Pullinger is a freelance writer and book and film publicist in Richmond, Va. Visit her at www.JenniferPullinger.com.

If you haven’t visited one of Yahoo!’s content sites recently, you’re almost in the minority. Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Sports are all number-one in their categories. (Yup, despite all the hubbub around Google News, Yahoo! News actually trumps them.) And, combined with Yahoo! Entertainment, the sites get about 81 million visitors a month according to comScore. Helming it all is Jimmy Pitaro, the vice president in charge of Yahoo! Media, whose job it is to decide how to program and package the content. Historically, much of the focus has been on aggregation and licensing of third-party content. These days, Yahoo! is investing more in original material, as with the hire last fall of Talking Points Memo deputy publisher Andrew Golis to build a blogging team for the News property and the recently announced deal with Ugly Betty and The Office executive producer Ben Silverman’s new Electus production house to create Internet-native shows.

Pitaro is a Cornell graduate and former lawyer who came to Yahoo! as part of the Sunnyvale company’s acquisition of online music site Launch Media. In 2006, former television executive and then Yahoo! media chief Lloyd Braun put Pitaro in charge of Yahoo! Sports, which Fast Company subsequently called “the best Cinderella story” in sports news. Pitaro’s bosses must have agreed. In 2008, they handed him the keys to Yahoo! Media as a whole.

Pitaro talked with mediabistro.com about what Yahoo’s learned about what its users — and advertisers — want online, why free will beat paid, and what Yahoo! is looking for in the few good writers it’s hiring.

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Name: Jimmy Pitaro
Position: Vice president and head of Yahoo! Media
Resume: From 1994-1999, was a lawyer for Marshall, Conway & Wright and Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker, both Manhattan-based litigation firms. Served as vice president and head of business affairs for Launch.com and Yahoo! Music (which acquired Launch) from 2000-2005. In 2006, became vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Sports and was elevated to vice president and head of Yahoo! Sports & Entertainment (Movies, TV, omg!, Shine, Music, Games) in 2007. Named vice president and head of Yahoo! Media in 2008.
Birthdate: August 2, 1969
Hometown: Scarsdale, NY
Education: Cornell University; St. John’s University Law School
Marital status: Married, two children
First section of the Sunday New York Times: Business section
Last book read: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
Favorite TV show: The Tudors and 24
Guilty pleasure: “Gadgets, including everything Apple-related and home theater products.”

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Tell us about the deal with Electus. When are we going to start seeing content from that?
Hopefully very soon. It depends on the advertiser. Historically, we’ve created content that is 100 percent based on audience needs. In this deal, the idea is to focus on content that really meets advertiser and audience needs: identifying key sponsorship partners, identifying content that could work well for them, and then determining if that content could resonate with our audience.

You’re not going to see us launch any content that we don’t think is going to work for our audience. If we have something we think is really great for a particular advertiser, but it’s not going to work for Yahoo! Sports, for example, we’re not going to launch that. Because it’s not going to work, and it’s ultimately not going to work for the advertiser.

“We don’t want to walk into meetings with advertisers and say to them: ‘Here are the standard display units we have. Please buy them.’ Those days are over.”

So are we talking three months? Six months? A year?
I’d be very surprised if we didn’t have some content that has been generated by Electus with an advertiser on board within the next six months.

The idea of creating content by starting with the advertiser seems counter-intuitive. Why does it make sense to you?
It’s just a piece of the puzzle. We still have a Yahoo! Originals team that is 100 percent focused on creating content for our audience, and then going to market with that content and bringing a sponsor on board. Historically that’s what we’ve always done, and we’ve had a lot of success.

It sounds like advertisers are increasingly unhappy with the conventional avenues for marketing themselves online. Is that the case?
Advertisers are just tired of sitting down in meetings with digital media companies and digital distributors and being pitched on standard large rectangular ad units that have very low click-through. They want creativity. They want innovation. And they want better brand integration. So we’re being proactive. We don’t want to walk into meetings with advertisers and say to them: “Here are the standard display units we have. Please buy them.” Those days are over.

Dunkin’ Donuts came to us and said, “We’re all about the coffee, and we really want to go after our customer first thing in the morning.” So what we started to ideate with them, to come up with a program that could work for them. After an hour of discussion, we realized that we wanted to go after our user first thing in the morning, because Yahoo! is all about being a starting point. So we started to talk about Yahoo! Sports and how we could get that sports fan. We came up with this show called “Yahoo! Sports Minute.” It’s a recap of what happened last night or yesterday in sports. The Dunkin’ brand is integrated into the program, but what’s important is that we created a new environment. It wasn’t just a pop-up video player, or a player that was embedded in an existing page. We created a new micro-site for Dunkin’ Donuts. Within that page is a Dunkin’ Donuts locator. So it’s that type of product that’s innovative and is taking the next step in terms of how we meet advertiser needs.

“Our audience wants quick snacks. They’re not that interested in consuming 22-minute sitcoms or one-hour dramas.”

Your wrap-up shows — “Prime Time in No Time,” “Yahoo! Sports Minute,” etc… — there’s no analog for that in the old-media world. It’s an entirely new beast. Why does that work for your users?
All of our data tells us that our audience wants quick snacks. They’re not that interested in consuming 22-minute sitcoms or one-hour dramas. The key point, though, is that we program based on audience insights. If you look at how “Prime Time in No Time” and “Tech Ticker” were launched. They were really low-risk opportunities for us. What we saw in entertainment was that, the morning after American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, search volume around those shows exploded. People wanted to know what happened last night, who got voted off. We were constantly reacting and producing stories around the content, scratching and clawing to find stories from content partners.

We found it wasn’t really scaling, so we decided to just create programming that met that audience need. “Prime Time in No Time” was launched to address our users’ huge appetite for knowing what happened last night in reality television. With “Tech Ticker,” we saw a lot of interest on Yahoo! around tech stocks. One of our most popular areas in Yahoo! Finance are quotes pages. We launched that show knowing there was a huge demand for that kind of content.

What do you see in your data that would surprise the average person who works in media?
People want to consume content for free. While there are some opportunities for Internet companies to charge, for the most part, free is going to prevail. If you try to charge [for text-based content], there’s always going to a free alternative, some startup out there, or some mid-level Internet company that is providing that content or content that’s similar at no charge to the user.

On the video side, it’s very different. There are barriers to entry, and it’s expensive to create premium video content. I do think that video providers are in a different arena and can and should consider charging for their content.

Where are the opportunities in this new world for the people who create the content — writers, photographers, videographers?
We’re hiring very selectively. When we go out and hire a new writer, blogger, or editor, we create a model, and we look at the return on the investment that we’re going to get. We’ve done a good job within Yahoo! Sports of hiring a team of incredibly professional and talented writers, editors, and bloggers. And we’ve been able to do it cost-effectively and bring in a solid return on that investment.

As a result, we’re now looking to extend those types of investments into News, Finance, and our Entertainment properties. We’re not going to go out and hire 300 writers. We’re going to hire a select few writers in each of those verticals to help us produce some compelling content that can help differentiate us and build a unique voice in this super-competitive industry.

What are the attributes you’re looking for?
It’s voice and perspective. We’re trying to differentiate ourselves from what’s out there. We want to build a personality and a style and a tone. We want incredibly talented people, but we want people who have a style that’s their own.

If you look at what we did within sports, we hired [former Sports Illustrated writer] Michael Silver. He’s courageous. He’s not afraid to print the facts and write the truth and to say what he thinks. By bringing Mike on, we built up some credibility within sports and the NFL, and we also got access to athletes, coaches, and GMs.

AOL and Yahoo! seem to have almost diametrically opposed content strategies: AOL is focusing on the long tail and Yahoo! is going more for mass audience. Why do you think you’re right?
We’re very focused on monetization. Long tail content across so many verticals is a challenge because, from what we can tell, from talking to advertisers, it’s going to be tough to monetize. You’re not going to charge for that content, so you’re going to monetize it through display advertising and through creative advertising. And advertisers want their brands associated with premium content. Otherwise, you can go to an ad network.

CEO Carol Bartz just hit her one-year mark. How has Yahoo! Media’s world changed as a result of her being there?
She’s a big supporter of the media businesses. She’s a fan. As a result, she has made very quick decisions to invest in the various verticals.

From my perspective, that’s been the most refreshing thing I’ve noticed: her ability and her desire to move swiftly. In one of my first meetings with her, I sat down and walked her through the Sports business. And she said to me, “OK, got it. What do you need?” And I said, “I need this, this, and this.” And she asked me, “If I give you this, this, and this, are you going to maintain your margins, and are you going to continue to produce a profitable business?” And I said, “Yes.” And she said, “I’m going to hold you to that,” and she authorized me to go ahead and make those investments.

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E.B. Boyd is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.

Most people know Jimmy Wales’ story. They know that, almost 10 years ago, the former Chicago futures and options researcher launched an open-content encyclopedia that has become one of the most popular sites in the world, a blessing for millions and the bane of school teachers and university professors everywhere. They might not know, however, that the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, has other user-generated projects similarly focused on spreading knowledge to the four corners of the earth, including Wikimedia Commons, a repository for public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images, and Wikinews, a user-generated breaking news site.

And while most people might know that Wikipedia is a commercial-free, nonprofit venture, they might not be aware that, back in 2004, Wales launched another company, the for-profit Wikia, where millions of volunteers also use wiki software to create sites on everything from pop culture blockbusters like the television show Lost and the video game World of Warcraft, to domestic pursuits like cocktails and vintage sewing patterns. And in an era in which the revenue outlook for most newspapers and magazines seems increasingly dismal, last year the advertising-supported Wikia hit profitability. It also broke into Quantcast’s top 100 list of the most popular sites on the Internet, and has over 10 million unique users — and growing.

We caught up with Wales, who regularly circles the globe, speaking at conferences and meeting with members of the Wikipedia community, to ask him what he’s focusing on these days, what newspapers and magazines can learn from Wikipedia and Wikia, and why there’s a dish in China called “stir-fried wikipedia with pimentos.”

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Position: Chair emeritus, Wikimedia Foundation; Chair, Wikia
Resume: Taught finance at the University of Alabama and Indiana University while doing graduate studies at each. Research director at Chicago Options Associates. Founded the web portal Bornis, Nupedia (the precursor to Wikipedia), Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Foundation. Co-founded Wikia.
Birthdate: August, 1966
Hometown: Huntsville, Alabama
Education: B.A. Finance, Auburn University, M.A. Finance, University of Alabama
Martial status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Front page
Favorite TV shows: Lost, Flash Forward
Last book read: “I’m always reading about five books at once!”
Guilty pleasure: Pringles
Twitter handle: @jimmy_wales

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Where are you right now?
I just got back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, and then I was at the Wikimedia Foundation board meeting in San Francisco over the weekend. Now I’m in Washington, D.C., for a few days. Then I’m home in Florida for about a week and a half. Then I’m back in D.C. for one night only, and then I’m going to London.

How many days of the year are you actually home?
I’m probably home less than a hundred.

What are you focusing on these days?
The biggest thing is pushing forward the usability of the wiki software platform, to get more people involved. We’re doing a lot on that at Wikia. We’re trying to branch out beyond the tech-geek early adopter crowd, in terms of who’s doing the editing.

We’ve done a lot of testing to get data on what helps people contribute more. And we now have the WYSIWYG [“what you see is what you get”] editor, which is a much easier editing environment. It’s much more familiar to people, more like a word-processing program.

And we’re branching out topic areas. So, for example, we have the Recipes Wikia, which is doing very well and bringing in a whole different kind of audience from the people who are editing the World of Warcraft wiki.

“We’re the fifth-largest Web site in terms of reach — 350 million people a month or more. And yet [the Foundation has] only 35 people [on staff].”

Wikipedia seems to loom so large in our consciousness that I think most people would be surprised to discover how small the organization really is.
The Web site has been incredibly successful, and the community around the Web site has been incredibly successful. But the foundation behind it all has been very bare bones. Even today, when we finally have capacity to do things, we’re talking about 35 people, still a very tiny organization compared to the reach of the Web site. We’re the fifth-largest Web site in terms of reach — 350 million people a month or more. And yet [the Foundation has] only 35 people [on staff]. That’s very different from everybody else in the top 10 [most popular Web sites], where you’re looking at hundreds or even thousands of employees.

There was a dust-up last year about a study — which was later proven to be flawed — asserting that volunteers were abandoning Wikipedia. And yet, Wikimedia’s strategic plan still talks about the “health” of the editing community — in other words, that the organization needs to put systems and processes in place to ensure that enough people continue contributing to Wikipedia. Are there natural limits to a project of this kind, which depends on volunteers to create the content?
That’s always been a focus for us, and it will continue to be a focus. The community has been very successful, so making sure that that community is healthy and happy and growing appropriately — and is sufficiently diverse — will always be a priority for us. When you’re talking about user-generated content as we are, it depends on those users.

Particularly as compared to more social Web sites — like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, where the community does whatever they want to do, and it’s for entertainment and hanging out with your friends — that’s very different than the Wikipedia world, where we have a clear mission that unifies the community and defines what the work is. So the health of the community means more than just numbers of people participating. That’s not really the goal. We’re concerned about having quality participants doing good quality work.

What’s the difference between what people are doing on Wikia and what they’re doing at Wikipedia?
Wikia is building the rest of the library. If you go into a traditional library, and you look for the encyclopedia, you find a set of books, 30 volumes, A through Z. And then there’s all the other books in the library. So people are using Wikia for all different kinds of things that are not [in] an encyclopedia. For example, Uncyclopedia is a humor site that parodies Wikipedia. And one of the ones we’re focused on right now is the Recipes Wikia, where people are sharing recipes.

“The idea that people will pay for quality, and that the traditional magazine is quality — that doesn’t really hold up.”

Big-name advertisers like Verizon and Toyota have discovered Wikia and started placing ads on its content sites. How much of a disruptor is that for traditional media?
I don’t think we’re big enough yet to be that much of a disruptor, but I’m hoping to be a disruptor in that area. (Laughs) The interesting thing that’s going on with advertising and Wikia is that advertising today is trying to reach the influencers. At Wikia, the editors are the influencers. These are the kinds of people who have lots of knowledge and share it with their friends.

How about on the content side? Is that disrupting traditional media in any way?
There’s a shift among what are called the magazine audiences. We’re not talking about headline news journalism — CNN or The New York Times — but among the kind of things you traditionally would associate with a magazine. Gaming magazines are probably where we’re having the biggest impact. These days, consumers want information, and they want more information than they ever did before. If they subscribe to a traditional magazine that has 90 or 100 pages of content every month, and a lot of that is advertising — they’re finding [the magazine] to be quite lacking, compared to what they’re able to get online. So with something like the World of Warcraft wiki, which has 70,000-plus articles, there’s really no competition. No traditional magazine can compete with that level of detail and quality of information.

I don’t know what the future is. I’m not predicting the death of the paper magazine, because the physical form of the magazine is useful in certain contexts. But I do think that, right now, readers are realizing, “Why should I subscribe to a photography magazine, when I can go and get massive amounts of information, that’s much more detailed and much more in-tune with my interests, online, and it’s good quality?” The idea that people will pay for quality, and that the traditional magazine is quality — that doesn’t really hold up.

Wikinews hasn’t taken off the way Wikipedia has. Why is that?
There’s a couple of reasons. Volunteer contributors are really drawn to writing about current events in Wikipedia itself because of the traffic. When some large-scale global story like the earthquake in Haiti happens, volunteers really want to go to Wikipedia, to contribute, do the research, find all the background information, and put in all the links. They do that in part because they know people are going to go to the Internet, type “Haiti earthquake,” and find Wikipedia. So if you want to actually be useful to people, you need to go to where people are going to be.

Then there is the question about the way people are consuming information. Wikinews generally follows the same kind format as any kind of Associated Press-type news service. They write a single story. They update it at some point. They cut it, and then they move to the next story on the same topic. But that’s less and less the way people want to consume information. For example, me. I’m not following the news every day, particularly not about Haiti. I check in every few days to find out the latest. But if I go to a news story about it, I get what’s happened in the last 24 hours, when I actually want the summary — what’s the overall status? The Wikipedia-style entry is more useful for that.

What lessons are there in Wikipedia’s and/or Wikia’s success for news organizations and magazines?
Communities are capable of high-quality work. Journalists and magazines both operate in communities and should consider moving away from the “top-down” and “broadcast” way of thinking towards more of a “community facilitator and moderator” way of thinking.

Media reports about you tend to repeat the same details over and over. What’s one meme about you that’s either wrong, wrongly emphasized, or wrongly framed?
There are so many small ones that I don’t know where to begin. (Smiles)

There’s a restaurant in China that has a dish called “stir-fried wikipedia with pimentos.” Why did they call it “wikipedia”?
There’s a whole weird meme about this. People keep sending me photos of menus in China with all kinds of different dishes being translated as “Wikipedia”. The best we can figure is that someone is asked to translate the menu into English. They ask, “What’s the name of this dish in English?” And someone says, “I don’t know, look it up in Wikipedia!” And they just write down: “Wikipedia”. But honestly, I have no idea!

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E.B. Boyd is a WebNewser contributor and San Francisco-based freelance writer.

“When I go to events with existing journalists, it feels like a wake,” says Sree Sreenivasan. “But when I’m on campus, students are much more optimistic. And they should be.”

As Columbia Journalism School’s dean of student affairs, Sreenivasan has watched first-hand as waves of students flock to J-school despite a bleak outlook for the business. His advice? Work smarter and harder. He urges everyone in his popular social media classes to at least be knowledgeable about all forms of new media, (yes, even Foursquare), even if they’re not interested in Tweeting every detail of their lives.

“It’s fascinating the way journalists have used and struggled with technology. They’re both the savviest and the most skeptical. That’s fine. But they have to know what’s going on.”

With 10,000 Twitter followers of his own, a pragmatic approach (“I’m an evangelist and a skeptic,” he likes to say), and a schedule more transparent than the president’s, this in-demand speaker and TV commentator is now embarking on a different experiment. He’s scouring the globe for people who, like him, are turning 40 in 2010. How on Earth does he have time for all this? Check out his guilty pleasure…

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Name: Sree Sreenivasan
Position: Professor and dean of student affairs, Columbia Journalism School
Resume: Earned his first byline in The Fiji Sun at age 15; Began lecturing at Columbia after graduating with a M.S. in journalism. Promoted to professor of professional practice in 2007. Served as dean of students from 2005-2007 and later appointed to a newly created position, dean of student affairs. Former freelance tech reporter for WNBC and WABC. Co-founder and former president of the South Asian Journalists Association. Contributing editor for DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan hyperlocal news startup he helped launch with Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.
Birthdate: October 28, 1970
Hometown: New York, NY
Education: M.S. in Journalism, Columbia; B.A. in History, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; Marist Brothers High School, Suva, Fiji; also: P.S. 6 in Manhattan and kindergarten in Moscow, in the former USSR
Marital status: Married with twin children.
First section of the Sunday Times: “I try to read the Magazine, Book Review and Real Estate sections on Saturday.”
Favorite TV show: Pardon The Interruption, Psych, Monk, and NCIS
Guilty pleasure: Starbucks Frappuccino in the glass bottle. “My wife says the last thing I need is caffeine, but the Starbucks bottled drink reminds me of the iced coffee my grandmother made in India.”
Last book read: Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland by Basharat Peer.
Twitter handle: @sreenet

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When it comes to technology, you call yourself both an evangelist and a skeptic. What have you been skeptical about?
Things like Second Life; I have too much trouble organizing my first life to play that game. I’m not a user of Foursquare, Google Wave or Google Buzz, I have given them a test run but I just don’t have the bandwidth to add them to my media diet right now. But I still have to be knowledgeable. Today I had to teach three people how to turn off Google Buzz. So even the things I don’t use, I need to be able to understand them.

What are you evangelical about?
I use Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Those are the three that work for my lifestyle and my work style. Now, if you’re a music journalist, you must use MySpace. But those are the three things that work for me.

“A lot of people spend all their time hiding on the Internet. You don’t have to give away information the way I do. But you don’t have to hide either. A good journalist is reachable.”

Your daily calendar, beginning with taking your children to school, is available for anyone to access on your Web site. Do you have concerns about having your entire day publicly available?
Am I concerned, yes — but I can’t keep that concern from using technology to make my life easier. Having my calendar out there means I have eliminated the voicemail and email phone tag I used to play: Can you meet Friday at 2? How’s Thursday at 6? Monday at noon? I know very few people who would do something like this. Besides, it can raise awkward questions at home. “Lunch with Kathy? Who’s Kathy?”

I believe journalists should be open and available and engaged. I’ve also had the same phone number and email address for 17 years. A lot of people spend all their time hiding on the Internet. You don’t have to give away information the way I do. But you don’t have to hide either. A good journalist is reachable.

You have more than 10,000 followers on Twitter. What kind of advice do you give to people attempting to amass followers on Twitter?
I Tweet very carefully. I very rarely Tweet what I’m doing at the moment. I try to bring something into the conversation. No one wants to know who I am hanging out with or what I am eating — unless I can find a way to make it relevant to as wide an audience as possible. I’ve had dinner with celebrities and sorta-celebrities, but I don’t Tweet about it. That doesn’t engage anyone. It’s self-serving and I’m hyper-conscious of it. If I’m at a bar, I’m not Tweeting that. But if I’m at a bar offering a discount on the weekend or has a new recipe, I’ll Tweet about that, or the two-for-one drinks. I want my Tweets to be interesting/informative/relevant/timely/generous/fun or funny. I don’t always manage to meet that criterion all the time, but I try. That takes time and effort. Oh, and I never try to Tweet more than 120 characters, allowing people to easily retweet my stuff with comments.

Is it true that although the media is experiencing a tidal wave, numbers are actually up at Columbia University’s Journalism School?
The numbers are up, it’s true. We haven’t done [an] exact number. But generally we’re seeing apps from 60 countries and across the countries. There is a level of optimism that is exciting and palpable.

What do you attribute that to? Is it because they’re younger?
It’s that, yes. But also, we have a large international population of students. The media across the world is not fragmented or mature the way it is here. And the young people in general are more optimistic. They have entrepreneurial spirit that serves journalists well.

“Social media is just one optional credit out of 30-plus in the Journalism School. What you really need is to be a good, trusted reporter, editor, and storyteller.”

But the fact is, the jobs are not there the way they once were. Are you being direct with students about this?
Of course. That’s always a worry. Part of my job is to have a teaching role and an administration role. I have a direct stake in making sure our students get suitable, satisfying work. We have invested heavily in a four-person career service office that does an incredible amount of work connecting our students with hiring editors and others around the globe. In fact, on March 27, we [hosted] one of the largest journalism job fairs in the country with more than 80 media companies — large and small, old and new.

What are you telling your students about how to prepare for landing a media job in this market?
You need to be able to do multiple things. My colleague Sig Gissler, who runs the Pulitzer Prizes and teaches digital media here, coined the perfect term: the tra-digital journalist. Someone who has all the skills and values of a traditional journalist, but who also has a digital overlay, understanding the tools and techniques of the current Internet. The media still needs people to report, write and tell stories — and do it fast and well. A small part of what they need to know is things like social media. I want to be clear: social media is just one optional credit out of 30-plus in the Journalism School. What you really need is to be a good, trusted reporter, editor, and storyteller. If you are, you can make your way in this changing media landscape.

There’s been some discussion about the president’s Twitter account. It’s updated in the first person. But he says he doesn’t Tweet. Does it matter if he’s using a ghost Tweeter?
Twitter rewards authenticity — why not just have his staff Tweet in the third-person? In any case, I would rather have the president concentrate on other issues. Like how the economy is affecting our country. Why should he be on Twitter? He had to struggle mightily just to get a Blackberry. Mistakes you make on Twitter are much bigger than mistakes you can make on email.

When you have 10,000 followers, do you care about losing a few here and there?
Yes! I care about the people I lose, because these are folks voting with their feet. I can get obsessed about that. I use a program called TWunfollow.com. But I beg you, don’t use it unless you’re ready. You might need psychotherapy. They will email you when people unfollow you with the Twitter handles and how long they’ve followed you. I get those emails and I obsess over them. It’s pretty sad. You’re better off using Chirpstats.com, which gives you aggregate numbers, telling you the total number of people you’ve gained and lost.

Even though you’re an obvious technophile, you still want to see print journalism remain available.
I love print. There’s something magical about it. No technology can ever completely replace all forms of print (I hope). I subscribe to two daily papers, the NYT and the WSJ, and to five magazines/weeklies. And as long as there’s a print edition of The New York Times, I’ll be a subscriber.

On a more personal note, you’re married to a former sports rifle sharpshooter…What’s that like?
It’s true. My wife, Roopa, who has a terrific food blog at RoopaOnline.com and is a Pfizer exec, used to be one of the world’s top women rifle shooters. Her father was a cop in India and her mother won a state pistol-shooting championship when Roopa was still in her belly. She can shoot a dime off your shoulder from 50 yards away, without a scope. We are always looking for volunteers.

So, is it safe to assume that you generally stay out of trouble?
Well, yes. But I also make sure we don’t have rifles in the house.

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Aliya S. King is an author of two works of nonfiction and an upcoming novel. She also blogs at www.aliyasking.com and Tweets even more @aliyasking.

Susan Lyne can do anything, and she has. After 20 years in the print world, she jumped headfirst into television, at Disney/ABC. With zero TV experience, she rose to president of the entertainment division, where she oversaw development of Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Grey’s Anatomy. Then she was fired, and they all became big hits. But Lyne didn’t sweat it for long: “Stewing over things is a huge time waster. You spend all your energy on either getting back your job or explaining how it wasn’t your fault. It’s never attractive.”

With that experience now firmly in her rearview, Lyne is employing both her business and creative sides as CEO of the cult luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe. Ahead of her appearance with other women in tech and media at Mediabistro Circus, the resilient leader spoke with us about breaking the glass ceiling on and off the tube.

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Name: Susan Lyne
Position: CEO, Gilt Groupe, New York
Resume: Began her career as managing editor of City, a San Francisco alternative weekly, then moved to the Village Voice. In 1987, founded Premiere magazine. Spent eight years at Disney/ABC, rising from head of movies and mini-series to president of the entertainment division in 2002. Joined board of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in June 2004 and named president and CEO in November ’04. Named CEO of Gilt Groupe in September 2008
Birthday: April 30, 1950
Hometown: Boston
Education: Attended University of California-Berkeley, George Washington University
Marital status: Widow. Two daughters, ages 21 and 24.
First section of the Sunday Times: Real Estate.
Favorite TV show: Glee. “It’s brilliantly executed. It’s so hard to combine a musical and a one-hour drama. I smile from the moment it starts until it’s over. I wish it was my show. It’s kind of risky. A lot of people would have run from it. I’ve downloaded every number.”
Guilty pleasure: Scrabble. “I play every day. I’m addicted to iPad Scrabble. It’s a sickness at this moment. I will tire of it, but right now I’m heartbroken because I left it at the office last night.”
Last book read: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Twitter handle: “Don’t use Twitter.”

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How do you feel about not having a college degree?

I left school ultimately because I wanted to work. It bothered my parents a lot. It bothered me much less. I always had amusing moments. When I’d work for some company and they’d want to update their website or put out a press release, they’d keep coming back to me about my education. I would say I have no degree. They would never believe me, because I was so far along in my career at that point. It was hard to imagine someone moving into a senior management position without a degree.

“I’m always more alive and happier in a startup, or a company that needs to be turned around. You have the ability to have a greater impact.”

You’ve moved from print to TV to media conglomerate to eCommerce. What are the upsides and downsides of changing industries so frequently?

The upside is that I am always learning. I can never get too comfortable in one spot, so my mind has to work that much better and harder. It’s easy to get excessively comfortable in a world you know really well. You can phone it in. You can’t do that when you’re learning a new language. I get itchy staying at the same place. I’m always more alive and happier in a startup, or a company that needs to be turned around. You have the ability to have a greater impact. I’m not necessarily the right person to move into a large, successful company.

The downside is you have to literally learn a new language with each new industry. When I first went to ABC, I didn’t really know what a rating point was. I had no idea what the rhythms of the TV season were or what 18-to-49 demos were. It was a huge learning curve. You have to learn a new culture every time, too. When I came here [Gilt Groupe], no one had an office. It was an open floor plan. For the first week, I thought, ‘There is no way I can do this. Everyone will be listening to my phone calls. There’s noise all around. I’ll never be able to concentrate.’ One or two weeks in, I was no longer hearing noises. I’d never go back.

How are sales doing at Gilt Groupe?
Our sales in 2009 were $170 million. We’re projecting $500 million for 2010. Our sample sales [every day at noon] are so popular that the system has crashed, so we keep upgrading our platform.

Are you engaged, creatively?
We put on a live show at noon, seven days a week. It’s incredibly creative to mix sales, curate sales, figure out how to describe items. What goes into each sale is hugely creative in building the brand and figuring out how to expand the category mix and draw in new members. I’m having a really good time.

Why did you leave Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia?
It seemed like the right time. I took on the job for multiple reasons. I joined the board and really fell in love with the company. It was surprisingly robust for a company that had been through a year of trauma. I thought, ‘I could really have an impact here.’ I also knew it was not something I would be doing the rest of my life.

“If you specialize too much and stay in one piece of your business — marketing or content or finance or operations — it’s significantly harder to get the leadership job.”

With women increasingly breaking into the CEO ranks, what advice do you have for those looking to reach the top?
You have to learn every part of the business you’re in. There are very few good women CEO’s who haven’t worked their way through and up the industry they’re in. If you specialize too much and stay in one piece of your business — marketing or content or finance or operations — it’s significantly harder to get the leadership job. You need to really understand most of the moving parts. I’ve worked in most of the core functional areas at some point in my career as I’ve moved through different industries. Another thing: If you can work directly under a good CEO, it’s extremely good training.

What are some of the common mistakes women make in business?
I’m not sure there’s a huge gender gap there. The mistake everyone is realizing is easy to make is not getting under the covers and asking questions deep into the company about how it works. We saw this in the financial crisis.

At ABC, you helped launch two female-driven smashes, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy. What do you think of TV’s presentation of women these days?
Most of the characters on TV are highly exaggerated. I love ‘Nurse Jackie,’ but her faults are magnified as well as her skills. I like Damages and Real Housewives of New York. Extreme characters seem to work on TV right now. It’s a different era. I just don’t think TV provides a way for women to be themselves, which it did 20 years ago.

It’s not good or bad. We go through cycles in TV, wanting realism, then wanting heightened drama. We’re definitely living through a heightened drama period. It might be because cable has raised the bar on that. It’s very hard for slower shows or less hysterical shows to get attention.

How did you deal with getting fired by ABC?

I was devastated for 24 hours. Then I decided I had to move on, and I just didn’t sweat it. You can look at something like that either as a disaster, and rage at the world, or you can look at it as the opportunity to take the summer off, which I hadn’t done since college, and choose what you want to do next. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t reacted to offers right away. [The ability to focus on the future] is genetic, I think. It can be a blessing or a curse. I rarely look back.

Do you miss anything about TV?
I miss pilot season. That’s it. I love the process of going from hearing an idea to seeing a fully-formed show, or at least the first episode, in four months. It’s a hugely creative period. So many things can go wrong. When you come out with something great, it’s pretty thrilling.

We hear that your younger daughter declined your offer to buy her a TV when she moved into her apartment. True?
Yes! She looked at me like I was from Mars. I couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to pay a cable bill. To her, a TV is an old-fashioned piece of hardware. She watches everything on her laptop.

Do you want your own company some day?
Not really. I loved every job I took, at least for a good long period of time. When I didn’t, I moved on.

Susan Lyne tackles “Business Refresh: From Media to eCommerce” in her upcoming presentation at Mediabistro Circus on May 20 in New York.

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Gail Shister is a TVNewser columnist.

If print is dead, Samir Husni has been working in a mausoleum. Running a $30,000 annual tab for his magazine collection, the issues are overflowing from his three storage units and onto his office floor and couch at the University of Mississippi, where he educates the next wave of journalists and runs the Magazine Innovation Center.

From his first comic book at age 8, Husni’s passion for print grew to the point where he was publishing a daily paper from his bedroom in Lebanon, writing his own news stories and using candle wax to imprint the ink from old newspaper images. When he set out to earn his Ph.D. in magazine journalism 30 years ago, there was no such thing. When he wanted to turn his magazine research into a book on which publications succeeded and failed, his peers said, “Didn’t you do this last year?” Husni recalls complaining to his wife, “They just don’t get it.” She said, “Why don’t you put it in a book and just send it to the industry?” He pitched the idea to Jim Autry, then president of Meredith Publishing, and he bit. Within two weeks of publication, every copy was gone, and he became a household name — as Mr. Magazine, a moniker from a student who couldn’t pronounce “Husni.” “At the end of the semester, he gave me a plaque,” says Husni. In 1989, The New York Times ran a photo of his desk in a profile story, and the name stuck. “I figured, if everybody wants to call me Mr. Magazine, so be it.”

Today he lives up to the title as the country’s preeminent magazine expert. On the eve of the 25th edition of his eponymous Guide To New Magazines, coming out in June, mediabistro.com caught up with Husni to discuss what it takes to succeed in today’s magazine marketplace and the real salvation of print (Hint: It’s not the iPad).

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Name: Samir A. Husni, aka Mr. Magazine™
Position: Director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi and Professor of Journalism
Resume: After moving to The University of Mississippi in 1984 to start the country’s first Magazine Service Journalism program, he published the first edition of Samir Husni’s Guide to New Magazines in 1986. He has consulted for almost every major magazine company in the country. Founded the Magazine Innovation Center at The University of Mississippi in 2009, where he is also a professor.
Birthday: March 8, 1953
Hometown: Oxford, Miss.
Education: Earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Texas in 1980 and a Ph.D. in journalism from The University of Missouri — Columbia in 1983.
Marital status: Married to Marie Mikael. Has three children (two daughters and one son) and one grandson
First section of the Sunday Times: Sunday Times Magazine
Favorite TV show: Sanford and Son
Guilty pleasure: “Buying lots and lots of neckties.”
Last book read: Mandela’s Way by Richard Stengel
Twitter handle: @MrMagazine. “Tweet like a bird!”

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How did you know that you wanted to focus on magazines as a career?
I was maybe eight or nine years old, back in my old country, in Lebanon, and I bought a copy of the first issue of a new magazine that just came out — and back then we didn’t differentiate between a magazine and a comic. To me everything was a magazine. So Superman came out in Arabic, and I picked up — in the early ’60s. And there were three of us who bought the magazine. Two of my friends fell in love with the, you know, with the cape and the flying and trying to jump from the window, and I fell in love with ink and paper. My parents wanted me to be a dentist. When I finished high school I said, “Mom, dad, I’m going to journalism school.”

What’s your personal branding advice for other people who want to become the go-to source in their niche?
Have a specialty and know it A to Z. [Recently,] Dan Rather came to speak to our students. I picked him up from the airport, and we were talking, and he was telling me, “You know, I read this article in this magazine I’m truly not familiar with, called Armchair General magazine.” It’s about old wars and stuff like that. And I looked at Mr. Rather and I said, “Well, what if I tell you I have the first issue of the magazine?”

You have to know — and you have to be able not to be afraid to voice your opinion. I mean if your opinion is based on facts, as long as you deliver the facts correct[ly], then people will know that it’s your opinion. I mean when I say, “I don’t like this magazine,” or “I love this magazine,” it’s not just because, oh, I didn’t feel good about it. There are reasons.

Where do you keep all of these magazines?
I have three offices that are 12×12 [feet] that I rent that have all these magazines in boxes by month. And I grew out of space from these offices… If I have a guest, I just have to move some of the magazines from the couch so they can sit down. I have now maybe a collection of maybe 26,000 first editions, volume one, number one. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to create a museum or something, because it’s the best pop culture history.

“When the Food Network Magazine first came out, I looked for what I call the seeds of addiction in that magazine, what will get you hooked so you will want more of the same.”

You said that Food Network Magazine was the most notable launch of 2009. What are some early signs that a magazine will flourish or it will fail?
The No. 1 [determinant] is finding a willing audience who is not only capable but can afford the price of your magazine. All the magazines that are actually surviving and are doing very well, they have the seeds of addiction built in them. When the Food Network Magazine first came out, I looked for what I call the seeds of addiction in that magazine, what will get you hooked so you will want more of the same. They had two major ingredients. They had food, which is, you know, everybody is addicted to eating. And then they had celebrities. And you combine the two together, and I felt, I mean they must have a winning formula.

And of course there was like three examples [Every Day with Rachael Ray, Cooking with Paula Deen, Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade] ahead of the Food Network Magazine that told me there’s an appetite in the marketplace for something like that.

The second one is how clear and concise the concept is. If you look through the pages of the Food Network, guess what? It’s either celebrities or food. It has a very specific DNA. So the more specific, the better the chances are that you are going to make it.

Is that the advice you would give somebody who wants to launch a magazine?
Definitely. From the name — you know, so many people come to me with those like whimsical names, fancy names, and I say you know what? If I am going to start a literary, political, fiction type magazine today, there’s no way on earth I am going to call it the Atlantic Monthly. Because if I launched the Atlantic Monthly today, it would be a magazine about the Atlantic Ocean.

How do you think magazine brands can meet people’s expectations digitally and end up making money from that?
We have created what I call a welfare information society. We have created this sense of entitlement that all what I care about you is just like, “Hey, read my magazine.” Somebody else will pay for it. What really bothers me more than anything else: Now you are talking about you want to charge for your magazines online. Well, how about you start charging in print? You know? Since World War II we are giving our magazines away. When I subscribe to Auto magazine for $5.00 for an entire year, or for Elle magazine for 10 bucks, or for Newsweek, which until recently was $10 for an entire year, am I really paying for the magazine?

So this whole concept of charging the customers the real price of the publication — we don’t even have it in print. I mean there’s a few exceptions, but the majority of the magazines are still being given away because we are in the business of counting customers rather than being in the business of customers who count. September 2008 happened, the economy crashed; now most of the publishers, the small publishers are starting to think, “Oh gee, we need to find a way to start charging.”

“If you are not interested in the subject matter, no matter how many bells and whistles you are going to add, it’s not going to convince you to buy it on the iPad instead of print.”

Because ad models aren’t working anymore.
Yeah. It’s not working anymore. So the Web is going to be next to impossible for anybody to pay. I ask my students, “Where do you get your information about sports?” Almost all 80 of them raised their hands and said, “ESPN.com.” I tell them next week ESPN.com is going to charge five bucks or $18 or something per month for you to get that information. Without hesitation all of them had this simple answer, “We’ll find it another way.”

What about the iPad?
The silver lining here is those iPhones and iPads and the apps, where people are now used to paying for apps, unlike the Web. I bought an iPad. I am forcing myself to love it. I mean, heck, I figured I spent $700, I better love this thing. I mean I didn’t really enjoy the magazine experience on it, like some people who were like — because, you know, if you are not interested in the subject matter, no matter how many bells and whistles you are going to add, it’s not going to convince you to buy it on the iPad instead of print. People who think the salvation of our magazine industry is going to be on an iPad or in digital delivery, they need to think twice.

At the Magazine Innovation Center, you said one of the first goals is to come up with new ways for magazine distribution. How’s that going?
We are going to have our first big event in October 20–22. We’re going to have an “ACT Experience,” which is Amplify, Clarify, and Testify. And we are going to bring a group of experts worldwide from all different countries, all different media. The goal for the first experience is going to be reimagining the future while we still have time. I will match each one of the professionals who’s coming with one student, so we’ll have like 100 students and 100 professionals, and the students will be like shadowing the professional. Then we’ll divide into four groups each of 25, whether you want to focus on distribution, whether you want to focus on printing, whether you want to focus on paper…

Do you think that these are conversations that aren’t happening now that really need to be?
If they are happening, they’re happening in a very superficial way. And if they’re happening they’re happening in sort of like this, somebody screaming, “Jump,” and we all jump.

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Blake Gernstetter is mediabistro.com’s associate editor.

Say the words “Google News” to a journalist in this age of decreasing newspaper revenues, and you’re likely to get a lot of teeth-gnashing. Interestingly, however, the site was created back in 2001 by a Google engineer with intentions any journalist could respect: Sept. 11 had just happened, and Krishna Bharat was looking for an efficient way to access a wide range of news reports on the attack.

Eight years later, Bharat is still the lead engineer of Google News (his formal title is Distinguished Research Scientist). Having grown up in India, Bharat went to Georgia Tech for his doctoral studies in the early ’90s, where he first started tinkering with ideas about how to display news online. (If you want to really geek out, check out his paper on the project here.) Today, Bharat speaks frequently on the subject of what Google is doing in the area of journalism. “Google didn’t sign up to solve the problems in the industry,” he told mediabistro.com, “but it feels itself inevitably drawn into it, partly because we are a premier access point for many people seeking information.”

mediabistro.com caught up with Bharat to learn about the origins of Google News and about the company’s other journalism-related efforts.

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Name: Krishna Bharat
Position: Founder and head of engineering for Google News
Resume: Research staff member at DEC Systems Research Center. Joined Google in 1999. Founded Google News and set up Google’s R&D operations in India. Received the World Technology Award for Media & Journalism in 2003.
Birthdate: January 7, 1970
Hometown: Bangalore, India
Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech
Marital status: Married, three children
First section of the Sunday Times: Front page
Favorite TV show: None: “[I] don’t watch TV.”
Guilty pleasure: “Researching travel destinations I may want to visit.”
Last book read: Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade
Last favorite gadget bought: iPad
Twitter handle: @krishnabharat

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Did anyone in the company ever raise concerns about Google News possibly violating copyright?
We were a search engine where people came for information. We’d show the title of a document and a small snippet and source information. From what I could see, Google News was doing the same thing, albeit without a query. The query was “Show me news.” So it didn’t strike me as any change in the model as to how Google was operating.

Eight years later, has Google News turned out the way you expected?
Initially we didn’t know how this would take off. It was a new paradigm. Trying to get people to read multiple points of view, I felt, was very important as a social good. Democracy depends on a good understanding of issues…. Whether people indeed wanted to consume news that way was a big question mark. But when we launched it, the response was tremendously good, and it has been tremendously good ever since.

The second question in my mind was: We tried this in English in the US; how is it going to work in other countries? We’ve now launched it in 60-plus editions. It is, in fact, applicable in all of these different locations. So that’s also been very satisfying.

“In order to be successful, you need to get inside the reader’s head and understand how you need to adapt your presentation to what they want.”

News organizations have generally thought they understood pretty well how people wanted to consume news. What have you learned about new ways people want to receive their news?
The news industry developed a lot of their thinking around the constraints of print and the other types of mass distribution, like TV. For example, the idea that everybody gets the same thing. The Internet has shown that everybody doesn’t have to get the same thing. In order to be successful, you need to get inside the reader’s head and understand how you need to adapt your presentation to what they want.

Online, the news experience is a mix of [four things]. First, you have to know what everyone needs to know. Then, you have to follow your personal interests. Beyond that, you also want to understand what’s popular, what the social networks are buzzing about, what are my friends suggesting to me. So the four things are: editorial “required reading,” if you will, personalized news, social recommendations, and audience popularity. Those are the four components that make up a news reading experience, and I think Google News will evolve to accommodate all of those.

What else is ahead for Google News?
Being much faster. What we discovered from FastFlip [a Google experiment launched last fall] is that when people get an opportunity to read news fast, they read a lot more. Giving you an opportunity to flip through many pages increases the probability that you will find something that you will want to read in-depth. And of course you can show ads in the previews, as well. It’s an interesting paradigm, and it has potential in the following sense: A publisher can monetize their content not just on their site, but elsewhere, by allowing people to host and preview it. It drives traffic to them, and revenue.

The other thing we need to address is how to make it easy and natural for people to pay for content and… how to make it work with search and social networks. On the one hand, you want people who have never experienced the content to discover it. On the other hand, once they become a fan, and if it’s high-quality journalism and expensive to produce, it should be convenient for them to pay for it.

“Our challenge isn’t trying to introduce the concept of payment to consumers. It’s to explain to them why this is different from everything else and worth paying for.”

A recent article in The Atlantic said you and your Google colleagues think free-versus-paid is an “empirical rather than theological matter” — that it’s not a question so much of whether people should pay, but of what works in the market. Do you think people will pay for content?
Yes. People pay for media in other settings. They pay for movies, they pay for music, they pay for magazines off the shelf. If it is high-quality content, and the billing is natural, I think they will pay. The issue is how do you make the value proposition to them, [by offering] something for which there is no obvious substitute. You’re not going to pay for one article that is just like any other article that covers the death of Michael Jackson. The brand, the quality of the journalism, the depth of insight, the look-and-feel, the experience, the infographics — all of that comes into play. Our challenge isn’t trying to introduce the concept of payment to consumers. They understand that. It’s to explain to them why this is different from everything else and worth paying for.

What’s Google doing to help publishers build paywalls?
We are looking for ways in which Google can help publishers put content behind paywalls if they choose to… There is an intersection between the world of paid content and how search engines want to operate in the future. We want to make sure that we a.) help publishers achieve what they want to achieve and b.) also are in a position to make search work with that. We’re providing one piece of technology that publishers could use to implement paywalls.

Last winter, Google road-tested its Living Stories idea with The New York Times and The Washington Post. What’s the idea behind Living Stories?
The core idea of Living Stories is to have a persistent URL for every story. It shows you the latest update up front, so you can catch up. But if you want some background, it shows you the background. If you want to look at opinion pieces on the topic, you can look at that. If you want to see images, you can look at that. You can go back in time, in a timeline view. It is a “living story” in the sense that it’s not an article that’s frozen in time. It evolves all the time. You can link to it in social media and discover it through search. When you come back, you get the latest rendition [Example: Washington Post living story on Fixing DC’s Schools.] of that same thing.

From an SEO perspective, it makes a lot of sense for the publisher — one link that people will want to link to. It also allows the investment of journalistic effort today to pay dividends not just today but in the future. We partnered with The New York Times and The Washington Post to showcase what can be done, but our longer term goal was really to have the industry involved in building Living Stories — either using our technology, which we open sourced, or building their own.

If you could wave a wand and have news organizations do three things differently than the way they do them today, what would you change?
They should realize that “value add” is something that will ultimately influence how their content [performs]. If you’re producing content that is substantially similar to what everybody else is producing, it doesn’t help. It would be nice if they specialize in ways that allow them to do an excellent job on where their core competency lies. So if you view yourself as a local paper, then that would mean investing a lot of resources on local news. If you’re a technology-focused publication, then technology is your forte. So, rather than having every publication cover everything, trying to get more focus within a publication would be a nice thing.

The second thing is that while networks have become much faster, websites have become much slower. A lot of it is because they’ve piled on media elements without realizing the consequences on download time. They should really focus on making it super-fast to load content. That’ll pay dividends in terms of how much content their users look at and often they come back.

The last thing is they should move into personalization as a way to engage and retain users. There is the news that you need to know. I don’t think we want to personalize that. And then there is all the other 500 things the site could show you. In that space, if, for example, there are certain sports you don’t follow, those sports should recede, and the ones that you do follow should come to the forefront.

I checked out your Twitter feed. You’re not a big tweeter.
I tweeted for a while and then I got tired of it. But I’m a really bad example of many things. I study the Web, I use the Web, but I don’t contribute very much to the Web, sadly speaking.

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E.B. Boyd is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco.

Just over a year ago, you might not have had the slightest idea what “I just unlocked the ‘Superstar’ badge on @foursquare!” meant. But since its launch in 2009, social media startup Foursquare has grown to nearly 1.8 million users, rolling out new products and accumulating serious cash (the company secured an additional $20 million in funding in June) along the way.

Dennis Crowley, along with Naveen Selvadurai, started the company around his kitchen table after shuttering a similar service called Dodgeball. “One of the reasons I think that Dodgeball suffered is because it wasn’t really a fun one-player experience. If you didn’t have 10 friends on it, you really weren’t getting much value out of it,” said Crowley. “So a lot of stuff we tried to build into Foursquare from the very beginning was about [exploring] the city by yourself. There’s a reason to check in beyond just sharing it with your friends.” Eventually the pair got out of the kitchen and made their first hire, and today they have a team of 27 that barely fits into the office. “We’ve been waiting for years and years to be able to do interesting things with mobile phones in the location space, and it feels like all the pieces are finally lined up to make those things happen.”

WebNewser editor Alex Weprin caught up with Crowley to talk about how he’s grown Foursquare and what’s next for the company.

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Name: Dennis Crowley
Position: Co-founder and CEO of Foursquare
Resume: Started out as a researcher for Jupiter Communications before joining mobile app provider Vindigo as a product developer in 2000. In 2003, worked on MTV’s wireless product development side, and held stints at PacManhattan and ConQwest 2004. In 2004, he founded Dodgeball.com, one of the first mobile location-based services. It was acquired by Google in May 2005; Crowley left in 2007 and Google shuttered Dodgeball in 2009. Crowley founded Foursquare in January of that year.
Birthdate: June 19
Hometown: Medway, Massachusetts
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Newhouse School at Syracuse University; master’s degree, New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Sunday Styles
Favorite TV show: The Neistat Brothers
Guilty pleasure: Peanut M&Ms, Adidas ZX sneakers
Last book(s) read: The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick, and Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, by Ernst Malmsten, Erik Portanger, and Charles Drazin.
Twitter handle: @dens

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[Foursquare] struck a couple of deals with television networks, Bravo and C-SPAN — is that a mutually promotional partnership that benefits each of you, or do you think it can actually drive revenue at some point?
We don’t disclose the terms of the deal. Some of them are generating revenue, and some of them are just interesting and exploratory. A lot of it is an experimentation to see if we get media properties and different media brands on Foursquare, are they seeing some benefit in terms of leaving different pieces of content around [the] real world for other users to discover? So every deal that we do is a little bit different. We’re inching towards a strategy that works for everyone.

How do you handle suggestions from users, like if someone has an idea for a badge?
We built a forum a while ago, almost like a year ago. We still go through it pretty regularly, maybe once or twice a month. And now we’re structured to the point that we have these badge meetings that go on twice every week, and occasionally we’ll go through the queue and pull out four or five good ideas and try to push those out.

“We’re doing a lot of things to explore and experiment in [the location-based] space to try to tease out the things that are going to be most interesting to venues, but a lot of value to users, too.”

Do you think Silicon Valley has more people willing to fund ventures compared to New York?
Yeah, I think that might have been the case before. I know when Alex [Rainert] and I were trying to raise financing for Dodgeball back in 2004, we had a really tough time because there really wasn’t a strong angel network here in New York, especially for tech startups. And even when Naveen and I were trying to raise financing really just last year, it was a little bit more difficult. But I think even since that process, a lot of other firms have opened up shops in New York. There’s definitely a resurgence of the New York tech scene, and I think you’re seeing that and also in the presence of other investors here, too.

What’s the best business advice that you’ve ever received?
Well I think it goes back to what my mom used to say, way back in the day, because I never believed it. She was like, “If you keep working on the stuff that you really love and you’re really passionate about, then everything else will just kind of work out.” When I was like 20 and 22, it didn’t really make much sense, but with these projects, even Foursquare — I’ve been hammering on some of these issues or some of these questions for about 10 years, and it seems like her advice is generally pretty good now.

What advice would you give to an entrepreneur?
I think it’s being persistent with what you’re trying to do. I always encourage people to try and go out and team up with folks who can help them build a prototype. It’s funny, I go to these parties or conferences, and people will pitch me these ideas that they have: “What do you think? Isn’t this great? Can I raise financing on this?” And you know, I think all those are good and interesting ideas and stories, but it’s really difficult to take an idea and execute on top of it. So I really encourage people to team up with different groups of people or different groups of skill sets and really try to get something off the ground.

Where do you think the biggest revenue opportunities are in the location-based social space?
Location’s pretty broad, so I guess it depends on what you’re tackling. For the stuff we’re looking at ,I think there’s really good opportunities in connecting users with local businesses. We’re doing a lot of things to explore and experiment in that space to try to tease out the things that are going to be most interesting to venues, but a lot of value to users, too.

Is there any concern at Foursquare about Facebook launching its own location-based service?
We’ve spawned a lot of different competitors, and we definitely look at what Twitter and Facebook are doing. We’re really interested in the way that they’re approaching location, too. I don’t really have a lot of insight into what those guys are launching, but we look forward to seeing what it looks like when it does come out, and if there’s ways that we can work together with them.

“We’ve been waiting for years and years to be able to do interesting things with mobile phones in the location space, and it feels like all the pieces are finally lined up to make those things happen.”

What do you think Foursquare will look like in, say, five years?
I don’t know. It’s funny because we have a road map that could take us a couple of years. But again, you look at even four years ago the iPhone wasn’t out, and look at how much things are even going to change just with iPhone 4 coming out and all these background location tasks suddenly being available. It’s hard to really gauge, but we’ve been waiting for years and years to be able to interesting things with mobile phones in the location space, and it feels like all the pieces are finally lined up to make those things happen.

What’s a typical day at Foursquare like?
We’ve got this one floor in the Village Voice building, and there’s three different companies there, and there’s just no more room. Like, you walk in and there’s absolutely no more room. That’s after we moved about 10 people downstairs. There’s a lot of shuffling back and forth, people moving around trying to find a conference room, trying to find a place to sit, trying to find a place to work. It’s pretty hustling and bustling. A lot of people come in for their first time and take a look, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you guys actually work here.”

I probably get in around 9:00 or 9:30, and it’s really running from meeting to meeting and trying to catch up with as many people in our office as possible so I have a general idea of what’s going on. And then usually speaking to some brands and speaking to some potential partners that we’re doing, either media companies or mobile companies. It’s not a lot of coding these days. It’s a lot of coordinating and just communicating with people.

How do you and Naveen [Selvadurai, co-founder] work together?
We sit next to each other. He’s managing the client team, and I’m running around to get a bird’s eye view of everything that’s going on. A lot of what I’m doing is helping Alex [Rainert, chief product officer] out on trying to organize and get a lot of the product stuff up and running. And a lot of that touches what Naveen is doing on the client team. So we work pretty closely but not every single day together.

What mobile devices do you use?
I have an iPhone — not the new one, the old one.

There’s a bunch of them laying about in the office. We occasionally do this thing where someone will trade in their preferred phone and take out a Blackberry for a couple of days or take out the Android for a couple of days just so we can get a feel what it’s like to exist in one of these other apps.

What places are you mayor of?
I think I’m only mayor of one. It’s Scratcher, which is the bar across the street from our office. I’m pretty proud of that one because there’s a lot of people checking in there all of the time, and I’m still holding down the fort. I used to have a ton of them, including the Chinese food restaurant in my suburban Boston town, and someone took that away from me a couple of months ago. I don’t know who it was, but that’s a sign that the service is growing.

Tune in to our Media Beat video interview with Dennis Crowley airing next week on WebNewser to hear his take on Silicon Valley startup culture vs. New York’s, how Foursquare handles celebrity users, and his tips for media entrepreneurs.

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Blake Gernstetter is mediabistro.com’s associate editor.