“Pack your knives and go.” Gail Simmons did just that — and hasn’t stopped since. Fresh from college, all she wanted was to be a food writer. But the Toronto media scene was lacking, so she packed up and headed to New York. Her ambition propelled her through culinary school, two grueling kitchen jobs, a ‘stars aligning’ stint as food critic Jeffrey Steingarten’s assistant, and a job handling events and PR for chef Daniel Boulud — and no regular bylines. But when her behind-the-camera experience with Boulud helped her land a role at Food & Wine back in 2004, she couldn’t have anticipated the next course: a screen test and a plane ticket to San Francisco to judge the first season of soon-to-be Bravo sensation Top Chef.

Fast forward a few years, and Simmons is a household name and host of her own show, Top Chef: Just Desserts. Ahead of tonight’s season finale, we caught up with Simmons to discuss whether every magazine needs a TV presence to compete, her plans to pen a book, and her tips for a stress-free Thanksgiving.

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Name: Gail Simmons
Position: Host, Top Chef: Just Desserts; special projects manager at Food & Wine
Resume: Got her start as an intern for Toronto Life, then wrote for a newspaper in Toronto before moving to New York to attend culinary school. Worked as a commis at Le Cirque 2000 and Vong. Served as food critic Jeffrey Steingarten’s assistant for two years, through whom she met chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud. Worked as Boulud’s special events manager for almost three years. Joined Food & Wine in 2004 as special projects manager. Became a judge on season one of Top Chef, and began hosting Top Chef: Just Desserts in 2010.
Birthday: May 19
Hometown: Toronto, Canada
Education: McGill University in Montreal; the Institute of Culinary Education (formerly The Peter Kump New York Cooking School)
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: “I would say the Style section. But, really the Wednesday Times is more important to me.”
Favorite TV show: 30 Rock
Last book read: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. “The book I’m reading now is called The Last Fish Tale by Mark Kurlansky.”
Guilty pleasure: Spicy chicken wings. “In New York, when I’m having a craving, the best I have found are at this place Wogie’s.”
Twitter handle: @GailSimmons

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What do you think makes a good food writer?
It’s all about the research. If you do your research really well, it will sort of write itself. It’s not just about just going to the library, but research means tasting, and tasting, and tasting again. And trying, and learning, and being adventurous, and keeping your eyes and ears open, and knowing both sides of an argument, and retasting. And then retasting again. I don’t think that anyone can write about food without knowing about food. I’m not saying that there’s one way to become a food writer. There are so many ways, especially in this amazing age of digital technology, and so many ways to go about a job, or getting a job. But you have to understand food beyond just liking to eat.

How has your role at the magazine evolved since the franchise with Top Chef has really taken off?
It’s totally changed in every way. When I first started Top Chef, my role at the magazine really was running the event department, which means I was directing the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. After three or four seasons of juggling both the Classic and leaving for large periods of time to film Top Chef, we realized that that didn’t make much sense.
My role at Food & Wine has really become more of an ambassador for the magazine because Top Chef in all of its incarnations takes up so much of my time. But I still do a lot of other appearances for Food & Wine. I do a lot more cooking demos and on-camera stuff for them, not just for Top Chef but the Today show, The Early Show. I work really closely with the editors on a number of content projects. I try to write a little bit for Food & Wine, as much as I can and time allows.

“You can’t just live on a piece of paper, just like a chef can’t just live behind a kitchen door anymore. To really expand, you need to be multi-dimensional.”

Do you think that magazine brands now need to have a TV presence to compete?
I don’t think they need it; there are certainly many that don’t. No matter what your brand is, whether it’s a magazine brand, whether it’s a restaurant brand, whether it’s a product brand, I don’t think that in this moment you can be two-dimensional in any way. You can’t just live on a piece of paper, just like a chef can’t just live behind a kitchen door anymore. To really expand, you need to be multi-dimensional. Food & Wine isn’t just a magazine anymore, it’s a brand. Obviously there’s our big TV component, and we’ve been so grateful for that relationship with Bravo, and how well that’s translated.

Bravo really was the first network that really successfully, at least as far as I can remember, integrated magazines into the television experience in a really organic way that gave Bravo credibility and gave the magazine credibility and didn’t feel forced. Food & Wine, from a publishing standpoint, had to become not just two dimensional, not just three-dimensional by adding that TV layer, but four, five, six-dimensional in that now there also needs to be an incredibly strong online presence, an incredibly strong iPad application, which we just launched and we’re super proud of.

Bravo puts a lot of effort into engaging all of its fans on Twitter. How do you use it to connect with your audience, to promote your projects?
It’s an amazing tool to have this live, real-time experience with people who are looking to you for information, people who are interested in you. And it’s so reciprocal, right? Because there’s people that follow me but there’s also people I’m following, and I am following all of these people for the same reason that people are following me. My kind of test is, well, what do I want to know from my favorite people who I follow? And how can I give people who follow me that experience? I really try to only use it as a tool to connect with people who aren’t living in New York City, necessarily, and want to know like, “What’s Gail doing?” I give information I think is relevant and interesting, and obviously if that means I’m going to be making a public appearance I want people to know because if they want to join me, I want to have them there. If I am in an article that I think is relevant, or if I’m doing some kind of event or a charity, if I have a product or a brand. Ultimately I’m hoping to do a book.

Like a memoir?
Well, I can’t really discuss it yet. We’re just at the beginning of figuring that out, and so obviously — if people are looking for information from me in the short format, I hope that they’ll want to know more in the long form when that comes out.

Let’s talk about Top Chef: Just Desserts. What was going through your mind when you landed your own show?
We just felt like the time was right. We’d had so much response from our viewers and from pastry chefs coming to us saying, “When are you going to let pastry chefs show people how to make a good dessert, for once?” We were all talking about it, and Bravo said, “We’d like you to think about hosting it.” It just seemed like the right progression for me, too, because after so many seasons of doing Top Chef, my role in the show had been well established, and I’ve worked really hard at creating for myself a voice that the audience can trust; a voice that’s somewhere between our viewer and Tom [Colicchio], that translates the kitchen experience for every person who isn’t a professional.

“Everybody who applies for a job with me has their own food blog. That shows they are committed and interested, but how do you differentiate between 65 food blogs? You need to have a point of view.”

I wanted a challenge, and it was just a perfect way to move to the next step and to try hosting, but hosting in a way that for me, felt really safe. Because it was the brand I knew, the show I loved, same format, same producers, and it was for Bravo, who have basically become my roommates. I knew I had support, but that I also could go into a new role with a new formula, with a new show that I could also make my own.

So many of the competitive reality shows want contestants to showcase their personality. What are your tips for someone who wants to show their personality through their work?
You need to have a point of differentiation. What makes you unique, especially because we are so saturated in the media world with content. Everybody who applies for a job with me has their own food blog. That shows they are committed and interested, but how do you differentiate between 65 food blogs? You need to have a point of view, but that point of view also has to be open to other people’s experiences and open to you learning every day, and you can’t hold too tight, just like a chef on the show. When chefs on Top Chef hold on too tight to an idea and aren’t able to adapt that concept, ultimately it always fails, because if they don’t execute it perfectly, and they’re not able to adapt it to the specific challenge, their dish is going to fail.

Is there a season two lined up for Just Desserts

I do not know that; that is a question for Bravo. So if you get the answer, will you let me know?

If there is a season two, was there anything that you would change about your approach? Or are you totally satisfied seeing yourself on TV?
I blog about the episodes and I work with Bravo on a lot of content for [them], so I certainly have to see them. As much as I would be happy not watching them sometimes, I’m not one of those people who can say, “Oh, I never watch myself.” I don’t have that choice. And I can get nitpick-y, but from that kind of macro level, there’s not much I would change. I’m really proud of [the show], I’m so proud of the characters, and that’s the X factor in any reality show: the casting. We really struck gold.

What are your tips for a stress-free Thanksgiving?
Full disclosure: I’m Canadian, so I haven’t been celebrating American Thanksgiving all of my life, but it is certainly my favorite adopted holiday. Stress-free is being organized. That includes, you know, days before plotting out how many dishes you’re going to need, what the menu is, where is it coming from, buying your ingredients a day or two in advance if you can so that you know you have it, so that the day there’s no disasters because you run out of limes and all of the stores are closed. And asking for help; I recently overcame that fear. I was one of those people who entertain at home and want to do everything myself. Then you’re spending your whole day in the kitchen, and you miss out on what the experience of Thanksgiving actually is, which is being with all the people who you are thankful for in your life.

NEXT >> Hey, How’d You Use Social Media to Crowdsource A Cookbook, Food52?

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By Blake Gernstetter.

Although eBooks were once thought of as just a passing fad, today there’s nothing that has created more controversy and praise in book publishing. Even other industries are beginning to take notice of the format’s possibilities, looking to it as an opportunity to expand their brands and profits.

One such visionary is CSI creator Anthony Zuiker. His latest book, Dark Prophecy: Level 26, is his second foray into what he is calling the digi-novel — a fusion of interactive and traditional reading. By allowing readers to follow the tome’s plot through film, social media, mobile apps, and the traditional printed page, Zuiker hopes to reach the “ultra level of convergence in entertainment.” Here, the creator of the biggest franchise in television history and former Las Vegas tram operator explains how and why he did it.

What gave you the idea to expand your brand from television to novels?
During the writer’s strike, we had some downtime. I always loved the publishing business and so I decided to create Dark Prophecy as a digi-novel. I’ve been so infatuated with technology and I want to incorporate publishing, motion pictures and the social communities wrapped into one experience in terms of the ultra level of convergence in entertainment. So, with the digi-novel there are a couple of things I wanted to accomplish: 1) to be able to read a book cover-to-cover to maintain the traditional experience; 2) With every 25 pages that you read, you would have an option to log into a website, enter a code, and watch a piece of the motion picture footage to sort of bridge you from one chapter to another. There’s about 20 of those in book one; and 3) When it was over with, you’d be able to join the Level26.com social community to have direct access to Anthony Zuiker and have extra content in blogs, profile pages and etc. for levels of engagement.

Your first digi-novel in this trilogy was Dark Origins. How well did that do and what did you learn from the experience?
We made some mistakes for Book One because it was so new, we were trailblazing. We had a very masculine graphic novel cover, which didn’t help things. We had the first bridge more like a snuff film, which is much too dark and had a lot of sexual deviance in the book, which was not really up the alley of my CSI audience. And we began to sit back and go, “Let’s try to right these wrongs because we really want to figure out what the rhythm is for the digi-novel experience.” We also made it inept for the iTouch and iPhone, and I feel like when you have to put down a book you’re reading to log in, enter a code and watch the bridge, that’s somewhat of a clumsy experience. I didn’t want to take the book out of the reader’s hands.

So, how is this new eBook a different experience than the first?
With Dark Prophecy, we decided to make some major changes to try to figure out the rhythm of the digi-novel that I created in that it has a much more commercial cover, [and] the merit of it is much more protagonist-based — it’s really the coming out party for my hero, Steve Dark, who is a special part of the CSI group, which deals with the world’s worst crimes. We shot a one-hour motion picture that can be watched and enjoyed separately from the book so they didn’t fight each other in the narrative. And we’re able to have CSI, for the TV show, extract a villain from Book One and put that villain in the television episode and have the storyline continue in Dark Prophecy which drops the same day. So, it’s like the ultimate cross platform of the television/publishing experience.

How did you crack Hollywood’s notoriously closed doors without any family or personal connections?
Well, this is true. I’m an only child, so I have no known ties with Hollywood. They say all great things happen by accident. I was writing monologues for a friend in college for forensic speech. He in turn took those and auditioned in Hollywood trying to be an actor. And when Jenny Delaney, who was a literary agent at William Morris, happened to ask, “Who wrote those monologues?” he said, “a friend of mine, Anthony.” She called me up and said, “If you can write me a screenplay, I’ll represent you,” which in my naive opinion meant that if I wrote something she could sell it. I wrote a movie called The Runner, which she ultimately did not represent but it did circle around town. It caught the eyes of my manager, Margaret Riley, and I signed with CAA based on one script. There is no one way into the business. There are tons of spotters out here who are looking for fresh material, fresh faces.

What was your career path like from screenwriter to creator of your own series?
Well, my manager had the smarts to convince me to take lesser money on a smaller project because she said if I did a horror sequel, I’d end up being out of the business in three years. You can’t really expect to spread your wings as a literary giant if you’re doing cheesy horror films. Fast forward to 18 months later and [the smaller project] never got made, but it did end up on the desk of Jerry Bruckheimer. As timing would have it, he was trying to start his television company. He liked the writing. He liked the voice. He called me in. I pitched him CSI, and we’ve turned out as the biggest franchise in TV history.

You have expanded CSI to include Miami and New York. What other spinoffs can we expect?
There’s no spinoff plan right now. You know, there was a rumor about the movie but again, it’s very complicated. However, my company sold a bodyguard show about Kimberly Penn, the famous female bodyguard for Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Gates, and Mick Jagger. Then, we’re working with CBS on four or five more great shows. So, I’m sort of doing double-duty as a developer of our company on top of the fact that I’m on CSI full-time, while launching a book, a father of three and a husband and talking with you. It’s kind of my complicated lifestyle.

You famously worked a day job as a tram operator in a Las Vegas casino before creating CSI. What advice do you have for aspiring writers who are juggling a day job while pursuing their dreams?
You have to find a way into the castle. You know, I think that when I drove a tram back and forth, there was a part of me that was angry, part of me that was frustrated, part of me that was thinking, “What did I do in my life to deserve all this?” There I was working for $8 an hour and I had two college degrees and worked in a tram. There’s so many talented people out there that can do what I have done on CSI, if given the opportunity. There are spotters in this town that are looking for fresh faces, the fresh producer, you know, the unique story teller. So, pursue the dream and stay the course, ’cause once you give up, it’s over.

What is your writing process like?
It’s a lonely process. In terms of me writing a pilot, it’s me sometimes sitting in a deli pathetically from 9 to 4 ordering a ton of coffee so they don’t kick me out of there, and you know, taking 10-minute breaks every four hours. You know, I laugh ’cause I see myself and my sweats with cold coffee and ice cold eggs at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica, trying to figure out what the next scene is going to be. It’s really a non-glamorous lonely Hollywood scenario, but that’s just how it is.

What do you think about the claim that shows like CSI negatively affect the real life police process?
Have we done things in the show before that let out the police secrets? Yeah, sure. But for the most part the show becomes bigger than us, and I can’t even tell you the ratio of people that have gone on to graduate with PhD’s and graduate study degrees in criminal justice and criminal science. I have been asked about what the perfect crime is and I have a couple of ideas but they’re not really sound because it’s just really and virtually impossible to get away with anything.

Anthony Zuiker’s Tips for Aspiring TV Writers

1. Have some level of talent.

2. Be able to sell your vision verbally through pitching before you get to the written word.

3. Know how to execute your ideas.

4. Go to New York and Los Angeles to get in front of the decision makers. You have to then try to convince them that your piece of material can be profitable and is worth fighting for.

5. Do your research. There’s plenty of story points that bailed me out because of research. I’m not that creative to make things up, so thorough research and creative leads are pretty much the bread and butter of how I have survived in the business, besides having a unique voice.

NEXT >> Making an eBook: Getting Started

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Jeff Rivera is the author of Forever My Lady (Grand Central) and a GalleyCat contributor.

AOL has some lofty goals for its expansion into content creation, including becoming the number one employer of journalists. A large part of this plan involves the growth of Patch, its network of community-focused sites. By year’s end, the company expects Patch to have spawned into 500 towns across the nation.

But with this quick growth has come criticism as local bloggers question the site’s editorial oversight, while some Patch editors have complained about long hours. Then, throw in a couple plagiarism complaints for fun and dumping on the set of community sites has almost become in vogue. That hasn’t forced Patch editor-in-chief Brian Farnham to pull off the breaks, and, in fact, he seems to take the small setbacks in stride. After all, he’s just dealing with issues established media companies handle everyday. At least, that’s how he likes to look at it.

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Name: Brian Farnham
Position: Editor-in-chief of Patch
Resume: Started out as a fact-checker and writer for New York. A year later, joined Sidewalk.com, Microsoft’s online city guide, to write movie and tech reviews and to edit the book review section. Freelanced for New York publications and wrote a book about iWon.com, a site that received $100 million in funding from CBS. Moved back to print in 2000 as associate editor for Details; promoted to deputy editor four years later. Named editor-in-chief of Time Out New York in 2006 and editor-in-chief of Patch in 2008.
Birthdate: Sept. 14, 1971
Hometown: New York, NY
Education: AB, Bowdoin College; MFA, Columbia University
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: “I read it online or iPhone, so no section per se; [I] usually start with Frank Rich.”
Favorite TV show: Modern Family
Guilty pleasure: Apocalyptic sci-fi novels
Last book read: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Twitter handle: @brifar

What’s it like managing such a large network?
It’s a combination of awesome and intimidating. The growth that we’re experiencing right now is phenomenal. We’re hiring about 30 people a week to hit our goal of 500 plus markets by the end of the year. And, obviously, most of those are journalists — the editors that we are hiring to run these sites. So, given the recent events in the industry and all the news and reality of the economic downturns, but also newspaper woes and people losing their jobs or taking buyouts, it’s obviously incredibly gratifying to be able to be apart of something that’s growing that industry. So it has kind of been a thrilling ride so far.

How much interaction do you have with the community editors Patch currently has?
Well, in the early days I had a lot, right. We had a handful of sites, and it was pretty much me and a couple other people managing them, so I was very hands-on, and loved that. And then as we grew, I became less and less hands-on, but that was always the plan. The way we are structured is we hire regional editors who oversee 12 local editors, which is what we call them. So we have a local editor, [and] then there’s a regional editor managing 12 of those bundled together. And then just under me, we have four editorial directors who oversee large swaths of the country. So everything kind of rolls up to them, and then to me. I have contact with them through a variety of calls and meetings that we do.

“All of our content is produced locally, right, so it’s in no way a farm. It’s really a network of independent media outlets.”

Do you welcome the title “content farm?”
No, I don’t think it applies to us at all. Content farm generally applies to the sites that, well, the mainly the ones that have big networks of disaggregated freelancers who sort of opted in to be tapped when things are needed. We’re not that at all. All of our content is produced locally, right, so it’s in no way a farm. It’s really a network of independent media outlets is the best way to think about it.

Patch has come under fire for its lack of editorial oversight for unseasoned journalists. What’s your response to those cries?
Yeah, you know I think that is kind of an unfortunate stereotype really of our people. We have now, a couple hundred editors. The average experience for the editors is nine years of journalism experience. So it’s not as if everyone is right out of school. I think those things have been overstated a bit. Yes, there have been this and that incident, but not as many as I think some of the echoing in the blogosphere makes it seem like. Every newspaper or media company that deals with journalism and human beings deals with mistakes at some point. The real thing is how quickly you respond to those and correct them and how transparent you are about them. So that’s what we are really concentrating on.

Are the stories fact-checked before they run, or do the writers work on an honor system?
They are fact-checked by the reporter or editor. So any freelancer who writes for us, the editor is editing that copy. That’s not going live without someone seeing it. And when the editor writes something, usually the regional editor is looking at it beforehand again, but not always. But the editors all know to fact-check their own work.

How does Patch get implanted in a new community?
The most important I’d say, just because it’s sort of the first and most powerful, is whenever we launch a site, we send a team in — a three-person team of freelancers, and the local editor is actually a part of that. What they’re doing is building up our directory. We go around to every organization, every business, every park and government agency and we hand-collect that data. We put it into structured fields. We take numerous photographs. And then we build up that database and it becomes a really rich yellow pages for us.

“The local editors are all basically chief marketing officers of their sites. They are the ones figuring out how to promote it day-to-day.”

But then after the launch… We just do a lot of grassroots outreach of the editor constantly. The local editors are all basically chief marketing officers of their sites. They are the ones figuring out how to promote it day-to-day. So we help them with the overall strategy, but they are really the ones out there pounding the pavement, handing out flyers, and just meeting everyone they can.

How do you manage your relationships with the local blogosphere, especially since you and the other top editors are spread so thin?
We tell everyone that the local editors are masters of their domain. So that includes the content and the markets themselves and the people in that ecosystem, whether they be bloggers or the weekly newspaper, radio station or whatever. That means that we want them to sit down with the bloggers and share content and figure out ways to work together. We look at it as we are coming into a new market, and we are not going to assume we know more than [the local people] do or that we are bigger or better experts for that community than they are. We have an open linking policy if we didn’t get something we want to point our users to it, and hopefully other sites want to do the same.

In light of the plagiarism accusations, what guidelines or rules has Patch put in place to avoid them?
We put a number of rules in place before. We definitely had a zero tolerance policy for plagiarism. Everyone knows what not to do. I think, the incident you are referring to, one was actually a freelancer; it wasn’t a full-time editor. And you know, the other was an unfortunate mistake. It was really kind of, I’ll say understandable just because of the way sometimes [things] happen online where you will have a photo that in this particular instance was actually a public domain photo. It was a police mug shot, and you know it was definitely the wrong thing to do to take it. It shouldn’t have happened, but you know, I think there is a lot of gray area online, I’m not saying that this is an excuse, it’s something you have to navigate. But these things, every media company in the world, again, deals with these mistakes, and it’s something you see from time to time. And the best you can do is use them as lessons, and remind people what the standards are, and move on.

Patch has received a lot of heat from the blogosphere regarding the pay and hours of community editors. But why would a journalist want to work at Patch, and what’s there to like about the gig?
I think there’s a lot to like. I don’t want to speak for all the editors, but having talked to a number of them, I know that one thing I hear is first it’s ownership. It is really a chance to sort of run your own ship. And a lot love that. And the other thing is the flexible schedule. We try to structure the jobs so that people can find the time they need to take off whenever they need it, and we certainly put a lot of things in place to help people, whether it’s a freelance budget so they can pay people to help them… You are getting a site, and it’s your job to fill it. And we are not telling people what they should write about. In fact, we always say, ‘You are the local expert, you tell us.’ And I think the majority of our editors really get that. They really love the autonomy that they are given. They’re also marketing, and they’re also learning to sort of run this small business to some degree. So there’s many aspects of it that they can sink their teeth into. I think it makes it, obviously, fast moving, but it’s also really interesting.

Besides being local, what is Patch’s editorial niche?
Our philosophy is that we are not a news site. We are really a community site that’s got news and information and that the entire purpose is to digitize small communities and to give them experience online that people in bigger cities kind of take for granted. I figure niche, if anything, is really creating a complete hopefully comprehensive experience of the community online in a way that that community would recognize and doesn’t feel like it’s being served from somewhere else.

NEXT >> Relocating For Your Career

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Ryan Derousseau is a freelance writer in New York City, You can find him on Twitter at @ryanderous.

When Janet Evanovich left her publisher of 15 years in July, word in the book biz was that she inked a new deal with Random House‘s Ballantine Bantam Dell for a cool $50 million. Although the author denies the reports about her huge payday, the truth is, her success as a novelist is already solidified: 45 books, millions of fans, and a Katherine Heigl movie based on her title One for the Money in the works. The New York Times also recently reported that Evanovich made $16 million in 2009 alone.

But Evanovich isn’t in it for the money or the fame. The now bestselling author once languished in obscurity as a struggling romance writer for a decade, because, she says, she was unwilling to place business and financial needs over her craft. “I had the attitude that you create art for yourself and if someone else sees something in that, that’s fabulous,” she said. “But after 10 years, it wasn’t getting me anywhere and it probably wasn’t who I was. At some point you realize you could be the most fabulous writer in the world, but if no one is reading it, it isn’t any fun.”

With her latest release Wicked Appetite now in stores, Evanovich discusses with
mediabistro.com the challenges of being a woman in the business, her new co-author program and why she feels the media ‘lies’ about her.

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Name: Janet Evanovich
Position: Author
Resume: Began her career writing romance novels under a pseudonym after failing to sell her first three novels. Gained international fame writing the Stephanie Plum mystery series, with 16 landing on The New York Times bestsellers list. Sold the movie rights to the first title in the series for $1 million.
Birthday: April 22, 1943
Hometown: South River, NJ
Education: BA from Douglass College
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: Doesn’t read The New York Times
Favorite TV show: Bobby Flay’s Throwdown
Guilty pleasure: Mac ‘n’ cheese
Last book read: A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O’Reilly
Twitter handle: Doesn’t use Twitter

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With the eBook revolution threatening to overtake print books permanently, what are your thoughts about how this could affect your revenue?
Yeah, I love eBooks. I think they’re great, and I’m not sure how they are going to affect my revenue. I’m not sure anybody knows. I think we’re going to have to wait and see how it shakes out. What I know is that they are not going to go away. The kids have come up being so comfortable on the screen, and now even all ages are buying into the Kindle and iPad. eBooks are here to stay. I think that anything that expands the market, anything that encourages people to read, anything that enhances the reading experience, makes it easier, makes it cheaper, makes it more interesting — fabulous, I just love it. I think we haven’t even seen the beginning of eBooks. All kinds of great things are going to come out of it.

“I go to NASCAR races, and I hang out with my crazy relatives, and I prowl South Beach. I think that stuff kind of gets moving around in your head and helps to give you new ideas.”

Today’s authors stand to make dramatically more income by self-publishing and publishing directly on formats such as Amazon’s Kindle. Have you given any thought to doing the same for your future titles?
Actually, I have given it some thought, and then I’ve said, “What? Are you nuts?” It’s not that simple. I think that there are a lot of people out there self-publishing and who have the ability to get their work out now because of the Internet, but it has lots of limitations: distribution, publicity, marketing. There are just many, many components that for me, at least at my level, just don’t work for me. I am actually really happy to have help from a publisher. It’s enough to keep my ass in the chair and keep writing without taking on that also. And I mean, I have my whole family working for me and they’re all doing their own jobs, and I can’t imagine one more job added to the list.

You’ve written somewhere close to 45 books, some under a pseudonym. How do you keep your writing fresh?
I think that you have to continue to live and get new experiences that relate to the people you are writing about. I spend a lot of time in bars and shopping centers, and I go to NASCAR races, and I hang out with my crazy relatives, and I prowl South Beach. I think that stuff kind of gets moving around in your head and helps to give you new ideas. I have a family, we are very close, we are like a little herd. We all live together within three minutes of each other, and when I am running out of ideas, somebody always has one.

You recently switched publishing houses from St. Martin’s to Random House. What were your former publishers not providing that you felt your new publisher will be able to?
Well, I don’t know. We are going to wait and see, aren’t we? I think that sometimes… just a change is refreshing. I loved St. Martin’s; I could not say anything bad about St. Martin’s. My editor, my publicist, my publisher are all my best friends and when I go into New York, it’s girls’ night out. We just loved each other, and I still do. I think they did a fabulous job for me, but we had some differences about moving forward, about the projects that I felt very strongly about in the future, and that really was not so much a matter of money, it was a matter of a vision. I just had a slightly different vision than St. Martin’s. So, I just felt like maybe I needed a change, maybe I needed some new ideas. Sometimes you are the new girl on the block, and there is just a lot of enthusiasm and there’s a lot of energy. You all of a sudden have this rush to do something fabulous.

“If you are a guy and you make a lot of money, you are a success. If you are a woman and you make a lot of money, you are a bitch.”

Reports in media had you asking for more than $50 million for your next deal. For the record, is that what your new publishers gave you and how were you able to justify such a high asking price?
Yeah, I think the word was “demanding”, and it was not true, I don’t know where that figure came from. I have no clue, but that was not accurate. Now, having said that, I do make a decent amount of money, but not only was that not where the negotiations were stalling but the figure was wrong. Possibly at some point that was said in jest and floated out there. But no, it was not a serious accurate figure. Everybody lies about that. You can’t put too much stock in any of those numbers that come out of that. Either they are inflated or they are lessened, because you know if you are a guy and you make a lot of money, you are a success. If you are a woman and you make a lot of money, you are a bitch.

You’ve made the ‘Janet Evanovich’ brand very much a family affair, with key members of your family, such as your son, acting on your behalf. How do you feel your family has better served you over those who are not blood-related?
First of all they are very, very talented. They are very bright and we’re all very different. My son is brilliant, he is our finance officer. He also is my agent now. He is an amazing negotiator, he’s just the nicest guy but very, very smart and Peter just gets along with everybody. He can ease you into a contract and everybody’s happy with it. He also helps edit the books for me, and then my daughter is a little bit more on the other half of the brain. She graduated as a film and photography major and then came on board and created our website. Alex does all of that for me. She sits on top of the co-author program. She has an editor working under her, but she’s the bottom line person for that.

Tell us more about this co-author program.
Several years ago I did some co-authored books with Charlotte Hughes; then Charlotte decided that she wanted to go off on her own and the program kind of died out. Then, last year we realized that we were missing the co-author program. We would like to have, maybe three or four co-authors that we’re working with and bringing them out in hard cover. It’s one of those situations that if you find the right person, everybody wins. There are tons of really good writers out there, but for one reason or another, they just have not had the support that allowed them to build audiences. So, for these writers out there, it gives them an opportunity to get a much larger market. If somebody’s interested in being part of our co-author program, they should contact my son, Peter Evanovich or they can send me a letter. My post office box is on all my book covers.

Some have complained that the Stephanie Plum series just rehashes the same plots over and over. What do you say to those naysayers?
I ignore them. I think, first of all, you never go on Amazon and read the reviews because they’re demoralizing, and I try to do the best that I can everyday. And sometimes I feel like I write better books than other times; that’s just the way it goes, and sometimes it is true that the books are similar. Some people like it because it meets their expectations, some people get tired of them. If you’re one of those people who are tired of them, you should stop reading them, move on. I am serious, move on to someone else. Maybe after a year or two you might want to come back, because it will be fresh.

It isn’t that I don’t listen to what critics say, it’s just that you have to make up your own mind at that point if it’s valid. Sometimes it is and you try to correct things, and sometimes you decide that it isn’t. When I get up in the morning, I don’t just sit down and say, “You know, they are paying me a lot of money. What the heck! I’m just going to knock out a hundred pages.” I don’t know of anybody writing a book, painting a picture, creating music who does that. We are all dying to do the very best that we can everyday.

NEXT >> Making an eBook: Getting Started

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Jeff Rivera is the author of Forever My Lady (Grand Central) and the founder of GumboWriters.com.

You know that Facebook “Like” button you see everywhere these days? It’s just one of the new tools the social network has introduced which it hopes will turbo-charge traffic and user engagement for media and entertainment companies. Facebook is serious enough about that hope that it recently assembled a team to build tools for and work directly with news, entertainment, and publishing companies.

Leading the charge is Justin Osofsky, a three-time Harvard grad, former McKinsey & Company consultant, and cooking aficionado. Mediabistro caught up with Osofsky to find out how media companies can better use the site to add to their bottom lines.

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Name: Justin Osofsky
Position: Director, strategic partnerships, Facebook
Resume: Started as a consultant with Gen3 Partners and McKinsey & Company before joining Facebook’s Business Development department. Became head of product marketing for Facebook Connect in the summer of 2009 and began leading media partnerships in June of 2010.
Birthdate: October 28, 1977
Hometown: New Orleans, La.
Education: A.B. Economics, Harvard College; J.D., Harvard Law School; M.B.A., Harvard Business School
Marital status: Married
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports section
Last book read: The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Guilty pleasure: A dressed oyster po’boy
Favorite TV show: Modern Family

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What does a typical day look like for you?
My team works with partners and journalists in the media industry to help them understand how to best use Facebook to increase engagement, increase traffic, and, for journalists, to advance their story. First we engage with them on a business level to understand what their strategic objectives are — what they would like to accomplish from working with Facebook — and then how to best work with them to help them accomplish that. We also offer engineering resources to help people understand how to build with Facebook tools and how to create these experiences really effectively. Some of the team focuses on “insights” to help understand what products are working, how they’re driving value to you, and how one can improve the product experience.

At the end of the year, what are you, personally, going to be measured on?
Our goals are to drive value to partners. We want our partners to see increased traffic from Facebook. We want them to see increased engagement on their sites.

You’ve said on several occasions that you’re on a “listening tour” to find out what media companies want and need. Who have you met with and what have you heard so far?
We’ve been meeting with lots of folks, from large media organizations to journalists that are using our products, [and we’ve been meeting them] in settings ranging from individual one-on-one meetings to larger group settings, like Hacks and Hackers or the Asian American Journalists Association. Some organizations are using Facebook in really innovative ways to advance a story. Andy Carvin at NPR recently wrote an article talking about how he and NPR are using Facebook to find sources. They were able to find hundreds of people willing to go on the record to talk about their experiences related to the earthquake in Haiti or [giving up] cable TV.

What else have you heard?
We’ve heard that the way in which you implement the Like button can definitely impact traffic. If you show the faces of [your readers’] friends who have “liked” articles, people tend to click through more. Another really interesting finding: We have a Recommendations plug-in, which shows the content that your friends recommend, share, and care about within [another company’s site]. If you implement [the plug-in] both on [the site’s] home page and on story pages, you see outsized results. It kind of makes sense. When readers are experiencing the recommendations of their friends on article pages, where they’re already reading the content, that’s a great place to reach them.

Where are the stumbling points as media organizations start to use Facebook?
Media organizations produce great content and are very good at delivering it to the right audience. What Facebook adds is a social dimension, the ability [for a reader] to experience what [their] friends care about. What’s really important [when implementing these tools] is to immediately offer value to the reader. When you go to CNN or the Washington Post, you immediately see what your friends recommend. We think those are really good examples of what it means to share and recommend content with your friends. Implementations that don’t bring that front and center tend to perform a little less well.

“When you and I go to Facebook.com, even though we type in the identical URL, we’re fundamentally having a different experience, because we have different friends, and they share different content.”

How does Facebook “win” if media organizations are doing better?
Our readers share over 30 billion pieces of content each month. When you and I go to Facebook.com, even though we type in the identical URL, we’re fundamentally having a different experience, because we have different friends, and they share different content. Simultaneously, when I go to CNN.com and when you go to CNN.com, we’re now having a different experience as well, because we have different friends who care about different things within the CNN.com experience. We think that’s the way both Facebook and our partners win — by working together to create these experiences.

The traditional media world has its own preconceptions about how people search for information, how they retrieve it, and how they consume it. What are some things about the new world that traditional media companies should understand?
News has always been social. A recent Pew study showed that over 70 percent of people said a top reason they consume news is to share it with family and friends, and over half of Americans rely on their friends and family for the news that they receive. We’re now focused on how we can best enable those experiences. With the Facebook news feed, it’s more meaningful, and people spend more time on it because it’s based on their friends. In turn, people are spending more time on our partners’ sites.

Some observers are saying that Facebook is kicking up its efforts in this arena because people are still doing more sharing on Twitter than on Facebook.
We think Twitter and Facebook complement each other very well. But we think Facebook can offer unique value because you’re bringing real identity and authentic connections that people have as they share.

Should Google News be scared of Facebook?
I think Facebook’s doing something quite different than Google. We’re enabling people to share content with their friends and have a custom experience. That feels very different from what Google is doing.

“Our media partners are seeing that having this direct connection and channel, and the ability to deliver content to an audience at the right time, is delivering a lot of value.”

Is it correct that Facebook doesn’t plan to share revenue from advertising placed on media companies’ Facebook pages
That is correct. It’s not something we offer at this time and, to be honest, it’s not a request we hear from page owners. I think our media partners are seeing that having this direct connection and channel, and the ability to deliver content to an audience at the right time, is delivering a lot of value.

Google has taken a lot of heat for not sharing advertising revenue with news organizations. There hasn’t been the same kind of outcry about Facebook’s non-revenue-sharing policy. Why do you think that is?
I think Facebook is offering a lot of value to media partners by creating the connection that they have with their readers and enabling them to publish to them. The other thing is that Facebook, as a platform, is very much focused on creating experiences on the sites of media partners themselves, which allow the experiences on partner sites to become more engaging. Users experience more content and click on more content and then share it back to drive more traffic from their friends.

As a Facebook user yourself, what do you hope Facebook will be enabling you to discover, say, two years from now?
One of my passions in life is cooking. I love cooking on weekends and experimenting with new recipes. It would be really exciting to see a very custom cooking experience on the Internet. So, if I show up to a recipe site, [I have the ability to] understand what my friends want to cook, what worked for them and what didn’t. What happens today is I often show up at sites, and there are great reviews around recipes, but I don’t know the person who contributed the review. It would be awesome if I knew that [a friend] really knew how to cook really well, and the first review I saw for a recipe was from [that friend].

Last question, you said before that you think Twitter and Facebook are more complementary than competitive. But: you vs. Twitter head of media partnerships Chloe Sladden in a thumb-wrestling competition. Who wins?
I’m very clumsy, so I’d never bet on myself in thumb-wrestling.

NEXT >>> New Media Toolbox: Must-Have Smartphone Apps

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E.B. Boyd is a freelance writer in San Francisco.

Given print media’s ongoing travails, it’s difficult to get excited about newspapers these days — particularly at the tech-heavy South by Southwest Interactive conference kicking off this Friday in Austin, Texas. However, bridging the gap between the beleaguered newspaper industry and social media innovation is print journalist-turned Internet editor Robert Quigley, who’s showing the rest of the business how newspapers can embrace — and advance their coverage using — social media at The Austin American-Statesman. A self-proclaimed “Twitter addict,” Quigley operates the Statesman‘s main Twitter account, and is behind the newspaper’s aggressive social media effort that boasts 40+ reporters and six general feeds using the service to disseminate breaking news, cover local events, and interact with readers near and far. Half Web assignment editor at the paper, half social media strategist, Quigley will lead a SXSW talk this weekend entitled, “Old Media Finds New Voice Through Twitter.” We caught up with him by phone to discuss how he’s helping the Statesman acquire new, younger-skewing readers thanks to the “full-frontal assault” he leads using social media tools, the way old-media training can fuel online accuracy, how newspapers’ online video can work, and where print and social media both stand relative to the dreaded m-word — monetization.

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Name: Robert Quigley
Position: Internet editor for Statesman.com and Austin360.com, sites of Austin daily newspaper The Austin American-Statesman
Resume: Started as a sports writer in Nacogdoches, Texas in 1995, came to the Statesman in 1998 as a page designer/copy editor. Was a news and sports copy editor and page designer, assistant news editor, front-page designer and letters editor before taking Internet editor job in January 2007.
Hometown: Born in Rochester, N.Y. but moved all over the country as a child. Austin is home now.
Education: Political science/journalism from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Tx.
Marital status: Married since 2001 to Emily, a copy editor at the Statesman.
First section of the Sunday paper: Opinion/insight
Favorite TV show: Curb Your Enthusiasm
Guilty pleasure: “Playing my Wii.”
Last book read: Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR’s Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of her Survivors

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What were you doing before you became Austin American-Statesman‘s Internet editor?
I came to the Statesman in ’98 as a page designer and a copy editor on the news desk, and worked my way being a sports copy editor, assistant news editor and Page One designer. Then I went to the editorial board as a letters editor, and also edited the editorial page. When this job opened up, I applied for it and went from that to this.

What got you excited about moving over to the Web side?
When I was assistant news editor on the copy desk, I would slog along on the news desk at night, basically, when the main editors leave. I was kind of in charge of story play and calls on things, and I really enjoyed doing that pushing and working with the whole newsroom. When I applied for this job, I was seeing it as another way to get back into working with the whole newsroom. I wasn’t thinking social media at the time, to be frank. It was more like, “Online’s where the excitement is now, and I want to get into that.”

Describe what you do as Internet editor.
Half my job is being the social media coordinator for the Statesman, coming up with strategies and implementing them, as well. The other half of my job [is] working as an assignment editor for the Web. I work with all the different departments through the newsroom as a breaking news desk editor, coordinating coverage when there’s breaking news and making sure that everybody’s working together and we’re getting enough on the Web quickly. I also work on special projects to make sure they’re Web-friendly.

Was the 50/50 breakdown within your position in place when you entered the job?
[The job] was created in January of 2007 — we didn’t have an Internet editor at the time. We had a production editor in charge of Statesman.com, and we had a production editor in charge of Austin360.com (our two Web sites), but this job it didn’t exist until my boss at the time — Tim Lott, who’s now our VP of Internet — came up with the description. He said half the job would be social media. At the time, we didn’t really have social media efforts underway, so I was supposed to figure it out and make it work.

When I started we had Pluck, an Austin company that does social media, mainly for newspapers, but also for other businesses. They do site-wide commenting and reader blogs for USA Today, Houston Chronicle and several others. We were one of their first customers several years ago — what we did with them was host reader blogs on our site. That was our main social media component when I started. I spent a lot of my time trying to nurture those reader bloggers. We had about 15 or 20 who blogged continuously on the site, so I was trying to grow that community.

What does the social media coordinator half entail?
I started out trying to get that reader blog community going. I did that for about a year, pushing hard for that. Then, last year around this time, we upgraded to get site-wide commenting, and I was the project leader for that. I spent 80 to 90 percent of my time that first couple of years doing the assignments editor half. It wasn’t 50/50 — that’s what it was supposed to be, but it wasn’t. But I was in charge of the project of upgrading our software, figuring out how to migrate all our bloggers into the new software, things like that. As time has gone on, I’ve come up with strategies for Twitter. Now I probably spend more time [on the] social media side, less on the assignment editor side. Part of that is due to the newsroom evolving and the culture changing. It doesn’t take as much prodding as it used to, to get things online.

That was going to be my next question, about the newsroom’s attitude toward the Web —
In the newsroom, we had buy-in relatively early here for the Web in general, but I still had to push quite a bit when I first started, so I put a lot of effort into that. I think that people have gotten it now — now, at the 10 a.m. budget meetings, I’m not asking for things. People are just telling me what they’re going to have for me, so that’s changed a lot.

So at the Statesman, those who previously thought of themselves as print-only journalists now consider themselves journalists for the Web, as well?
Oh, no question — we’ve made a huge shift here. For the past four years or so, we’ve had a giant shift, but even in the past year I’ve seen a sea change in the way our reporters and editors have to do their jobs—and photographers and everybody else, too. We don’t have a separate online staff for reporting. For the most part, everybody has to do both jobs: They have to get print stories done and they have to get them online. We’ve been saying for years that we’re an online-first publication — our editor made that proclamation four or five years ago, but [now] it’s really happening. People are thinking about the Web first. I wouldn’t say [that about] every single person, but we have really good buy-in here.

How would you describe the connection between that buy-in and Austin itself? It seems social media and new digital technologies get accepted faster there than in other parts of the country.
[Austin] is a very high-tech, looking for the next thing town. Social media is big here. I would say perhaps there’s nowhere else in the country where it’s bigger, based on population. This is a place where when you come here to work, generally you stay because [Austin’s] a great city — great climate, cool people, everything. That culture is in the newsroom, too. Everybody who has friends outside of the newsroom is friends with people who are doing a startup, or have done three startups, so it’s contagious. I think we have been pushing the envelope for quite a while here online, and it’s paying off for us.

“Twitter is not going to save a newspaper by itself, but I think it’s part of a strategy of being in touch with the community that can, in the long term, save [newspapers].”

Does the Web-savvy culture and community in Austin create pressure at the paper to stay in front of new technologies and adopt them for your stories and coverage?
Not really. With social media, one of the great things is that when you’re doing it well and you’re really involved in the communities out there, people care about you. I think it’s a plus that this community is so forward-thinking, because I can lean on them for advice and to give me good feedback on what we’re doing. I haven’t felt pressure because of the community. I’ve felt more support, really.

You mentioned Twitter strategy — when did you first become aware of Twitter and what were your initial thoughts?
The history of the Statesman.com’s Twitter feed is that one of our tech guys during the 2007 South by Southwest set up an account for us, thinking that we’d probably use it at some point. In February of 2008 — almost exactly a year ago — I set up an account for myself after being pestered a little bit by a colleague of mine, Christian McDonald, one of the early Web producers. He kept saying, “You need to get on Twitter, you’ll really enjoy it.” Every time he would try to explain it, it sounded kind of dumb to me, like “What do I care your friends are eating a sandwich?” You know — the same thing everybody says when they first try Twitter. Then I got on there and became addicted. I was having a lot of fun with it, found lots of new people [to whom] I could pose questions to and get their responses.

So I did that for a couple months, and then in June of 2008, I thought, “I’m posting news tidbits already, just naturally — why not have the Statesman post news tidbits [to Twitter] officially?” [Initially] I’d thought it was my idea — I went and looked, and of course there were dozens of newspapers already on Twitter. Most of them didn’t have any followers, except for one account out there, which was @ColonelTribune. [At the time] he had 600 followers, and everybody else had two dozen, or something like that. So I went and checked him out. It’s by The Chicago Tribune, and it’s an avatar they created to give out news. [The Tribune had] created a little character — a persona and everything — and they were sending out Tweets linking to things on their site, except in a conversational, fun way, like, “Did you see this cool story,” instead of just RSS feeds like all the other newspapers seemed to be doing at the time.

I went in the next morning to my boss and said, “I’m addicted to Twitter, and I think it might be a good way to deliver news. Could I try it out for the Statesman account?” And he [said], “Yeah, go ahead.” I went back to my desk and just kind of did it without going through any red tape at all. I started posting news stories there that morning, in a very personal way — the way that ColonelTribune did, but without the persona. I just did it as me, but with the Statesman logo there. I wanted to treat Twitter [for Statesman.com] the way that I was treating Twitter with my personal account: I was trying to be very personable, and just point out things that I thought were interesting on our Web site that day. We had 18 followers when I started on that morning in June, and by the next day we had 80. Without doing any advertising, marketing or anything, we were building 15 or 20 followers a day pretty early on.

We just went over 4,000 followers [the week this interview was conducted]. Now, we’re adding somewhere around 29 followers a day. Most of them are still local, which shows the growth of Twitter. We had one reporter and one editor who were using Twitter when I started. The reporter was mostly using it for personal kind of fun, but also mentioning news once in a while, and that’s our tech culture writer, Omar Gallaga. He has our top number of followers for an individual reporter. We have more than 40 [reporters on Twitter now], writing about their beats, conversing with people. And we have five or six official news feeds [on Twitter]. We’re getting good traffic out of it, but we’re also building our brand, and getting good feedback from people.

The most exciting part to me right now is that reporters are understanding [Twitter], picking it up and using it to converse with readers and build little communities, basically. During Hurricane Ike [in September 2008], we had four reporters Tweeting to one account from Houston. At one point, our reporter was Twittering minute-by-minute as they crossed the causeway into Galveston. During that weekend, we received 300,000 page views directly from Twitter onto Statesman.com. I think that was the event that vaulted our social media efforts. Suddenly, Twitter wasn’t something to giggle at — it was a serious journalism tool.

You’re giving a Core Conversation at South by Southwest, “Old Media Finds New Voice Through Twitter.” What will you tell people in that talk?
I invited ColonelTribune to give the speech with me — the guy behind it, Daniel Honigman. We’re going to talk together about Twitter, mainly: How using social media, you can connect with your readers in a way you never have before. Three years ago when I was letters editor, those letters [from readers] I put together for the paper — 10 of them [per issue] — that was all the feedback that we allowed as a newspaper. Now, people can sit there and converse with our sports columnist. They can ask a question about why are there fire trucks around a certain building downtown, and I’ll get a reporter to find an answer and get it for them. [Twitter] is giving people a new way of looking at our product. The feedback is so overwhelmingly positive. It’s amazing because as a newspaper, we’re not used to hearing positive feedback at all. Usually, the only time [readers] contact you is when they want to complain. And here we are getting a lot of people saying, “You guys get it,” or, “This is the future; you understand it.” Twitter is not going to save a newspaper by itself, but I think it’s part of a strategy of being in touch with the community that can, in the long term, save [newspapers].

The current state of the newspaper industry: What’s your assessment?
It’s rough. The economy’s bad all the way around, but newspapers have a bit of a business model problem. And nobody’s really figured that out yet. The Statesman is weathering the storm better than most — I think that’s partly because of where we are, and the fact that Austin’s probably weathering the storm better than most cities. But it’s also [that] we have been very aggressive with our Web coverage, putting a lot of effort into it. We realized early on we had to, and we pushed ahead. But it’s not a good time for newspapers. We have to find ways to reinvent ourselves. We have to think of new ways to make people care about our product. Social media is a way for people to see that — at the very least, [for users/readers] to see that you get what they are about. Facebook, and Twitter, and StumbleUpon — that’s where people are right now. That’s where they converse with each other, that’s where they spend their time, and it’s getting more [prevalent] as time goes on. If a newspaper’s not there — if a newspaper decides that’s below them or not interesting to them — they really can become irrelevant.

A difficult word for a lot of newspapers, as well as social media tools, is monetization. There’s almost a parallel problem — Twitter itself is trying to hit upon a business strategy that will enable it to keep growing, and the newspaper industry needs a new business model to survive. What’s your take on how to monetize social media, and media in general?
Social media’s probably the tougher one, I would guess. You can’t say that social media is going to bring in a ton of money for your organization at this point. What I would argue is that the effort is more about marketing our brand, than direct dollar to dollar payback. You’ll find that a good portion of people on Twitter are in the marketing field, and that’s because you can market a brand really well there. There’s good return on investment as far as seeing people say that they bought a product because of what you said on Twitter, or say that they feel better about your product because of what they’ve seen [you do on Twitter]. That’s as true for [newspapers] as it is for Dell or anybody else. If [newspapers] don’t do this, we risk becoming irrelevant. We are in the communications business, and [social media], at an increasing rate, is how people are communicating. If [newspapers] decide they don’t want to be there, they’re missing the boat.

[Social media] can be used for good customer service. It allows us to respond to complaints and people who need help quickly. I’ve used [Twitter] several times to help people who said they weren’t getting their paper delivered. I’m an editor in the newsroom; I’ve helped out there [using Twitter]. I’ve helped people who say they can’t find a story, or they had their picture taken at an event and are wondering where it is. [Twitter’s] good for that –it’s good for seeing what people are saying about you, and responding to them.

It’s not about making money right now, necessarily, but in the long run it could be, and probably will be. Just from being on Twitter every day and paying attention, I would say the demographic skews relatively young, and it skews to tech-savvy people — it’s a crowd that we don’t get with our print edition; even with Statesman.com, our online edition. We skew older, we skew with a different demographic quite a bit. But [Twitter] brings in new, unique users — that is the holy grail for us. As the Web site ramped up in the past decade, we were seeing phenomenal growth, as were all newspaper Web sites — and TV broadcast Web sites, for that matter — mainly because of penetration. More people were getting online more often, and then, more people were getting broadband, which made them more avid Web surfers. So we naturally saw an increase, but as an industry, [newspapers are] getting to a point where we’re reaching that plateau, that saturation point. Now the game is finding new, unique users out there, and Twitter brings them in.

I did a survey on Twitter a month ago, and I asked my followers a couple of questions: I asked them how often did they read the newspaper in print, before they started following our [Twitter] account. I asked them how often did they visit our Web site before they started following the account, and then I asked them how much do they do it now. It’s a big change. It’s made them loyal readers of our Web site: Before they followed us on Twitter, 58 percent [said they] either never visited us or came a few times a month. Now that they’re following us on Twitter, 90 percent [said they] either visit a few times a week or every day. That’s probably my best argument when I’m talking to money people — we’re bringing in a new audience.

“As editors at a newspaper, we should be thinking the same way about online video as we do with stories — why have a bunch of wasted space when you can get right to it?”

It’s easy for rumors and unverified information to travel quickly via Twitter — how do you handle that at the paper?
The way I handle it for the [Statesman.com] account is if I see something out there, I hustle — I run and find a reporter who can make a call for me and verify. The moment I can get verification is when I re-Tweet or post our own information. I do not do it before that. I will not re-Tweet that the Capitol’s on fire unless I can verify the Capitol’s on fire. And by verify, I mean the old standard way of getting somebody to either see it or get a call from the fire department saying it’s on fire. That works for us, just that one step — double-check, make sure we know what we’re talking about, take a deep breath and then post. I haven’t run into a problem with that yet.

Reporters are posting, as well, and we have yet to run into that with them either. We’re all so ingrained with our training in the way we did things in print for years and years that none of us are going to throw out a wild rumor. We have the capability, but ever since we’ve had blogging we’ve had that capability. We just don’t do it.

What’s your take on the extent to which verification takes place within the blogosphere?

I think that bloggers who do due diligence, who make phone calls or meet with respected sources and can name them, or at least back up their information with facts, do better. I think people will trust bloggers more — whether they work for a newspaper, or they’re independent — if they are more accurate. The way to be more accurate is to verify. I don’t think that you have to work at a newspaper to be a good journalist. Bloggers out there who verify their facts, who use good sources, do just as well as anybody else, and I think they rise to the top.

What social media tools are you most fired up about these days, aside from Twitter?
I’m very interested in link journalism, and using Publish2 as the tool for it. We’re using it already on our state political coverage index page: (check it out under “recommended reading”). I am going to look to unroll it on our Longhorns sports page and in other spots, as well. Ideally, as our reporters read interesting things about their beats, they would be submitting links for the aggregation page.

We have dozens of reporters blogging, and some of them do it very well. I want to make a new push to sharpen their blogging skills, including how they can use social media tools. I also want them to work on building relationships for link exchanges with other (non-mainstream) bloggers, and to continue to focus their blogs on the best content possible.

[I want] to start using StumbleUpon more, figuring out how to leverage Digg better. I’m also interested in things like 12seconds.tv, building community on Qik and YouStream. I think the future is just trying to move out there [online] and find out where people are talking about [the Statesman] — where people are talking about local news, even if they’re not talking about us, and make sure we’re participating.

Is there significant enough appetite for Web video to keep it an active part of online media?
To be frank, I think that we still have to figure that all out. I think video can work online. I think that video, when it does the right thing, and is done the right way, does work very well online for newspapers. But we haven’t figured out the perfect formula yet, and that’s part of what I want to do: I want to look into those communities — look into YouStream and look into Qik, and YouTube even — and find out what works and what doesn’t, what we’re doing wrong and what we’re doing right. I think there’s room for video to work. I am particularly interested in 12seconds.tv because I think part of the reason why there’s not huge growth in online video views at newspapers is because most people are reading our stuff and looking at our videos while sitting at work. It’s hard to watch a two-minute video when you’re worried your boss is going to walk behind you, or you’re going to annoy the person in the cubicle next to you. So, 12 seconds of a breaking news event… We had a fire on 6th Street down here [in Austin] this morning that burned down a couple of dance clubs. If we could have gotten 12 seconds of the flames and put that up, I think that’s all you need. And maybe there’s some happy medium — maybe 12 is too short, and we need to figure out how to do 30-second videos. But we need to figure out the formula. I don’t think [the media industry has] really figured it out yet.

What types of video do you most enjoy watching online?
I tend to push towards really short breaking news, cut right to the chase-type videos. If there’s a canoeist going over a dam in a flood or something like that, I don’t want to see the 45 seconds that lead up to it, where he talks about how he’s going to do it — I want to see it happen. I think that’s true of anybody. If you get a YouTube video that sounds promising and it’s four minutes long, you tend to slide that little slider up and see where you get to the meat of the action. As editors at a newspaper, we should be thinking the same way about online video as we do with stories — why have a bunch of wasted space when you can get right to it?

We’ve improved on that a lot in the past year or two, where we’re not only editing tighter, but our are thinking that way. We’ve given out several cameras to reporters in the newsroom, and we’ve been working with them to try to find ways to get to the most interesting parts of videos. There’s a future for video if we push for that — well-edited, good content.

What do you and your colleagues do to distinguish your SXSW coverage from that of everyone else who descends upon Austin to cover it?
We’re going to run a full-frontal assault with Twitter. For the first time during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, we scraped together Tweets from not only our staff members, but also people following our account and posted them on our Web site through this application that our developers built. We’re going to do a similar thing for South by Southwest. The reporters can direct message our main account, and it re-Tweets it out — it’ll say “via Robert Quigley,” with my Twitter account, and then it’ll say “dispatched from South by Southwest.” Somebody can follow just that main account and get all reports from all of our reporters. We’ll also scrape what everybody’s saying who’s following that account. When they mention certain keywords, it will post on the [Statesman.com] Web site, as well.

Another thing we’re excited about [is] having social media awards for the first time ever [during SXSW]. I came up with the idea of awarding 25 people in Texas — they’ve got to be Texas residents — whom we feel are good at social media. We’re going to name an overall winner as well, and we’re going to have a big party during South by Southwest at a venue downtown to honor the winners, and give out awards. That’s a big part of our [SXSW] marketing push, just to have our name out there as we’re doing those awards. We had 125 nominees for that, and [named] the 25 winners on February 18, and we’ll name the overall winner at the event itself.

What are the criteria for judging?

Omar Gallaga is one of the judges, I’m a judge, and Addie Broyles — our food writer who’s really into social media (is really good with Facebook and Twitter, and she also does Tweet-ups for foodies) — the three of us are going to be judges. I asked for links from people who nominated [others], whether it’s because they’re really good at building a community among commenters on their blogs, or whether they’re really big into the YouTube community, or Twitter, or Facebook, or StumbleUpon. It’s not like there are any harsh guidelines to social media, as far as doing it the right way or the wrong way, just what we think is best as a panel of judges.

What do you think are going to be hot topics this year at the festival?
I think that we’re hitting on it right now: Where’s social media going? Here we are, at a spot when the economy is down, when everybody’s cutting back on what is seen as frivolous spending. You heard me do my little dance about how to monetize [social media]: There really is no good answer. So, social media is one of the things that is getting cut at a lot of places, or at least is losing some prominence. So, the question is: How do we pull out of that, how do we make sure we’re still moving forward?

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Rebecca L. Fox is mediabistro.com’s managing editor. If you’re going to SXSW, join her to discuss, “Why Is Professional Blogging Bloodsport For Women?”, on Sunday, March 15 at 11:30 a.m.

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.