Streaming Media East 2008 Day 2: How CNNmoney Does It
Silver calls his team a new kind of journalist. In line with the story published last week about the new journalism, Silver said his team is multi-talented.
"I came out of school as a good television producer, but these new journalists are the Swiss Army knife of journalism," said Silver. "They shoot, produce, edit and post to the web. Then they go on to the next story, in the true decathlon of journalism," he added, noting that many of the producers have 3-6 story segments per day.
The Technology
Silver rolled out a list of technologies that help them keep ramping up the story volume.
"We knew we needed to have our own editing system, and the price of the equipment has dropped dramatically," said Silver. "We were able to ramp up equipment to meet our needs without the high cost to put equipment in place when a new broadcast show comes on."
"We made an early commitment to the Mac platform and Final Cut Pro to be able to produce video at volume day after day," said Silver. "Final Cut Pro is cheap, easy to learn, and scaleable. We tied it with Building 4 Media's FORK, a relatively new asset management system from a small company in the Netherlands that works well with Final Cut Pro, so if a reporter has to switch from machine to machine, including laptops, they can still work on a project."
To save time, and eliminate the need for tape, CNNmoney uses flash memory cards to shoot in 1080i HD. For the "control room", CNNmoney uses Anycast, a portable Sony production switcher.
"We're stretching it to get as close to 'as live' as we can," said Silver, noting that nothing CNNmoney.com does is actually live. "This means we're moving from 60% post-production to almost 80% pre-produced (content), dropping graphics and titles and pre-edited clips or packages into Anycast, so that we can get content to the web quickly. Our Anycast is about the size of an old suitcase; it can handle six different cameras, including two HD cameras and remote controlled cameras, and we're able to use one highly-skilled person to operate the cameras and the Anycast switcher."
Besides FORK media asset management and Sony's Anycast, CNNmoney's video clips ties into Avid's iNews and FORK (media asset management). Anystream is used for transcoding content to post to the website and to CNNmoney.com's syndication partners.
Speaking of the need to create a bigger feel for such a small group, Silver noted the mini studio created for CNNmoney.com has an advantage that other small news teams don't have.
"We use the backdrop of our newsroom to keep the mini studio close to our desks, and also to show the energy of creating breaking stories in the background," said Silver. "
"We are a network within a network," said Silver, "with access to stories and story tellers, both to what CNN has within its New York bureau and also in terms of CNN's reach around the globe. Reporters on CNN are willing to do things to help on our site, and we help our broadcast partners."
The Results
"Since January 15, the day we put our player on the main page, and added 10 videos per day," said Silver, "we have found the stickiness of the site has improved dramatically, up to 16 minutes per user. We're now 54% of the entire category and 3 times larger than our closest competitor. We hope to extend that lead soon."
To recap, Silver provided this advice to the audience.
"Hire smart, build to scale, document your failures and don't do it alone. Team up with a group," said Silver. "And since I get asked this question in Q&A all the time, the most popular videos are car videos from the aspirational part of our site."