Interview with Jason DeRusha
Well this interview started out like all the other 10 Questions interviews I have done but quickly changed into one that is totally different. Below is the email that prompted to audio interview. Question 6 is what prompted the in-person interview. Below the interview is the transcript of the audio interview. It was done by ‘castingWords and there is a review coming on them soon.
Email Interview:
How long have you known about blogs and how long have you been blogging?
I’ve known about blogs for about two years. Although it turns out I’ve been reading things that were probably “blogs” before the term existed: TVBarn.com is a blog written by a Kansas City media writer and the Wahoo Gazette is a behind the scenes look at the Letterman show. I wrote my first blog entry in February of this year.
When did WCCO start their blogs and what has the impact been for the station?
We started our blogs in January of 2005, and it’s been interesting. We started with Paul Douglas writing a daily weather notebook and some of our morning personalities writing. Karen Leigh wrote about being new in Minnesota. I went to the web people and asked if I could have a blog. A couple days later, I was online.
As a Reporter what has your experience been with Blogging?
I get way more e-mail now than I used to. And it’s all over the place. I believe I’ve connected with viewers in a personal way, and so they’re more comfortable sharing information with me. I also think it’s given me credibility as an entree into the digital world. I contribute to MNSpeak.com and get lots of story ideas from that community.
As a Reporter what do you think Blogging can do for Media in its current form?
Blogging gives the media access to a bunch of “experts” who aren’t your traditional “experts.” I know there’s a guy in Minnesota with the definitive Vikings blog. And the people with media blogs and political blogs. It gives ordinary people a voice. And smart members of the MSM know, that those people have good stories to tell. They also are an immediate check on us. If I do a terrible story, I hear about it right away.
Does the local, national, or global blogging community have an effect on what stories you or WCCO are picking or is the blogosphere not part of that decision yet? If it is not part of the decision why?
As a reporter, I will bring story ideas to the table from things I’ve seen on blogs. I will note things that tend to get a lot of attention, a lot of “buzz.” Most people aren’t quite hip to it yet, but I do bring that into our newsroom. To me, blogs are a little like talk radio, and you can’t always translate that into a good TV news story. An example was the buzz about the mysterious blimp floating over the Twin Cities (a viral advertising effort). It got huge play in blogs, and that’s part of why we did a TV story about it.
What effect do you see bloggers having on current media in the next 5 years?
Bloggers will continue to provide a check on media… but I fear that people will go too far. Bloggers love to attack the mainstream media. But if we shut down CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, what would the bloggers link to? What would they talk about? We need each other. They feed on us. I expect to see blogging transform itself from personal diaries and rants by radicals, to collaborative journalism. I expect to see hyper-local blogs dealing with neighborhoods. And I expect the media will cull those sources for stories, much like we read community newspapers for ideas.
What do you hope readers of your blog will get out of it?
I hope my readers get an insight into how we do things at WCCO. People like to think of the media as the evil people in the movies…. chasing down people who don’t want to do interviews. But we are very thoughtful about what we do. I try to explain some of that thought process. I also hope people get a laugh out of the blog. The best blogs have a tight focus, a niche. I don’t have that. So I have to count on people making a connection with me, and coming back to see what I have to say.
What do you think is lacking with the WCCO blogs if anything?
I wish we had comments. CBS’s public eye blog has moderated comments, we simply don’t have the staff on the local level to keep an eye on comments. I think people would behave and submit thoughtful comments, but the reality is, some people would abuse it. So we don’t have a space for comments. That bugs me.
What blogs are on your current reading list?
I read MNSpeak, Girl Friday , Ironic Teachings, Slanderous Minneapolis, and MNSpeak Aggregator daily. The aggregator at MNSpeak gets me to 200 local blogs/news sources. I like that a lot.
What else would you like to say about blogging and the media that I might not have asked?
I’m enjoying blogging. It’s a lot of work, and I feel an obligation to update at least once a day, but it’s fun to have a connection with viewers. And I know I’m talking to a lot of people who don’t watch WCCO. Hopefully, my writing will inspire them to check us out on TV.
Castingwords Transcript for, David Newberger interviews Jason Derusha:
David: Go ahead and introduce yourself first, just so I have a little bit. ‘Cause I’m actually gonna do this as a Podcast, so
Jason: All right, I’m Jason Derusha. I’m a reporter at WCCO TV and I suppose I’m a blogger as well. I have a blog that I’ve been doing for, it’s getting close to a year now, so
David: Pretty interesting
Jason: It’s kind of a blog. It’s not, I mean, I know a lot of people in the blogosphere have a very specific definition of what a blog is
David: What would your definition of a blog be?
Jason: To me it’s anyone who’s keeping any sort of diary that gets updated kind of in a chronological manner. To me I update sometimes several times a day, sometimes once a day. I think it’s a blog but I think some people believe that a blog has to have comments and trackbacks and all of that other stuff. And I do not have comments or trackbacks
David: Okay. How long ago did WCCO start blogs, and what was the impact of the station when you started the blogs?
Jason: We started just this year, so in early 2005 we started blogging, and we had Paul Douglas, our weather guy doing, like a weather notebook, and Karen Leigh, our anchor, is new to this area, so she started blogging about her experiences as being new to Minnesota, someone who’s never lived in cold weather before. So we started doing those two and I thought, I’m really into kind of the online world and digital media. So I went and said “I’d like to do one of these” and a coupla days later I had it. So I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with it, but there it was
David: How long have you been following the online world, digital media, podcasts, blogging, video logging even, now?
Jason: I guess when I was in college, which wasn’t that long ago, I’m only thirty years old. But when I was in college I remember using the text‑based Web, the Internet which, you know, there was no, like, I remember when we started getting the pictures and the World Wide Web and the full graphical interface, but I remember using, like, newsgroups on the old, I think it was called Lynx or something like that, the old, old system. So in a way that was a precursor, I think, to what blogs are doing now, and there is one blogger that I read today who started out just as‑‑he’s now a media critic for a newspaper in Kansas City. When I was in college in 1994 he was just a guy in Chicago who was writing, he was a Letterman, a Dave Letterman expert. And so he had this kind of daily update about what was going to be coming up on the Letterman show and what happened. It was called Late Show News or Late Night News. And now he’s got a blog called TVbarn.com. Which is a really great media. He’s a great critic, a really good writer
David: That’s actually one I haven’t heard of. So I’m gonna‑‑
Jason: It’s good
David: I saw that when you did your e‑mail interview here, and I was like, hmm, I’m gonna have to check that one out
Jason: So I’ve been into that for a while, I’ve been knowing about blogs for about two years though, so
David: Okay. As a reporter what do you think blogging can do for the media in general and yourself specifically?
Jason: Well to me specifically, I get lots of story ideas from blogs. When you see that there’s a critical mass of people out there talking about something that isn’t getting coverage in the media, to me, I start to think, ‑oh, we need to check into this. People are talking about this, they’re interested in this, they’re linking to it. We need to connect to that as a mainstream media operation. So I use blogging for story ideas. I also think it gives the mainstream media, if you use it correctly, it gives you access to this whole network of people who are experts in various niches. And you can go out there and before blogs I might just randomly call people up out of the phone book. Not just random people, but all right, I’m looking for a doctor, so I might call a big health company and say “can you hook me up with a doctor”. Now I mean a lot of doctors have blogs and you can go read it, and you can go and check, all right, I know where this guy’s coming from, I know what their expertise is. Plus I think it gives me access to kind of citizen experts. People who would never be interviewed by a TV station, but now I know about these people because they have their little corners of the Web. The other thing it’s doing, there are kind of two‑‑I see blogging splitting into two directions. On the one side you have people who really have an agenda, and people will come to those blogs because they identify with that viewpoint, and you can come to that blog and read someone that probably you agree with their general thinking, and then be enlightened to their thinking over various news issues. I see another side of the blogosphere, if you will, splitting off and becoming more like citizen journalists. I see on the other side people, communities of people, coming together and posting their news tidbits, opening up to comments, it’s a great organic thing where people can tell about news in their neighborhood and their community. Someone else can link and say “oh did you know about this, and oh did you know about that, and oh I disagree with this”. And it gets this great organic kind of‑‑to me that is, that’s, like, the ideal of news. What we do right now at Channel 4, at WCCO, is we sit in our little studio and tell you people what we think the news of the day is. But it’s not gonna take long before you are telling us what the news is. And we’re getting that from people. And what we need to do is a mainstream media operation is figure out how to tap into that, that organic kind of citizen journalism and how do we tell those stories in a way that is true to the spirit of that, without us just sucking up these ideas and then just spitting them out just the same way we’ve been doing news for forty years?
David: Do you know a approximate percentage of how many blog stories or blog ideas may actually get aired?
Jason: I mean, I’ve had, it’s starting to heat up more, I’m doing more. I did a story, about two stories that I shot last week actually, were interactive with my blog. One was a story about a woman locally who has a blog called Girl Friday, who does a personal errands service. And I wouldn’t have known about this if it wasn’t for reading her blog. So that was one idea. There’s a story I’m gonna pitch tonight that’s been getting a lot of talk in blogs today, the Walker has an exhibit tonight that’s opening a discussion on contemporary prefab houses. So it’s like, it’s not your, prefabricated houses, it’s not the perception of the mobile home. These are gorgeous contemporary homes that are being assembled in warehouses. And that’s been getting some talk on some real estate blogs, and some other places, art blogs. So I’m gonna pitch that, who knows if it’ll go or not, but I’m gonna pitch it, and that’s had a lot of talk. So I get ideas like that. I would say it’s still a very small percentage
David: Do you give credit to the blogs when you get an idea from a blog, or‑‑?
Jason: I do. I did a story… there’s a blog called Behind the Mortgage. A blogger who broke the story that the FBI was looking into mortgage fraud in the Twin Cities. He broke it on his blog. And when I did the story I did credit, and in my blog, I’m like, you know, “credit where credit’s do, here’s where the story idea came from, here’s the link, go at it”. For my story I interviewed him, for the TV story I went and interviewed him. For the companion piece on my blog I specifically said “hey, you broke this story.”
David: What effect do you see bloggers having on what we currently call mainstream media, in, say, the next five or even ten years
Jason: It’s hard to tell. Right now, you know, just like people lump the media together, people are lumping blogs together. And on one end of blogs you have these kind of rabid right or rabid left wing Web sites, that are just, they nitpick every single word the big networks say on every story. And everything has an agenda. And you’ll see different blogs taking the same story and saying “this was horribly tilted in favor of the Bush White House” and “this was, ” same story. “This was horribly biased.” To me, I don’t know how productive that is. It’s kind of like talk radio. And, I think a lot of blogs, that’s kind of like what they are. They share the opinions of their readers and so it’s kind of this mutual admiration society where people come and read it because they agree with it. It’s like, most people who listen to Rush Limbaugh are not listening because they disagree with him. Most are listening because they agree. I think the same thing is happening in the blogosphere where you have the right‑wing and the left‑wing sites. I think right now the blogosphere probably has a disproportionate impact because the mainstream media is so desperate to look like we’re in touch with what is going on in the cutting‑edge world, and I wonder if, as a percentage of society, I would say probably blogs are getting, have more influence than necessarily they deserve, based on the percentage of people who are reading and participating and that kind of stuff. As for where it goes in the future, I have no idea. I love that you can have people out there acting as a check of the media. Like the Dan Rather situation on 60 Minutes, you had blogs out there who just started going to work. And basically what these blogs were doing was journalism. And these were just people with a computer who just started doing research, asking questions, making phone calls. And they said, “y’know, it looks like you guys at CBS got this thing wrong.” And CBS ended up retracting it and the whole thing. I see that as a positive development. The more we can get viewers involved, y’know, the better. I would prefer, I wish, that people were doing it because they cared about the journalism, because they really wanted the truth to get out and had a passion about getting the truth to people. The reality is, I think, most of what’s going on is that people have an agenda and it’s this whole game of gotcha. You as a blogger get attention if you can have a big controversial gotcha kind of thing. It’s like talk radio, the loudest host gets the most attention. I think there’s a danger in the blogosphere of that continuing to happen. And the thing that excites me about blogs is you have this space and this organic thing where people have thoughtful discussions. I get 90 seconds to tell a story on the air, you can’t have much of a thoughtful discussion in 90 seconds. But online people are having these great discussions and really getting deeper into stories and taking it off and having different tentacles out of stories. We can’t do that in the linear format of a television newscast where you have a finite amount of time. But if blogs only become people screaming the loudest so they can get the most links so they can be on the top 100 on Technorati’s list, then I don’t know what that’s serving as far as the loftier service of journalism, I guess
David: How do you find blogs that interest you? What’s on your reading list?
Jason: Well, there are a coupla blogs that I’ve read before they were given the title ‘blog’. One is TVbarn.com, that I’ve been reading quite a long time. And I think that would be defined as a blog now. There’s also a great blog that’s hidden on the CBS Web site called the Wahoo Gazette that does this whole behind‑the‑scenes rundown of every night’s David Letterman Show. And it’s great. The guy who writes it is an assistant producer or something on the Letterman Show, and it’s just a great site. Most of the other blogs that I read I’ve found on mnspeak.com, I think what Rex has done with mnspeak is phenomenal. And I daily, several times a day, go to the mnspeak aggregator and see what people are saying and read what people are talking about, and read the front page‑‑I think that the front page of that Web site is a very interesting model for what kind of community journalism could be, in that people need to have no credentials, they just sign up and register on that site for free, and you can post a story, and it gets put up on the front page and people can comment and off they go. I think that is really exciting, and I can see that, right now that’s mnspeak, I can see different neighborhoods, I can see Maple Grove, I can see different, y’know, block clubs or whatever having a different model, where certainly it’ll be‑‑I think most people define news in such a broader way than typical mainstream journalists do. I mean, if you lived, where do you live?
David: Woodbury
Jason: You live in Woodbury. If your town is having a parade that’s going to shut down Main Street, is that news to you?
David: Yeah
Jason: Yeah, that’s news, you need to know how to drive around. Is that gonna be on the Channel 4 news? No, of course not. If there’s someone breaking into houses on your block, is that news to you? Yeah, that’s important news. Is that important news to us on Channel 4? Probably not. But I could see a hyperlocal kind of blog where you as a neighborhood could contribute and pop on and read about stuff. I think that is really exciting. And of course we’re seeing in industries, I mean, you call yourself a geek on your site, that’s where some very exciting stuff is happening. I think the best blog is focused like a laser beam on a specific topic, be it PR or marketing or computers or‑‑not computers, that’s way too broad. But, you know, specific‑‑branding. Different things like that. There’s a value add that someone to come back every day and see what you have to say. I think in that regard my blog is a total failure in that it does not have a laser beam focus, and for people to come back they have to kind of buy into me as a person who they connect to. Otherwise why would you check it every day? I mean, yesterday maybe my entry is about a story I did on mortgage fraud and maybe the next day it’s about a story I did on people breakin’ into cars in front of day care centers. The stories keep changing all the time. I thread throughout it stuff about me and my personal life and behind‑the‑scenes stuff about the station. Instead of just blogging about a story, I try to blog about why we did it or how did we discuss it, or what were some of the technical obstacles we had to getting it on the air. And I think that gets people to come back every day
David: When you’re focusing on, say, mnspeak and that. Do you focus outside of mnspeak, do you use a feed aggregator such as RSSbandit or Feedlounge or Technorati as just a search engine?
Jason: I use, on my Firefox browser at home, I use a RSS feed that’s automated into my toolbar favorites
David: So live bookmarks
Jason: Yeah, the live bookmarks. I like that a lot. Typically I will go to the, I’ll actually go to the site instead of going to an RSS feed. And partially that’s just laziness on my part, not setting up a good RSS reader. And partially I think some of those sites are a little confusing still for‑‑I’m not a computer expert. And for me sometimes I don’t wanna go through the trouble to set that up
David: And actually that brings up sort of an interesting question. For somebody like yourself who might not be a geek‑‑
Jason: Although I do code my own blog! I do have to do the coding!
David: And that’s good! But for someone like you or an average Joe citizen or whatever, what would be ideal for them to be able to subscribe to RSS?
Jason: Man, I think live bookmarks are so easy, it’s great, you just click on the thing at the bottom of the page and you’re in. I think it’s way even before RSS, most people I talk to, most people, my in‑laws, they don’t even know what a blog is. They hear the word and they’re like “what is it?” And the other thing people don’t know is “how do I find the blog?” Back when the bombings happened in London we did a story on some guys here who have a site, it’s like for expatriates, and he’s got a Web site. And we have people asking us, “how do you find a blog that’s talking about the bombing?” And to most people who use the Internet regularly or use blogs regularly, you’re shocked that people would really have that question. You go to Google Blog Search or go to Technorati or just go to Google and type it in. But you know, if you went to Google and typed in ‘London bombing’, well, you’d get a bazillion sites. But if you went in and typed ‘London bombing blog’, you’d still probably, it would still be unusable to people. I think that for blogs to get huge penetration, huge readership, you’re gonna have to have some rating system somehow. You’re gonna have to have some easy way for people to figure out where to go. And in a way that makes you just another newspaper. Or just another TV station. Why do people watch the networks, still? All the research on cable TV shows that people watch fewer than 20 channels. You may have 200 channels at home but people regularly, I think it’s like 12 channels is what people actually watch. People like to have someone doing the work for them. This is where mnspeak, I think, is genius, here’s this one site that every day I can log on and the guy that runs the site has provided ten or fifteen links for me, and if I wanna go in‑depth I go click on ‘aggregator’ and there’s two hundred news sources or blogs that I can just look at from this site. That’s what we need I think, more portals for people to go to to kind of get, to find stuff that I’m interested in
David: I did an e‑mail interview with you, and that’s what made me decide to do this actual Podcast, this is my first generation of Podcast
Jason: Well, I hope you edit this down, we’re at 19 minutes and 45 seconds. People are going to fall asleep at this point!
David: To be honest, they won’t
Jason: Really, all right, good
David: In your e‑mail interview, what really caught my attention was, what really caught my attention was, what effect do you see the blogosphere having on the current media in the next five years. In the e‑mail you mentioned, actually, lemme find it here: “Bloggers love to attack the mainstream media, but if we shut down CBS, The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, what would bloggers link to?” What’s your thought process behind that?
Jason: I think right now what most bloggers are doing are taking stories in the news and commenting on them. Most blogs are not generating original stories. There are a handful, there’s a coupla really good political blogs in Minnesota that do generate their own stories. But most bloggers, when you go to Technorati and see what the most linked‑to story is or blog, oftentimes it’s a story from the BBC or it’s a story from the New York Times and that’s what people are linking to. Maybe that will change. Maybe. But I think right now people have lives. Most bloggers have a real job. So they can’t be generating their own stories. So people are always criticizing, on the blogs, the mainstream media. We are a great punching bag and largely we deserve it. I mean, I interned at ABC News in New York when I was in college, and they are out of touch, they are‑‑I don’t think they’re biased in a‑‑well, they’re biased, for sure, their bias is East Coast and their bias is against whoever is in power because that makes for good television. Typically that was my observation when I was there. New York City is overwhelmingly Democratic. You look how they vote, it’s overwhelmingly Democratic, I mean, what do you think the media is going to be when they’re based in New York City? All their friends think a certain way. You hang out in social circles, I mean, it’s not surprising that that is the bias. But the blogs attack, they attack constantly, and often they’re right. But the source material is still from the mainstream media. And so I really believe if you shut us all down, I really don’t know what the bloggers would talk about. Or people would have to quit their jobs and go out and start digging up stuff to be able to comment on. I still think the mainstream media does a decent job of telling people what’s going on in the world. Are we perfect, no, but it sure is great, it’s great to have all these bloggers out there bringing up other things that we’re not thinking about. We’re a finite number of people, we can’t think of everything or do everything. So, I wonder sometimes, if you did shut down the networks and shut off‑‑like if all the newspapers folded up their Web sites…
Jason: …I mean, we’re a finite number of people; we can’t think of everything or do everything, so, but I do, I wonder sometimes if you, like, shut down the networks, shut off, like if all the newspapers folded up their websites, which of course they wouldn’t do because the web sites, I mean, no one’s buying papers anymore, people are reading the web. But, if all the newspapers for a day shut down their web sites, it would be very interesting to see what the bloggers would do. I suppose they’d all be writing about the newspapers shutting down their websites, right?
David: Probably on the first day, but if you give it a week or two weeks, I guarantee that you’d be surprised
Jason: I think that some people, I think that there would be some people. But like, look at Powerline, which is hugely powerful, and locally based here in Minnesota. But almost every entry in Powerline is a link to a newspaper article or a TV story. And those guys have real jobs. I mean everybody has real jobs. If there was money to be made in blogging, then maybe we would see people go out and do their own digging, do their own story
David: That actually brings up interesting question. Money to be made in blogging. That’s a lot of what people are actually trying to figure out right now. Why do you see that as… or what do you see that can take us over that hurdle… that can take bloggers over that hurdle?
Jason: Well, I would pay right now for a… if [xx] charged a couple of bucks a months, I would pay for that in a heartbeat. There are, I think there are some blogs that probably could charge. I think the hardcore readers of Powerline probably wouldn’t mind chipping in a buck a month for that. Or some of the other… Power Liberal, or some of the other strong sites that get huge readership. I don’t know what would take it over the edge. We’re trying to make money on our own website. We’re a big operation with a lot of page view, and I still think, I don’t know, but I don’t think we’re making money on it. We have a pretty big staff dedicated to updating our website with news around the clock and I don’t think it’s making money
David: Is that staff actually local here?
Jason: Yeah, in our building. We have a pretty big staff, I think we have five people, five web producers who do rewriting of stories. They do generate some original content, slideshows, things like that. They’ll go out and shoot. We’re trying to move towards them developing more web exclusive journalism stories that you only read on the web. But it’s not a money maker, it’s an investment into the future, when people are, you know, when I go out to cover a story we bring it back, we edit it, and we immediately publish it online so people can get it right awayt 10:00 to watch the news is, I mean, people are slow to change, so it’s going to be around for a while, but I don’t think it’ll be around forever. I have a TiVo, I don’t ever watch anything when it’s supposedly on. And I think the same thing will happen with news n is: will people choose to watch us? I think we get a lot of viewers out of habit. We’re on at ten, at ten we watch the news. That’s what reasonable people do in society. Well, if your time‑shifting everything, are you going to actively make the choice to download through your broadband link, are you going to download the news? I don’t know. I hope… god, I hope so, or I’m out of a gig, but I don’t know
David: If somebody said to you which is king, distribution, content, or conversation? What would you pick and why?
Jason: That’s a very interesting question. Well, without distribution, none of the other things matter. You’re screaming in an empty forest. But I think, wow, that is an excellent question. [pause]
David: You can think all you want because I can edit out the dead air, just so you know
Jason: I think content is king. You can have distribution, but if you have nothing interesting as far as content, people aren’t going to tune into you. They’re not going to dial you up. Conversation is important, but you need content to have a conversation. So if you’re just conversing, then you’re just a social network, and I don’t think that’s where we’re moving here. I think content is king. I think that the blog that continues to prosper will be blogs that have, that reward their viewers, that reward their visitors with compelling content. Then everybody else is going to bring the conversation to the table. But without that compelling content to start with you really aren’t, what are you talking about
David: In an age now where content… there’s a lot of great content out there, it’s basically becoming a commodity. What happens when content becomes secondary to the conversation for news organizations such as WCCO?
Jason: What do you mean by that, give me an example of what you mean by that
David: OKd be: I maybe publish a smart little question to somebody on my blog, and I ask for feedback. All I’ve done is I’ve asked a question, and everything in there is part of that community of comments now which is now the conversation
Jason: Wow, interesting… Yeah, well that’s a real interesting point. I think you could make a real case that the quality of the conversation… Well, let me give you an example. I read several industry bulletin boards, web sites, where people post comments and you have a conversation. And the ones I keep going back to are the ones with the good conversation. As far as content, these web sites are just web sites out of nowhere that have people posting questions or comments or observations. I read some of those religiously. So I suppose that really the conversation is important. It may be more important than the content, because you can have a conversation that’s just totally out of nothing. You don’t need any… these web sites I go to have no content, they’re all conversation
David: So with an organization such as WCCO how does it affect what WCCO does for the future of WCCO or how it’s set up?
Jason: Yeah, well I think right now we are very much a one way street when it comes to communication. I mean, we talk on the television, we talk out of the TV and talk to people and no one’s communicating back. Emails changed that a lot. I get… the amount of feedback I get on my work is unbelievable because the anonymity of email I think people are more than willing to send their comments in, and more than willing to send nasty comments in, because they don’t actually have to talk to me on the phone. They’re always shocked when I respond to their nasty email. Which I always do. Sometimes I even change people’s mind. Not always, but sometimes. I think that as an organization we are lacking in conversation. I try to do it on my blog by having people email me, and I post those emails and answer them on the site. I answer the emails individually and I answer them on the site. To make up for the fact that we do not have comments on our website. I’ve gone around and around with our management on this. They do not want to have comments on our blog because they fear, I think they fear lawsuits, I think they fear that people could hijack our website with hate speech or whatever. And to have someone moderate the comments, you would need almost a full time person to do that, and we don’t have the staff to do it. At least that’s the answer they’ve given me. I disagree. I think you could put comments up and I think you would get responsible comments. I think people would not take advantage of it. We agree to disagree
David: What do you think is so powerful behind those comments, both positive or negative? Actually let’s put it this way: what type of power does a negative type comment on wcco.com, on your blog, how much weight does it have behind it, in a conversation?
Jason: Well, right now, a negative comment has a lot of weight because… I think what happens is someone is emboldened to put a negative comment, it gives people even more… it can be kind of a domino effect, where people will start piling on, like “Yeah, I agree. That’s, you know, you guys screwed up.” I posted negative comments on my blog before
David: But with an email system itself, there’s that added layer of ‘Oh, great, we got to get over the hurdle now’ that may be impeding in some sense, and I’m wondering
Jason: Yeah, cause you could immediately, on a comment link, you just push it, put in your negative comment, there it is. To me, I think it would have no impact. I think if I get a story and on the blog I got 50 negative comments about it, I think it would probably make all of us say, maybe we screwed this up. Like I think it would be positive influence. I don’t think we get people out there just attacking on us just because they could. I think they would attack us when we deserved it. There are times when I screw up and I will admit I am like ‘You know what, that was not the best story I’ve done’, or ‘we could have done that better.’ I get 8 hours to do my work and so sometimes, well often times less than that, and sometimes you make a mistake and sometimes the ‘first draft of history’ we call it, so sometimes you’re going to get it wrong. I wish… I would love to have that conversation. I guess, to me, I’m really confident in my ability. I’m confident as to where my heart is and what my intent is. I am more than welcome to have anybody challenge anything I do. Sometimes they’re going to be right and sometimes I’m going to be right and I think that the dialog actually makes everybody better. It provides for a more educated news consumer and it provides for a better newscast. I would like to see… open it up, let’s go. Here’s my thing: if we’re not going to allow that conversation at wcco.com, it’s going to go somewhere else. That kind of conversation is going to happen. You can’t stop the conversation from happening. I know the American Lung Association has a blog here. They don’t allow comments, and some other blogger found a very interesting article by the people who run the Lung Association site talking about whey they didn’t want comments, because they didn’t want their site hijacked by the pro‑smoking forces. I could see that from a site like that, I could understand that, but for us, I don’t know what we have to be afraid of
David: Is that really what it is, that sense of maybe being afraid of what may come out of it or what changes may be brought about by comments
Jason: It’s not changes. I think we’re worried about the FCC climate we live in right now. As an arm of the television station, our website, that people could say that there’s profanity that shows up, that the FCC could then somehow go and fine us. Our corporate structure is very very sensitive right now about anything that would get an FCC complaint. We have been told that in the field, when it comes to live shots, that if there’s a situation where if there’s something that could happen on the air that would be in violation of FCC rules, that we should just kill the live shot. I think that same atmosphere spills over to the website. It’s not about… people are going to say negative things about what we’re doing, and then it’s going to throw the whole trust of our viewers off, I don’t think that’s the fear at all. I think it’s more the fear of inappropriate, racist, profane, sexist, pornographic, all of those kind of comments that happen on the internet, and we just don’t, we barely have the staff to get all the content that we’re getting on our website, to have someoneelse dedicated to policing comments. They just don’t want to deal with it. I’m hoping to wear them down. I’m ready to take it on. But I have a job too. I have a full time job, and my full time job is doing stories for the TV station. The blog is something I do in my spare time. So I don’t have time to police comments either. What happens if a comment is posted and I’m out in the field for 8 hours and don’t have time to check in. I think that’s their fear. And as a TV station, we have a broad audience and we’ll have people coming to my blog who maybe don’t understand blogs and don’t understand that it’s a little more freewheeling there. So I think we as a television station have to be sensitive to all of those things. That’s where the managers are coming from. I think they’re wrong, but they know I think that
David: How do you think WCCO can educate your broad face as to the power of blogs
Jason: I’m excited about that. I’ve pitched a couple of different stories that they seem interested in. I would like to do as story in the people behind the blogs. I think right now on CNN there’s a couple of bimbos who are reading headlines off of blogs. It’s nice eye candy, and I appreciate the effort by CNN to acknowledge that blogs exist, but how boring is that, sitting there reading blogs to people on television. It’s ridiculous. But boy, I think people would be fascinated to know about, you know, there’s a guy who’s a teacher who has a great blog. He’s like a teacher at a high school in Robbinsdale. It’s called ‘Ironic Teaching’, it’s his website. There’s interesting people doing interesting things on blogs that would be compelling stories and maybe would give our viewers an insight into the fact that this isn’t just people screaming back and forth, the typical political stuff. There’s all sorts of fascinating resources out there for people, if they just knew where to look. So I’m hoping that in the new year we’ll start doing some of those stories. I wanted to do one a week. Like here’s the blog of the week, like have it a stripped kind of thing. Here’s somebody in our community doing this. So that’s one idea we’re tossing around
David: What do you think it would take to get somebody like Don Shelby talking?
Jason: We’re moving in that direction. I know they’ve been trying real hard to get Pat Kessler and Mark Rosen blogging, because I think there would be interest in a political blog and interest in a sports blog from our station. There’s typical contract, union, workload kind of things to work out with that, but I expect more people to be blogging. We’re going to keep trying them to see what sticks, see what works, see what people are interested in. I think people would be interested in what Don has to say and I wouldn’t be surprised in the new year if Don has a little corner of the web site too. Those people are, I think our staff is pretty receptive and interested in it, and most people are familiar with blogs, so that’s at least a step in the right direction. I don’t get made fun of anymore. They used to make fun of me all the time. ‘Oh, just plugging your blog again on the air, talking about… Oh, I guess we’ll read about that in the blog.’ People were worried about if they said something in the newsroom it was going to show up on the blog. I think people now kind of understand more of the potential that having a more direct conversation with the viewers has. Something that we can’t do in the confines of our television newscast
David: That actually brings up a pretty good question. From when WCCO started their blog in January, I believe it was, to now, how has the atmosphere in the newsroom and at WCCO in general changed? Or has it?
Jason: I don’t think it’s really changed. I think what’s really happened is that people’s perception of the blog… I get a lot of feedback on my blog. People like reading my blog quite a bit. I think it’s because mine, because I use humor in my blog and talk about funny things and entertaining things, and it’s not just all about ‘the news’, or ‘I did this very important story today’. I try to be more freewheeling with it and just kind of let my personality through and I trust that the blog readers understand that that’s what we’re doing and they don’t feel like when they watch me on TV they’re going to think, ‘Oh, well, he’s biased because on his blog he said blah, blah, blah..’ I try to be careful to stay away from… I mean, I’ll talk about anything on my blog, but I don’t really go into my own personal opinions on controversial things. I think I’ve come down firmly against people who pop their collars. I’ve taken that controversial position on my blog. And in favor or real Christmas trees as opposed to the artificial Christmas tree. I am a journalist, so you have to be sensitive about making sure your own personal opinions don’t come through. I think people in the newsroom are now excited about blogs. I think they see it as another way… in the past our only way of having a conversation with the viewers was with personal appearances. We go to talk at the Rotary Club. We go shake hands at the State Fair. I’m doing that every day with people who may or may not ever watch channel 4. I don’t know. But I’m having a conversation with viewers, and I’m hoping that I’m having a conversation with viewers who are in their 20’s and 30’s who don’t watch TV news. Maybe they’ll think, ‘This guy, he seems alright. Maybe we should check out and see what he’s doing.’ I figure if maybe I can get them to watch some of my stories in the video viewer next to my blog, then maybe that will follow with them at some point when they come to make their choice. People get older and they tend to decide ‘Oh, I got to watch the news now’. Maybe then they’ll say ‘I got to watch channel 4, that Jason guy that has that blog I’ve been reading for a year.’ That’s the hope
David: Why do you think your personal opinion on certain areas, controversial areas, maybe not so controversial areas, may affect your reputation or your trustworthiness?
Jason: I this is an issue where news is in one place now and will be in a different place in ten years from now
David: How so?
Jason: I think for years people have tried to put forth the image on the news that they are unbiased. I would rather know where somebody’s coming from. If I know where someone’s coming from… I think the most important thing is to be fair on the air. I think in this whole idea of being biased, sometimes we give equal time to things that are ridiculous. Things that any person would be like ‘This is crazy.’ If we’re doing a story on racism, do we need to give equal time to the KKK? ‘Well, some people believe that black people are inferior.’ Well of course they do, but those people are idiots. So should that be part of our story? No! So I think that in this drive to be unbiased, I think it’s somewhat misguided and I think Fox news has done an outstanding job as… they have proven, I think, their regular news organization is pretty good. Their shows are clearly very right‑wing but their news I think is pretty good. People watch it and know where they’re coming from so they can make their judgements one way or another. I don’t know that local news will change. I still think local news viewers would have a hard time knowing… ‘is Channel 4 liberal, is Channel 4 conservative?’ I don’t know. I don’t know if Don Shelby is liberal or conservative or [xx]. And Pat Kessler, who’s our political reporter, I couldn’t tell you if he’s a Democrat or a Republican. I have no idea. Which is pretty cool. That’s good, for him. As a television journalist, I don’t want anything to interfere with the message, the story. So if people have preconceived notions of my political affiliation, or my opinions on issues, than they might find it hard to listen to the people in my story. They’ll think that I’m just filtering it through my own personal opinions. So that’s, I think, why we try to keep it out
David: Alright, well thank you very much for this interview, it’s been great. It’s a lot of content, and a lot of conversation…