Video from our GENERATOR event with the Time Warner Media Lab featuring:
Michael Barrett
Former ABC News president David Westin’s memoir, Exit Interview, is out this week. Our own Max Robins, executive director of the Paley Center’s Media Council, draws on his years covering the network news business in his review of Exit Interview in today’s Wall Street Journal:
When [Bob] Iger tapped Mr. Westin to lead the news division two years later, I had been covering the network news business first as TV editor of Variety and then as an industry columnist for TV Guide, and I was not alone in being surprised at the choice. Mr. Westin’s counterparts at rival networks had résumés with impressive journalism credentials. His own predecessor was Roone Arledge, the pioneering producer who had transformed ABC Sports before building ABC News into a first-class news division.
By contrast, Mr. Westin was regarded by the news establishment as “a 42 long,” an anchorman-handsome suit with no journalistic credibility. That rap from the “high priests of journalism”—as he called them in that New Yorker profile—clearly continues to haunt him. In “Exit Interview,” a memoir of the 14 years he spent at ABC News (he left at the end of 2010), Mr. Westin labors to establish his news bona fides while recounting the pressures of balancing journalistic principles with economic realities.
“The one tweet Booker wishes he could have back is a joke about Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor who disappeared for a week purportedly hiking on the Appalachian trail, but was actually with his Argentinian mistress. Booker tweeted a joke to the effect of “if anyone’s looking for me I’m not on the Appalachian trail, I’m with a hot sweet Colombian blend,” he said (a coffee reference). A staffer took it down. Booker reprimanded him.
“Nobody edits my tweets.”
Booker says his philosophy is “never ever delete a tweet,” even if it is a “butt tweet.” “
New @fastcompany
via Nieman Journalism Lab:
Richard Gingras, the head of news products for Google, visited the Nieman Foundation last Friday to talk about Google’s approach to news and information discovery, but also the pace of change in technology and how it has affected the future of news. Recently Gingras has spent time talking about his8 questions that will define the future of journalism.
On Friday he said newspapers need to completely rethink their approach to news, how the design of their site responds to the flow of audience and the ways news companies can separate their business model and content model to help increase audience and generate revenues.
Click-through to watch the video.
Gingras also had some great things to say about the future of journalism at our “Future of News and Information” summit in Madrid last month.
Yahoo! Interim CEO Ross Levinsohn at the Paley Center for Media in LA last week.
Moderator Paul Noglows asks: Can the Yahoo! brand be saved?
The Paley Center’s Max Robins with Om Malik at the Guardian Activate NY summit.
Om’s pretty strong endorsement for Silicon Alley: “The future of media is in Soho.”
(Source: paleycenter.org)
Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo! EVP and potential CEO pick spoke at the Paley Center in LA yesterday where he outlined the reinvention of the Yahoo! brand and talked digital content strategy.
Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik on how brands and news organizations can benefit from integrating their product with Facebook at #IC2012 Madrid.
(Source: paleycenter.org)
