1315-Tue-062221-PR-Master the Moment Maximized Video Storytelling for a Remote, Digital World-FINAL-V2: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

1315-Tue-062221-PR-Master the Moment Maximized Video Storytelling for a Remote, Digital World-FINAL-V2

Online News Association48min

Speaker 1

01:03

Welcome to master the moment video storytelling for a remote and digital world storytelling is is how we connect and develop shared truths. And technology has always influenced how we produce and consume stories. I'm Rakesh Agarwal, I'm the founder and CEO of snapstream. At snapstream, we're on a mission to help help organizations leverage the power of news and media moments and how they tell stories. I'm also a news junkie and a student of the of the media. And I'm an early stage technology investor. And I'm excited to be joined by one of someone that I consider to be one of the deepest thinkers in news and media, john Battelle, john founded Wired Magazine, the industry standard and seven other companies, including John's current company, which we'll talk about recounts. And john and i were chatting earlier, I've never met john, in person, or, you know, in a live conversation like this. But I think I first came across john, when he was, I think, the band manager, so to speak for a popular blog called Boing Boing. And we were talking about how that was a really special time in, in the internet, and the development, a lot of a lot of independent media. Anyways, the recount is a snapshot in customer, and they're doing amazing work telling news stories, specifically using video moments. So I'm excited to have john here to share his insights on this work that they're doing at the recount, and more broadly, his insights and views of the world of news and media in 2021. So john, welcome, and thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Rick, do you want to add anything to your to your background that the introduction introduction that I made?

Speaker 2

02:55

Oh, most of the, you know, let's just focus on what we can talk about, you know, I've been working on issues of technology media, and you know, the internet since God 1987. So, it's been a long time.

Speaker 1

03:12

Yeah. Well, great. Let's, let's start out and and start with the now and talk about talk about the recounts. Are you I read somewhere that you described, the recount where I think your your co founder, john Heilemann described the recount, Palamon as, as hip hop journalism. Yeah. So can you talk more about why you? Maybe why and how you landed on the model that you've chosen for the recount, and maybe describe how you how you decide? How do you describe the recount to start out with maybe the audience, not everyone has actually watched the product of the recount?

Speaker 2

03:52

Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you haven't, you should, I agree. But the problem that we set out to solve was that the power of sight, sound and motion felt to us, not entirely leveraged when it came to news that the forms and format of you know, high quality journalism in video had been sort of relegated to either kind of linear television cable news format, right? Where you have suits on sets, talking about things, every so often you get to actually see video of things that are happening, but not that often because it's mostly suits on sets talking. And they tend to be coming from a partisan point of view. You're either Team Blue or Team Red. And the other, you know, sight, sound and motion, you know, a form factor that's well established in journalism is documentary, long form. And it struck john and i when we were starting the company that You know, we were very much in a post linear moment television was going through a significant shift a major disruption, probably analogous to the shift from broadcast to cable, new forms of distribution, new formats, new, you know, uses of video. But there wasn't a news brand that meant that that was native to that. And so, you know, our mission and our ambition is to essentially reinvent television is. And in order to do that, we had to kind of, you know, start with a clean slate and say, Well, what would we make if we didn't have to follow the sort of form and rules of traditional television journalism? And that's when we came up with what john Heilemann calls hip hop news. Now, you know, that has a lot of implications. It's not like we're, you know, trying to be hip. But the idea is, the form of hip hop came by sampling. And, you know, reimagining the melodies, from a base of music across decades, and across genres and styles. And it was a remix of the culture. And so the first products that we came out with certainly not the only ones we do now, but the first products we came out with, when we launched about a year and a half ago, were remixes of all the video that you find not only on traditional, you know, broadcast and linear cable, but also social media, audio, and even text, graphics and graphical treatments. And so what we try to do is essentially not waste your time, especially in a world where people are consuming video on their phone, and they're consuming it on platforms, you know, on social and so on, how can they get high quality, you know, super dense, useful information in the format that makes sense, you know, for kind of a fractured information ecosystem that we have in a post linear world, well, that requires that you be really, really good at identifying just the moments that matter to tell the story, and putting them together in a really compact and elegant way using editing and graphics. And a lot of the tricks of the trade that, you know, people in your world recaptured, you know, very familiar with. And that's a course sort of set of muscles that we've been exercising for almost two years now. And it informs now everything we make, whether it's a longer form piece, or like, you know, recently, there was a piece that we put up on Twitter, that was only four seconds long. But as far as I'm concerned, that piece has, you know, roughly the equivalent of 10,000 words of information in it. It's so powerful if you pick just the right moments and put them together in just the right way.

Speaker 1

07:49

Yeah, part of our insight at snapstream has been and why our mission is one of moments has been that the part is, is quite often greater than the whole. And that's especially true when it comes to this powerful medium of video. And so it's it is the four seconds versus the 30 minutes that you know, gets engagement, drives connection and increases increases reach you go back to two years ago, when you got started. I I'm curious how you landed on this as the as the product, I'm sure it's evolved over time. But did you you and john come in with this thesis of hip hop journalism from the from the outset from like, when you walk in and say, Hey, this is this is what this new company is going to be? Or was there like an a series of steps and unlocking of insights that got you to the place where an aha moment that, you know, became, you know, the trajectory for the company and the product as it is today?

Speaker 2

08:52

It was kind of a combination of both? I mean, our first sort of hypothesis, you know, which was a question that that john Heilemann had himself, you know, john has a 30 year career 30 plus year career as a, you know, sort of op journalist covering our in America, usually politics, but also media and tech. And, you know, we're going in to the 2020 election cycle, clearly the biggest story in the United States and late 2018, early 2019 was, you know, the forthcoming election, and the choice that the country was going to make, whether it was going to continue on the path that it had been on under the last administration, or whether it was going to move to a new, you know, to a new president. That story was so big and so complicated and nuanced. JOHN asked a simple question when he suggested that we discuss whether we should start a company together. He said, you know, why is it that you know, on this device, right, this phone, why is it that there isn't anywhere I can go to see you know, sight sound mo What's happening in politics right now? To see it? Right, there's plenty of places I can go to read about it, I can browse the headlines of The Washington Post or the New York Times or Politico, you know. And if I'm a reader, I can get smart relatively quickly. But the truth is, john, of course, is well known now as a television journalist. Or video, there's just no place that I can reliably go. And that's struck him as very strange. And it struck him as an opportunity. Like, what if we could answer that question, that there was a place that reliably if you wanted to know what was happening, you want to see it with your own eyes, so that you can make up your own mind and see the power of the moving image and understand what was happening so that you could literally make your mind up about, I mean, how do I feel about this happening or that happening? There really wasn't a place to go, because if you turned on, you know, the television you heard a lot of people talking about, but you didn't see what was happening. So that was the core problem, you know, can we do that? And can we distribute it in a way where people can find it reliably. And then pretty quickly, after we agreed, that was probably one to solve, we came upon the solution of the remix, of finding just those moments and sort of stringing them together, like, you know, a string of pearls. And then we hired a team and started experimenting with form. And that team is extraordinary. I mean, the the degree that we've had so much success is because of their talents. And their sort of native ability to express video in in ways that work very well in, say, social platforms. And, you know, the we started building longer form things for us long form sometimes means two to three minutes, but using the same sets of skills until longer stories, and then we launched a podcast division as well. And our podcasts are all visual television. And what we do is take that same musculature that we developed about the ability to pop in the right graphic, the right moment, the right you know, sound on tape, and turn what might just be a relatively visually uninteresting conversation, even if the conversations interesting, of course, but and, and turn that into a visual storytelling, you know, template as well. So the core of the company is really identifying the moment worth paying attention to, which if you pull back for a minute, and I'm, you know, an old journalist, now, the role of an editor, the role of a journalist, the role of media brand, is to be the arbiter of what's worth paying attention to. That's all you're supposed to do. This is worth paying attention to, right. Your editorial judgment in determining what's paying it worth paying attention to, and then your voice and saying, Here's why. That is voice and point of view, which is that the essence of good journalism and good editorial content. Yeah, yeah.

Processing audio...