| June 20, 2008 | Yahoo! News' Scores First Online-Only Interview with President Bush |
 It was mentioned on The Daily Show, MSNBC, Huffington Post, AOL, and too many other places to count... Here is the link to Yahoo! News exclusive interview clip with President George W. Bush where he tells us that he hasn't played golf in 5 years and the reason why. It actually made even more news a few days later, when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann found a video of Bush golfing two months after he said he gave up the sport (following the bombing the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003).Since April when I moved into to my new job as director of programming at Yahoo! News, this exclusive Bush interview is one of the things I am most proud of that we have accomplished. The whole team worked so hard on planning it and devising the questions and shooting it. And, in the end, we were actually able to get Bush to talk about (and do) some things that made news. A whole team worked on this Bush interview, but most of the credit goes to my boss Neeraj Khemlani (who came to Yahoo! from CBS News), producers Robert Padavick and Erin Green, and Didrik Johnck who shot the interview. Also, Mike Allen from Politico was the interviewer. Here's the link to the full interview transcript. The ever-talented multimedia designer Chris Strimbu (full disclosure: he's my significant other, though this does not diminish his talents) created the animated Bush photo montage that appears at the beginning of every Bush interview clip. Labels: bush, chris, news, video, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 1:52 PM 
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| November 8, 2006 | Elex Success |
Even though I've been awake and working for most of the last 48 hours, I'm definitely excited about the Elections results, AND  I'm excited to point out that SearchEngineWatch just published a post titled "In the Elections Results Race, Yahoo!'s the Winner," saying that Yahoo!'s Election Day 2006 coverage was better than Google's, MSN's, and AOL's. They called out this interactive map that Chris built in the post. Considering this is pretty much one of the only positive pieces of press I've seen about Yahoo! vis a vis Google in the past year (see this Drift post "The Swift-Boating of Yahoo!" for more info), I'd say it was a smashing success.See, just as I pointed out two years ago in my post and flickr photoset describing how the 2004 Presidential Elections as covered at Yahoo! there are benefits to having actual human journalists taking care to gather and present information, rather then computer algorithms choosing and presenting news -- especially about important, controversial, and complicated topics. Labels: chris, elections, google, journalists, map, media, news, reporting, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 2:58 PM
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| September 16, 2005 | 3 Days Inside the Houston Astrodome |
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Here's one more rah rah Yahoo! post I've been meaning to make... Through the donation links on the Yahoo! network, we helped raise $53 million toward the Katrina relief effort. Also, there were a bunch of Yahoo! peeps who flew down to Houston to help set up a computer search network and assist people in finding their relatives. This is Hillary Mickell's excellent account of her 3 days spent in the Houston Astrodome. Also, graphic designer Kathleen Watkins spent a lot of time talking to survivors in the Astrodome and recounted the experience in this blog post. Labels: blog, katrina, news, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 11:59 AM
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| August 8, 2005 | Peter Jennings Was My Favorite Broadcast Journalist |
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I met Peter Jennings (and also rode up in an elevator with him) when I worked as an intern at ABC News in 1995. I was working for Diane Sawyer on "Prime Time Live," but we would always go stand on the catwalk and watch when Peter taped "World News Tonight." Peter Jennings was always my favorite broadcast journalist to watch work. He made fast and furious notes on all the copy that was given to him. I always got a sense that he was very interested in what was talking about, and that he was interested in conveying stories as accurately and thoroughly as he possibly could. It's very sad to hear that Peter Jennings succumbed to cancer on Sunday. It's hard to say what the future of broadcast journalism holds now, with the retirement of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel. Times, they are certainly a' changin'. So, who will give us the news now? Diane Sawyer? Hari Sreenivasen? Bloggers? Citizen journalists with video cameraphones? What do you think? Labels: journalism, journalists, news posted by Jess Barron @ 11:53 AM
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| July 7, 2005 | Awakened to London Blasts |
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When you work in online news, today is one of those terrible days when you wake up to 10 or more alerts from the AP coming in on your Blackberry one after the other. Pop. Pop. Pop. The messages say things like "LONDON (AP) Police have reported \'a number of fatalities' at one London subway station" and "LONDON (AP) Hospital officials say 190 people are being treated for injuries from explosions in central London." It is a terrible feeling. My phone rings before the alarm goes off at 7a.m. I wake up and pull the laptop off the floor and up into bed with me. More than 10 Yahoo! Messenger windows are active and highlighted in bright orange at the bottom of my screen as I sit in bed in a similarly bright orange Trainspotting T-shirt (that used to belong to J.P. before he disappeared). The active Messenger windows are all of my Yahoo! news co-producers (in Canada, East Coast, West Coast, and London) who are pinging me to join voice chats to discuss how to handle this news on our front doors and portal pages. Everybody is so on top of it, but still we're scrambling to stay on top of the latest angles: How many dead? How many injured? Is Al-Queda being officially blamed? My friend Clare in the Yahoo! London office is also telling me via Messenger that she narrowly missed getting onto the bus that minutes later exploded. She decided to take a faster bus this morning instead. I'm telling her that I'm glad she's OK, but this is all pretty horrible. If you want to read the latest news on this story, check out the Yahoo! Full Coverage page. The people working on it -- my friends and colleagues on the Full Coverage team -- are updating it with the best articles, info and photos available online. Also, check out the London bomb blast Flickr pool (sent to me by Esther). posted by Jess Barron @ 7:00 AM
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| April 4, 2005 | Will Our Next Pope Be a Blogger? |
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This ABC News piece describes how Pope John Paul II used his media-savvy to become a global superstar. (He released a music video, featuring him singing and reciting psalms and the Gospels. He also recorded the rosary.) It's also interesting to note that he became pope in 1978, the same year that instant global television became available. An AP news article published on Yahoo! News today explains the difficult process of determining the next pope, there's an aside mentioning the Internet and how it may affect the selection of the new pope: ...And there's another source of information that wasn't around in 1978 -- the Internet. A cardinal's every utterance is now stored there, if his fellow churchmen are curious. That could also make or break some of the "papabile," as potential candidates are known in Italian. I wonder if it would be possible to have an Internet-savvy pope. Do the cardinals ever go online? Could we ever have a pope who had his own blog? Labels: blog, blogger, media, news, pope posted by Jess Barron @ 11:35 AM
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| March 3, 2005 | Are Blogs to Blame? |
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Tom Regan, who I met last month at Poynter, posted to his Christian Science Monitor blog called My American Experience a piece positing that Americans' news and information consumption is today largely made up of opinion pieces rather than actual reporting and that this has a very dangerous impact on public opinion. He points to a Harris Interactive Poll showing that 64% of Americans *still* think that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al-Qaida. While I agree that Americans are consuming more opinion-influenced "news," and I do agree that blogs contribute to this somewhat -- I think that more of the blame in this case needs to be given to FOX News and conservative radio commentators. I just don't believe that any bloggers (right-wing or left-wing) have this huge of an influence on the opinion of the average American yet. For instance, is there any one blogger with readership over 1 million yet? (All the most influential newspapers in the U.S. have online readerships over 2 million). I would bet that the average American still does not read blogs regularly to get their news. Anyone agree/disagree? Add your comments at the end of Tom's post. Last week I did also see an Op/Ed piece that editorial cartoonist Ted Rall wrote on "Bloggers and the New McCarthyism". Rall also focused on the danger of these right-wing blogs. It was interesting to me that Rall pretty much ignored that there are any non-right-wing blogs out there. Am I underestimating the "threat" of right-wing blogs? Labels: blog, blogger, journalism, journalists, news, newspapers posted by Jess Barron @ 11:44 AM
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| January 30, 2005 | What Are We Defining as Journalism? |
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This morning my dad showed me around North Port and the neighboring towns of Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte, Florida, both of which I watch being ravaged during hurricane Charley last August on ABC News NOW while handling Yahoo!'s video coverage. I was surprised to still see so much hurricane damage -- some houses were still torn open. When I arrived at Poynter for the welcome reception and dinner, I met fellow redhead Theresa Moore, Executive Producer of Web Content for WTSP-TV Tampa Bay's 10. Fresno Bee reporter Matt Thompson came over and welcomed me saying, "Hey, you're one of the bloggers here!" I found out that Matt and another conference participant Robin Sloan have kept a blog called SnarkMarket since late 2003. Robin currently works as a producer at INdTV in San Francisco. (Oddly enough, former VP Al Gore is a founder of the network which aims to serve the twentysomething and thirtysomething audience with "real life video." This Washington Post piece tells a bit about what kinds of programming to expect, including a show called "That's F*&#ed Up". I told him about Pirate Cat Radio and Pirate Cat TV. So far, I see the print newspaper folks making comments that are somewhat disdainful of bloggers, while knowing that bloggers are themselves pretty darn disdainful of "real" media folks. Longtime family friend and my brother's first girlfriend Kristy Fox drove down from Orlando to visit me, and we walked around St. Petersburg late at night and found a restaurant to serve us chocolate cake and tiramisu. She brought a photo of us taken in 1988, which I may post here. Labels: blog, blogger, dad, florida, news posted by Jess Barron @ 9:26 PM
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| January 29, 2005 | The Journalism of Online Futures |
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I am about to fly to Florida to visit my dad for a day and see his new house in North Port, and then attend this Poynter seminar on "The Future of Online Journalism" in St. Petersburg. The 40-person Poynter group is truly made up of luminaries (a.k.a. smart people) of the journalism world, who you might recognize from holding such titles as: How I got myself involved with the likes of these folks -- I'll never know! OK, OK... as much as it pains me to, sometimes I guess I actually do need to take myself seriously for a moment. I suppose I have worked on some pretty kick-ass technologically forward-thinking and creative projects over the past 9 years. One of my greatest strengths is that I never take myself too seriously, however that also seems to be one of my biggest weaknesses too. I wonder if it's always that way for everyone that their strengths are their weaknesses too. In filling out the homework assignment for the course, I just realized that it's been almost 9 years since I've been working professionally on the web and almost 10 years since I've been doing this website. The most interesting question for me to think about was #6 -- "What do you imagine you would be doing today if you hadn't gotten into online news (or if the Internet hadn’t come along)?" My response: "Magazine journalism, independent 'zine publishing, and/or pirate radio." I realized I value having a voice in independent self-published media, but realize I'll need to sell work to a major established company as well in order to make money. I guess that has always been my career philosophy. Labels: journalism, journalists, news, online posted by Jess Barron @ 10:25 AM
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| January 20, 2005 | No Place for Thespians... |
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"It's really too bad there's no place for thespians in the parade." -Sam Donaldson on ABC News NOW coverage of Bush's inauguration Starting at 6a.m. PST today I was putting together and monitoring our portal's live video coverage of Bush's second inauguration centered primarily around the ABC News NOW internet-only channel. ABC News NOW's coverage was somewhat off-the-cuff and technologically experimental, so the end result was pretty interesting. It was almost as unpredictable and weird as watching pirate TV. The ABC anchors -- Bob Woodruff, Sam Donaldson and Hari Sreenivasan -- interspersed their inauguration commentary with interviews from high schools around the country via internet cams. They also included short video clips captured with cell phone cams by students and other inauguration attendees. The footage was very raw and grainy, but sometimes amusing. One woman from the "Red Hot Mamas" parade group captured video footage of waiting in the porta potties line, and they showed that on-air. (That clip gave me Burning Man flashbacks.) The use of personal broadcast technology was good to see, but the loose, casual (and at times competitive-seeming) banter between the anchormen themselves was probably the most interesting aspect. One high school student watching a bandmember friend march in the parade identified herself as a "thespian," and Sam Donaldson said, "It's really too bad there's no place for thespians in the parade." Then he asked "Have you guys heard the joke about the guy with the thespian cousin who goes to the all-girls' college?" (He was actually riffing off of how the word 'thespian' sounds like 'lesbian.' It was unbelievable to hear something off-color like that coming out of a newscaster's mouth. I was hoping that Mary Cheney wasn't listening. It was a bit dicey.) Toward the tail-end of the parade, the anchors' commentary became goofier and goofier. As the cavalry groups on horseback passed in front of the bulletproof glass parade-viewing window (umm, can I get one of those added in my apartment?) that the Bush family watched from, Sam Donaldson and Hari began talking about how the president always made a point to give a special wave and thumbs-up to the guys whose job it was to walk a few paces behind the horses armed with shovels to pick up the poop. "That's the kinda thing you can only see on ABC News Now," Sam Donaldson said while Hari directed the cameras to zoom in on Bush's tumbs-up to the poop pick-up guys. "He's a man of the people," Sam said. "That's how he won the election." I suppose there's a lesson to be learned from this. I hope the future Democratic candidates and campaign strategists have taken note. My 5 favorite photos from the inauguration are: #5 Jenna gives the horns of rock (do you think I could get Jenna to come out to The Odeon for some Kostume Karaoke?) #4 Bush gives the horns of rock (like father, like daughter!) #3 Hmmm. Maybe Bush IS a marionette controlled by Satan? (that is, after all, what the Norwegians think. #2 Jenna yawns during the inauguration (too much partying the night before?) #1 Bush's limo gets pelted with a snowball (Sam and Bob also argued over whether or not the anti-Bush protestors were hurling snowballs at the President's motorcade. Sam was pretty certain that the projectiles being hurled were not snowballs. Looks like he was wrong.) posted by Jess Barron @ 8:33 PM
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