MERRILL BROWN
July 2000

The editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com examines the changing face of convention coverage on the Internet. The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Online Special: Online Convention Coverage Extended Interviews: Merrill Brown Kathleen de Laski Online Special: GOP Convention Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the media     MSNBC America Online GOP Convention Democratic Convention	NEWSHOUR: There's been a lot of talk, Merrill, about how this is the Year of the Web, as mentioned in the political season in general. And if it is, why? MERRILL BROWN: Okay. There's a great confluence of events right now that make the Internet a principal source of news for millions of people in a more dramatic and profound way than has been the case previously, in the sense of people being engaged in community activities on the Web, in the sense of PC penetration reaching extraordinary numbers at home and at work, in the sense of high-speed access to the Internet being more widely available in significant numbers than ever before, in the sense of video being vastly more plausible as a consumer experience. That's now far more than the case than it was only a year or two ago. And in terms of people's general information consumption habits, the Internet is now right in the mix in even more significant ways than old-line media are.
	Covering politics on the Internet
	NEWSHOUR: What is it about the Internet that makes it particularly well-suited to these types of events; to conventions to elections to political events in general? MERRILL BROWN: The Internet is an extraordinarily valuable medium for covering politics. It allows you to do live television. It allows the user to delve into data and into races from anywhere around the country at his or her need or on his or her schedule. It allows people to interact with one another, in many ways like the medium of talk radio. It allows people to get news headlines based, again, on their schedules, as opposed to when somebody decides to air a broadcast or publish a newspaper. The range of things that the Internet can do, both technically and journalistically, is extraordinary when you compare it to any other sort of single-channel medium. And by that I mean a television set that would have only one network to broadcast over and only do it in one time frame or a newspaper, which at least until the advent of the Internet, had only one publishing cycle. So politics makes a lot of sense. It's data rich, it's community-driven; in other words, it engages people in conversation, it is a national event. You know we have 500 races involving Congress coming up this year, a little less than 500. People can go wherever they want with that experience they choose because of the interactivity of this medium. NEWSHOUR: I guess NBC News and MSNBC are particularly well-suited in this, but given that you have an operated online site, a cable outlet and a network, what is your strategy going into the convention on how you'll cover it? MERRILL BROWN: Well, our strategy is to use these media in a way that makes sense for both the user and, of course, for our companies. NBC News is the place to go for mass events because it is a broadcast network with vastly more audience than any other television medium. The cable network now is reaching nearly every U.S. cable home and will be in every U.S. cable home before too long. So it makes sense, as the convention progresses in secondary events, and events at least below the tier of an acceptance speech, and then the Internet makes extraordinary sense. It is ubiquitous. It's in every house that has a PC, and PC penetration is very high these days. The Internet makes a lot of sense because it can provide everything else, both from a data point of view, from a news coverage point of view, and now from a video point of view. We'll be doing video programming, which will supplement what the broadcast and cable networks are doing. NEWSHOUR: How, given your partnerships with those, with the other entities of NBC News, how do you have to be different? Do you have to make sure you're not mimicking them in any way or do you have to do this in a completely new fashion? MERRILL BROWN: Well, the goal is not to be new or old, the goal is to be effective and to serve people. So that's the principal thing we're thinking about--how does what we're doing make sense as part of the total package with a cable network and a broadcast network? But the second thing we need to do is really to demonstrate to people because we're going to be introducing the capabilities of an Internet news site at a large-scale event like this. We're also trying to demonstrate what the medium can do. So when you see our anchor broadcasting on MSNBC.com, covering something going on on the floor or covering a new piece of polling data, the anchor will say things like: If you want to see the full polling data, click over my left shoulder or click down to my right, wherever the link is on the page that the user is using, and get the full data there. So the goal is to create an experience that really makes sense in this medium, to be using chat and bulletin board services, to be using data, to be using correspondence in multiple places simultaneously with different media, so that you can be talking via audio, you can be talking versus text, you can actually be talking about maps that people are using in interactive ways, using the anchor as very much a host of an Internet experience is the way we're thinking about this, and we hope that'll work for people. NEWSHOUR: Do you, particularly at MSNBC on the Internet, feel an added responsibility because NBC network is dialing back its coverage of this convention? MERRILL BROWN: We have enormous responsibility when it comes to the entire campaign year and the conventions are a big part of that. The responsibility is built around the fact that the Internet is in every household and every office worldwide, and the potential audience for what we're doing is measured in the millions. I think I've used this data in the past, but it is the case on busy news days -- and these will be busy news days -- that our service has a larger audience than any daily newspaper in the United States. It is a very large audience, which is one of those factors that makes the Internet make a lot of sense in this political campaign. Our challenge is journalistic. It's not marketing. It's not about what NBC has done in the past. It's what NBC is doing today, and how to make that make most sense for consumers.
	Still editorially important?
	NEWSHOUR: Are these conventions still editorially important? MERRILL BROWN: Conventions are editorially important because of who they assemble under one roof. You never gather the breadth of political professionals in one place, and the breadth of the politically active citizenry in one place, as you do at a convention. So they remain remarkably interesting events that oftentimes do give you insights about who's going to be elected president and vice president of the United States. You are introduced to the vice president, you see the presidential candidates (which is especially true this time) in settings they'll dominate and own for the first time in their political histories. NEWSHOUR: Shifting gears just a little bit, there was that Pew Research Center for the People in the Press study that said a lot of Internet users find that the Internet outlets for the broadcast outlets and some other outlets, such as cnn.com, et cetera, are more credible than the broadcast outlets themselves. Why do you think that is? MERRILL BROWN: I'm not quite sure what to make out of that data because we don't believe ourselves to have any more credibility than certainly our parents or our colleagues. But the public does have certain views about old-line news organizations, be they print or television, that we seem, at least for now, to be given a pass from. And I think that's for a lot of reasons. First of all, we're capable of bringing people many more voices. So whatever people perceive to be the voice of NBC News, be it Couric, Brokaw or Brian Williams, we are not them. We are many voices. We are all of their voices, of course, but we're also the voices of political pundants of a variety of ideological persuasions. We're also a business news site. We're a sports news site. We offer people chat and community activities. We offer streaming video. So we're many, many things. I mean, we're just as much the Tom Brokaw channel as we are the channel of Dateline or the channel of the reporters who work for MSNBC.com. We are the site for the Today Show and the site for Don Imus. We're also now the Internet home of Newsweek magazine. So the beauty of what we're trying to do is that it's many communities and many voices. To equate it to one broadcast network, even though that broadcast network is a core part of who we are, really limits who we are. We're many things that NBC News is not. NEWSHOUR: Is the media overstating the power of the Internet the political season? Are they overplaying this story? MERRILL BROWN: The media is certainly giving a lot of attention to the Internet's role in this election, and it's largely because the Internet audience is of a scale now -- for the first time in a national political campaign -- where it surely matters as a way to distribute news and information. How big of a story it is, we'll see in the fall. But it's a big story right now, particularly since the primary schedule dictated that we knew the two major party nominees many months ago. So there hasn't been the drama of May and June leading up to the convention that you've had in previous convention years. Inevitably, when the media doesn't have a political story, it looks at the media story. And we're a very good media story. I mean, as I've said, we are the largest news distribution vehicle in the country today on busy news days, larger than the USA Today print publication, larger than any daily newspaper, in fact, on very busy days. So you add the political convention dynamic against the emergence of Internet news being a key part of the news diet, and you have what is the makings of a very good summer story, at least. We'll see if it lingers in the fall. NEWSHOUR: There are going to be so many Internet outlets at the conventions and throughout the political season -- is there any potential downside? And what's the upside to having so many different voices out there? MERRILL BROWN: Well, the Internet is special in many ways. One of the ways it's special is that the type face you see on my site could look just like the type face on some site run by an extremist group, and it's very easy to cut and paste and send Internet content around. So one of the things you always face is that Internet content, when it's manipulated, can be made to look like anything. Our site is no different in that regard. But putting that technological oddity aside, more voices is better than few; more profitable voices is certainly better than few unprofitable voices. It's really important that all of us view Internet news as a business, especially now that people aren't seeing the Internet business through the extraordinary lens of a couple years ago, when everybody was throwing hundreds of millions at every website imaginable. So there is some risk in people not being profitable and being good business models. But in terms of multiple voices, look, it's the world's largest newsstand ever invented, and the big newsstands you see with thousands of magazines on them are a great thing, and this is a great thing in the same fashion.
	Learning to cover conventions
	NEWSHOUR: What, for you, would really constitute success coming out of the conventions, after Los Angeles? MERRILL BROWN: The greatest satisfaction coming out of the conventions would be for those of who work here to feel like we gave it our best effort and perhaps broke some stories and were creative in how we covered the convention. I guess the second biggest kind of satisfaction would be for people who watch such things, pundits and political activists of various kinds, to acknowledge that we made a difference in the information flow. And I guess the third thing would be whether some audience really showed up to get engaged in this, at least in the kind of large numbers we're anticipating. So we're focusing on doing the best job we can and attracting all sorts of new people to the Internet medium at a time when there's a lot of attention on what we're doing. NEWSHOUR: Can you then compare your efforts this to '96, when MSNBC was a brand-new entity? MERRILL BROWN: Well, in 1996, we were literally in operation for only days when we showed up at the two conventions. And in terms of scale, it's not comparable. We had a few people there, and frankly, NBC News didn't quite know what to make of either us or the Internet medium as a part of what they were doing. The biggest fundamental change this year versus 1996 is that we're a core part of the NBC News convention plan, which is a critical change in the circumstances over a couple of years ago. So from the beginning of the planning process, NBC has realized and has understood, you know, intuitively and through years of working with us in developing the site that you've got to be thinking about the Internet in all parts of your planning process, from how you allocate anchor and correspondent time to how you think about how you're using your trucks, to making sure everybody has adequate sets and sound stages from which to work. We are totally integrated into what they're doing, both in terms of the logistics and mechanics of covering a convention, from the journalistic point of view about how stories are going to be approached, and also, and importantly from a marketing point of view, in how you talk about your coverage. NBC, in everything it's done so far and in everything it will do, will talk about the Internet site as if it's core to what it's doing, rather than a project off to the side. NEWSHOUR: What do you think of the parties' own efforts on the Web. MERRILL BROWN: I think it's spectacular that the parties and activist groups of all kinds are using the Web to communicate to their constituent. I think it's terrific that the political parties and activist groups of all kinds are using the Internet to communicate with their memberships and with potential members. And it is my hope in the same way that the Internet is a way to bring people back to news and public affairs through news coverage. I think political parties can do the same thing. The accessibility of the Internet, the ability to delve deeply into issues that concern you, the ability to really study politics in either casual or more sophisticated ways that it provides, I think it's a great thing. I mean, I'm as supportive of propaganda sites, such as those of political candidates, as long as they're labeled properly, as I am of our own journalistic sites. So I think it's a great thing because it's a communications medium that breaks through all bottlenecks. NEWSHOUR: So you see the Internet as a large potential solution to turning around voter apathy and public disengagement from the entire process? MERRILL BROWN: I see the Internet as a way to break down lots of communication barriers, and I see it as a way to engage the next generation of consumers in news in the world around them in a way that no medium invented before ever could. NEWSHOUR: In 4 years, when you go to the next set of conventions, when you cover the next presidential race, what do you think your convention coverage and Internet-related coverage overall will look like? MERRILL BROWN: In the next political campaign, there's going to be one big difference between the 2000 campaign, and that's the fact that everybody, at work and at home, is going to have access to Internet video and not just the kind of video you see today, but multiple screens, with multiple story lines, and designed for multiple audiences. So we'll not just be carrying the floor. We'll be doing packages available on demand that will fulfill the needs of particular audiences. So if your issue was taxes, we'll have services and stories available for you about taxes. If your issue is you want to be interacting with your delegates from your home state, people like ourselves will be providing that level of interaction. So I think the big change next time around will be the video streaming of various kinds. We will become the principal way to distribute video, both to the home and office for big events like this one. I think in the next presidential campaign in 2004, the Internet will be at parity, in terms of distribution with cable television and will be thought of in the same way you think of television coverage of a big event like this. And it'll be right there in the video listings, if you will, in the newspaper. They'll be NBC, MSNBC Cable, MSNBC.com, with parity in listings and programming, and it'll all seem like parts of the whole.

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