KATHLEEN DE LASKI
July 2000

The director of political and government programming for America Online outlines the next generation of online convention coverage. 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	TERENCE SMITH: Tell me what role you think AOL and the Internet is going to play at the convention? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Well, we really bring a new dimension to coverage from the voter's point of view, because not only now can you just watch it from an entertainment value standpoint, but you can interact with the experience. You can customize your own experience, and decide whether you want the Republican spin, you want to see issue stands of particular candidates. You can decide whether you want to ask a question to a news maker, take a poll, rate the speeches live, any of the above. TERENCE SMITH: And that's unique to the Internet function and different from the mainstream media? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Right. The media that have come before have been unidirectional, one-way, and this is really the first medium that not only gives you the things that each of the other does, but it adds this new dimension of a two-way dialogue of the interactivity, and also the customization. In other words, the ability to access the information at the time and place of your own choosing.
	Carving a niche for the 'net
	TERENCE SMITH: Is it well suited, do you think, to this kind of a news event? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Oh, conventions and any campaign moment really is tailor-made for the Internet, and I say that because it allows you to strip away the theater, the spin, and really get at the facts. Basically, the Internet, at its best, is a research tool, and what event is more of a research event than figuring out who you're going to vote for, figuring out on your terms instead of the candidates' terms. TERENCE SMITH: It was nice of them to create a convention for you to do this. Now, you have been there--you, AOL and the Internet have been there before, correct? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Yes. TERENCE SMITH: When was the first time? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: I went for AOL as the convention correspondent in 1996, and we were there--there were just a few of us. It was a small little band of novelty acts trying to figure out what will work in the conventions online? There weren't as many viewers, members, watchers, participants on our site, but what we really did then at that stage was pioneer what an interactive political event would be like. TERENCE SMITH: Do you have any estimate now of how many people are going to follow the convention on AOL and on the Internet, in the roundest figures? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: No, I don't think I can guess, because I think it all comes down to the level of promotion that AOL and others are going to give it on any particular night, and that really is determined by, you know, what else is happening. You know, if there's a plane crash, then, obviously, fewer people will go to the convention coverage. It's really hard to estimate. I can say that in the continuum of an election year the convention is not the biggest campaign moment, and we recognize that, but it's an excellent place to showcase, and really, a laboratory to try things out. The debates will be--that's the Super Bowl of the election season from the voters' standpoint. And that's when--we like to try some things out now that we can then really hit home runs with with the audience in the fall. TERENCE SMITH: Now, tell me, when you went there four years ago for AOL and for the Internet, how was it different than when you were there before for ABC? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: The car to take me to my live appearance was gone. Nobody recognized me. There was no food truck. We didn't have legions of producers running around. We didn't have assigned hotel rooms, and there was not sort of flowing floor passes. It was really just me and a couple of team members, you know, sort of fighting our way in. I felt more like, you know, a college newspaper reporter trying to get access. TERENCE SMITH: You're going to take many more this time? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Yes. Now, we don't need to take as many as the networks do, because we handle a lot of the production side from back here, but we will have a few dozen people who will be on site, mainly to do our live show and the convention cam, and we're going to have delegate diaries, where we have five on-the-ground delegates who will be filing every day for us.
	An interactive convention
	TERENCE SMITH: So briefly tell me what your coverage is going to consist of? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Well, if you are interested in just dropping in on the convention floor, we'll have an ongoing 24-hour convention cam from our sky box. We'll do a pregame show every night, which is mostly an Internet chat show, which you participate in by typing, but we'll have a video and audio line going so you can watch the guests. And the difference in this kind of show, compared to the usual pundit show is that we will have the members--our members ask questions and decide in advance what the show should be about, so they're really driving the direction of the show each night. And then during the speeches, we'll have instant polls so you can rate the speeches as they're happening. TERENCE SMITH: Each year, it seems to me, or each election cycle, I hear that this is the year the Internet will come of age, become a real factor in the public appreciation of the election cycle on choices they have to make. Is this the year? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Well, it depends upon your litmus test. If you litmus test is the presidential race will be determined by the Internet, this is probably not the year. Although, you could argue that John McCain hung in there a lot longer as a Republican candidate than he otherwise would have because of the Internet this year. So certainly the Internet has influenced the presidential race this year. There will be a race somewhere--my guess is at the congressional level--where the Internet strategy makes the difference between winning and losing. I predict that. From the voter's standpoint, this is definitely the year of the Internet, because enough of the audience is now online that their decisions will definitely be influenced. I predict that at least half of the Internet audience, they will be influenced by things they read online in making their choice for president. TERENCE SMITH: Are you at least partly motivated by the void created by the decision of the broadcast networks to pull back and reduce their live coverage? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: I wouldn't say that we're motivated by that void. I mean, it is just--I don't know whether it's coincidence that our trajectory into this space is happening at the same time as they're pulling back, but all I can say is that Ted Koppel left the Republican convention in '96 because he felt that the networks were being manipulated. And that sort of for me summed up the staginess of the events from a network standpoint. The Internet, I think is going to soar as the medium for this and other kind of political events, because it can allow people to determine for themselves--allow voters to determine for themselves -- what their experience is going to be. So I think it will be the medium of choice for voters, and that's not probably what's causing the networks to pull out or what's causing us to go in, but that's the happy side effect.
	Conventions as infomercials?
	TERENCE SMITH: What about the Koppel complaint that--and the network complaint broadly, that these conventions have become infomercials for the parties, and that the networks were being asked to run in fact an infomercial? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Well, the good thing about the Internet is that we can get around that in the sense that we can offer the partisans the infomercial, but we can also offer the voters the stance on the issues. We can offer them the details of the party platform that maybe the party doesn't want to put on the front page. We can show a lot of what's going on behind the scenes. So we can offer the theater, but we can also get around it by offering people a lot of other choices. It's just a great moment for us as a medium and AOL as a company that tries to appeal to a broader audience. It's a great moment for us to introduce a lot of citizens to an easy way to help figure out who they want to vote for, because the Internet is, you know, it's pretty painless to go in and look up information on people. TERENCE SMITH: These couple dozen people that go with you, will you be doing original reporting and trying to break news and stories, or packaging existing stories? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: From the news standpoint we think that news coverage is done very well by our partners, and our role is really to package up and present, in easy flow fashion, what our news partners offer. But where I feel we are breaking ground is in areas such as our tools, and, for instance, something called President Match. You know, you click on different buttons. And it ranks the candidates for you, based on your views. So it is sort of an easy way to see who's with you on the issues and who's not. It provides a service to the public, but in a way I think it signals a new direction for journalism itself. TERENCE SMITH: Who is your competition in Philadelphia? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Our competition is more what else you might choose to do with your time, rather than anyone else who is online, since we at AOL are the largest Internet service provider. We used to say "Seinfeld" was our competition, "Monday Night Football" was our competition. So it might be--you know, maybe "Survivor" will be the competition now or "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" But we don't really think of ourselves as competing with, you know, other online providers. TERENCE SMITH: That's what I had in mind, whether you did. The others tend to be more niche online services that feed, I suppose, the political junkie? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Right. I think that's true. And if somebody really wants to follow the nitty-gritty of what's happening on politics, they're probably going to want to go to one of our partners, for instance, like Hotline, which we'll offer. But the other online service providers for the most part haven't--you know, aren't really packaging up politics in the way that we have. TERENCE SMITH: Looking ahead to the proposed merger of AOL and Time Warner, is there any link between AOL and say, CNN in this sort of an operation? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: We'd love to talk very much about--with them about how we can work together in the future. We really sort of put a lot of that off until after the merger. We can dream now, but we can't move on anything yet. We've been talking about ways we might work together. TERENCE SMITH: Final thought. How will you define success of this effort at the end of the week in Philadelphia? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: I think I will define success if we feel like we have used the week successfully as a laboratory, a laboratory to figure out what types of interactivity work best online in a convention setting, and whether we feel like we have begun to introduce people to some of the new--you know, the polling--the types of live polling that we're trying out, the gavel-to-gavel, this way of accessing gavel-to-gavel. So, really, we see this as an experimentation and a way to test ideas that we then want to present to a larger audience for the debates, and can be on it. TERENCE SMITH: The polling you mentioned, explain how that is going to work. KATHLEEN DE LASKI: While you're in the "auditorium," you'll be watching along and typing and chatting about, let's say, John McCain's speech. And then at the end we'll pop up a quiz that says, "How do you rate this speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?" And everybody will rate the speech, and then we'll post the results. So we can do that, we can pop these live in front of the audience while they're watching the proceedings. TERENCE SMITH: So you're going to take the temperature of the audience all the way through? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Yeah. TERENCE SMITH: And will you poll the Republican ticket versus the Democratic ticket? KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Yes, and we do that all the time anyway, but as part of our live coverage, we'll do this down to the specific level of each key speech. TERENCE SMITH: Okay. Sounds like it's going to be fun. KATHLEEN DE LASKI: Yeah. TERENCE SMITH: Thank you.

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