THE POWER OF BRAND & BUILDING COMMUNITY

BURT HERMAN OF STORIFY TALKS ABOUT HIS NEW VENTURE WITH GOOGLE & HACKS/HACKERS, PLUS THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM

By Matt Carroll <@MattatMIT>

May 21, 2015: Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify and founder of Hacks/Hackers, talks to the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab about his new plans with Hacks/Hackers and Google, the power of brand, & building community

Burt Herman’s journalism career has spanned work from foreign correspondent to entrepreneur. As a reporter for the Associated Press, he covered the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As an entrepreneur, he started two groundbreaking organizations. He co-founded Storify, the storytelling platform, which is used by media organizations and others around the world. (It has since been acquired by Livefyre.) And he founded Hacks/Hackers, a group that brings together journalists and technologists in communities around the world to collaborate on building the future of media. (This interview has been edited lightly.)

He has a new venture, as well. Hacks/Hackers and the News Lab at Google today announced the launch of Hacks/Hackers Connect, an international program designed for media entrepreneurs.

BURT HERMAN

Hacks/Hackers Connect will begin with a series of one-day events designed to support current and aspiring media entrepreneurs.With innovation exploding across the industry, the program hopes to encourage more developers and media professionals to come together to create a new generation of media companies.

The first event will take place in Berlin, Germany on June 27 at Factory Berlin. This new partnership between Google and Hacks/Hackers will also support a global online community of active media and technology participants, and will facilitate related Hacks/Hackers activities across local chapters.

This program marks the first major partnership for Hacks/Hackers, which began in San Francisco in 2009.

• Q: You’ve started two very different organizations, Storify and Hacks/Hackers. What lessons have you learned from each of those?
• A: Very different things. One lesson from both would be the power of brand, mission and story. If you have a strong brand and sympathize with and feel a sense of mission, and also have a good story of why you brought something into being, that is very powerful. You are able to rally people to your cause, and get people to support you. People generally do want to support new things. They think they are exciting and will come out and help you when you have something authentic. With Hacks/Hackers and Storify, the timing was also right. People realized journalism and technology needed to be more intertwined, and with Storify that social media and journalism were intimately bound up with each other. We need the best of what came from past, and to bring it into the future.
• Q: Stories on the internet are being broken into pieces, or “atomized”, and are being reassembled in different ways. Storify was a pioneer at this as is FOLD, a new venture from the Media Lab. Where do you see this trend going?
• A: Taking stories and just pulling out the plain facts, sometimes that can be a bit dry. But I do think atomization is really important because news is not always going to come in the nice package in your daily newspaper. It will be a story that pops up on your watch because you’re going for a run and here’s a study about running; or your phone knowing you are in a new city and here’s a travel story. That kind of awareness in triggering the right story at the right time on the right device to the right person is really important. That means the way we organize is going to be much more rich in terms of metadata and breaking down stories and which parts might be appropriate at different times. It could mean giving updates on a wearable device, or offering a long-form experience for leaning back or a long video if you’re home. All these things mean we need to break down what a story is. Journalists are going to have to think about producing work for different formats, and including metadata to make sure you reach the right people at the right time.
• Q: Do all these different ways of producing news in different formats put strains on journalists?
• A: It’s funny, it all goes back to when I was working at the AP. We would write a broadcast version of a story that was meant to be read on the radio or TV. And we would write a print version for this morning newspaper, and maybe different versions for afternoon and morning newspapers. The afternoon one was usually more analytical and took a step back, versus the strict news of the morning papers. So we had to do that for different formats back then, and that is going to increase for sure.
• Q: There’s been a growing convergence between social and media, such as the recent partnerships announced between Facebook and nine media companies, including The New York Times. What are your thoughts on where this is headed?
• A: The future of media is about building communities. I don’t think media organizations should give that all up to Facebook or Twitter or any social network. More and more media companies should own that and think about the people formerly known as the audience as a community of people who care about a topic. The journalist is then the community organizer and kind of the expert who can bring these people together. That needs to be the way that media thinks going forward. Whether we like it or not, that is the way media works now. The Internet is a social medium, you need to be thinking about how that affects the way you work as a journalist. It would be crazy to give that away, that relationship, when really we see the things that are driving people a lot of the time on social media is the content. It is personal stories, but it is also the professional stories so how can you blend those two together? I do think we are going to see more of this interplay. You see it already. TechCrunch has events and has a web site, The New York Times even is doing events now. It is about getting this audience together and building community.
• Q: Where do you see revenue models going forward for news organizations?
• A: I think revenue will be a bunch of different things. This idea of community goes to the heart of that. It is about people feeling they are members not just subscribers, they get some benefit for paying to be part of a community. It is selective perhaps and you get access to events, personal experiences that are more than what you get by surfing through a web site and clicking on a few links. When you build community around narrow topics of interest, that is more interesting to advertisers, who want to target demographics and people who have certain niche interests. This kind of broad general thing, it works for Facebook because they have a billion-plus users and make $3 a year or whatever from each person. That can work if you have such huge scale. On a smaller scale you have to specialize and figure out ways to get more money from each person. I think that is by breaking people down into these niche audiences.
• Q: There’s a lot of naysaying about the future of the news business. Are you optimistic for future of news?
• A: I’m optimistic. I think we have barely begun to see where things are going. The web has not been around for that long. Social media has not been a thing for that long. We still are very early in all this.
• Q: What about longform on the web? That’s something a lot of people have speculated whether it will last, with people reading such small screens. Does it have a future?
• A: If something is good, people will read it. There is more competition than ever. The quality has to be there. I don’t know if it is true or not, but I read Seymour Hersh’s 10,000-word article on the real story behind the Osama bin Laden raid on my phone. I saw some other people who said they did that too. We have seen a kind of a resurgence of long form in some ways. But it has to be worthwhile and that’s tough because it obviously involves quite an investment to do great storytelling in longform, requiring months or years of reporting and editing.
• Q: Do you see investigative work staying strong?
• A: I hope it is there. I really wish news organizations would reframe the way they sell themselves. I think it should not be about, hey, we won all these awards, read our great stories our reporters did because these are the things they care about. I think we have to reframe this and go back to what journalism is about, which is being a watchdog for the people and kind of making the pitch that, “We are your people.” We are going to government meetings, we are poring through the company annual reports, we are going out there and finding out what is happening to the environment, and looking at the stratification of cities and disparity in wealth, and we are doing this service because you don’t have time to do that. So that is why part of why you support journalists. We are the ones out there making sure democracy is functioning and being the fourth estate and the watchdog and the check on power and all that good stuff we talk about in journalism classes. That needs to be the value proposition. I think the people who support investigative news organizations understand that, the big donors, but I wish we could do better selling that value proposition to regular people so they could understand that it’s not about “Oh, that’s where I get my sports scores and my coupons.” But rather that “These people are looking out for me.” Part of the problem is that journalists have not been good about giving people that sense that, “Oh, you care about this thing? Well, OK, we’ll check into that for you.” Again, involving the community in what they are doing and being more transparent and open about how stories get told and which stories get told. That’s why I go back to this idea that community is at the heart of media.
• Q: You worked for the Associated Press for 12 years. What’s the future for the AP?
• A: It’s kind of a challenge, because breaking news is sort of considered a commodity and spreads very quickly. The AP is a strong brand and when they report something you know that is real and we need that; we need that more than ever in some ways. When there’s so much rumor and speculation online we need sources that we can trust. But yes, publishing the same news in a local paper because otherwise you couldn’t see what’s going on in Europe or Africa or wherever because you had no access to that information, obviously that’s not true any more. I can just look at the BBC web site or whatever local site I want to anywhere around the world. That is kind of a trick for the AP. I still feel there is a valuable role for them. It might be the people who really value the AP are the professional groups in government or finance, people who need information quickly and reliably. They are not just going to necessarily trust what’s out there on the web. They need more dedicated feeds and tailored feeds. I think the AP is figuring it out. They are definitely investing now in technology and doing some interesting things like this kind of automatic coverage of earnings and they will eventually probably do that more with sports things. I know they are investing in startups and are looking for places to find new ideas and sources of revenue.

Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab.

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