Q&A with Cory Haik, Chief Digital Officer @ Vice Media
This week, The Idea caught up with Cory Haik to learn about her wildest predictions for digital media (sneak peek: holograms) and ‘Stories’ as a third key output for Vice alongside written and video journalism. Subscribe here to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
Can you tell me about yourself and your role at Vice?
I’ve been at Vice for six months as the Chief Digital Officer. I started my career at my local newspaper, the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, Louisiana, on the digital side, and I’ve been working in digital media ever since. I spent many years at The Washington Post, also on the digital side, and I’ve had the good fortune of working at some important places (from a strategic development perspective) that have been a real training ground for me to understand the business.
My background is very much the alchemy of reporting and digital and emerging formats and platforms and storytelling and strategy and product and business. So I see my role at Vice very much as the alchemy of all of those things together, making sure that for our global audiences and for our digital business, we’re operating with excellence and integrity and producing great journalism.
How do you think about choosing what kinds of platform and partnerships to invest in and how to make those authentic to the news brand you’re working with?
Some of them are, at this point, table stakes where big audiences exist: the Facebooks of the world, Twitter (where the conversation is), Instagram (the visual beat of our lives). Then there’s nuance within that.
Sometimes you have to make a decision to go with a platform because there’s an audience opportunity but the revenues is nascent. Those are strategic choices that you make. It’s hard to make a prioritized list of platforms because they’re not all apples to apples. And that’s OK. The beauty of what we do is sussing out the nuances and then making decisions based on that.
The things that really get me excited are emerging platform opportunities. The TikToks of the world, for example. We’re launching there in a couple of weeks with Munchies and our food vertical. It’s not just importing something from one platform to the other, but doing something that’s original and smart and bold for those platforms. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we show up on that platform, what is authentic and organic to those audiences and what they would expect from Vice. That doesn’t always look alike.
From a brand’s voice perspective, however, that does look alike. For us, the consistent factor is our voice. As we’re thinking about our move into TikTok for Munchies, for example, we’re thinking about what is the Vice voice on TikTok, meditating on that question and spending time with different visual ideas and really having a philosophical conversation about what we want to be on there and how that connects back to a broader Vice voice. So it doesn’t necessarily have to look the same from a format perspective, and in fact, it shouldn’t look the same from a format perspective, but it definitely should feel like Vice.
What are the primary risks are you thinking about when exploring these technologies or platforms?
In any media company — Vice is not alone — it’s a matter of resourcing. There’s infinite platforms and infinite audiences, or it certainly feels like that. When you’re making a decision to do something, it sometimes means you’re making a decision to not do something else. It isn’t always the case, but if we want to do something well, you need to focus on it. So that’s one.
Another is just the issue of nascent monetization. Some platforms are much more mature, and we are for the most part then spending at a broader, more sophisticated resource level. But when you have some new platforms, you have to keep it in the experimental realm: There’s a risk that you build something and that monetization doesn’t develop, and just knowing that and tracking that as you go is very important. The other is that, when you think about something like brand and voice, if audiences don’t take to what you’re doing, you’re burning resources; it’s like a tree is falling in the forest and no one sees it. You really have to pay attention as to where audiences engage and ask, are we having an impact that we’d like to have or are we just spending because we think this is really cool. You can’t just do new formats and new technology and new platforms for the sake of the newness. If there’s anything that we’ve learned, the collective ‘we’ of digital media over the last call it five or so years, it’s that, new for the sake of new is not necessarily the right move. So being strategic about our decisions is very important.
What is a project that you’re working on that you’re excited about?
We did our strategic planning for 2020, and we said that Vice’s core outputs are not just written journalism and video journalism, but also stories journalism. Stories with a capital S is Insta, Facebook even has a Stories feature, YouTube has a Stories features, TikTok, Snap: All of these primarily vertical, mobile-first ways to produce content in journalism and storytelling that isn’t always just text or isn’t always just video, but it’s kind of a combination. There’s animation, there’s motion, there’s interactivity. This is the main form factor that our younger audiences are consuming every single day. We know that and we’ve been producing that — I would say not in a consistent way at level with our article output or our video output, but we’re considering stories now as a third key output, and we’re making sure our teams are set up to actually produce that as a primary format.
This may sound silly, but I’m super excited about it because we know that this is where the growth is going to be from an audience perspective. What we also know is that revenue is still immature. So we’re tracking it, but we’re also trying to push the boundaries as well, particularly in the realm of branded content in those formats, because we know there’s a lot of opportunity. We’ve got some exciting stuff going on with our TikTok launch editorially, but we’re also helping our brand partners and our clients understand how they can use TikTok and how we can tie all that together.
Looking back, is there a trend or opportunity that you overlooked at the time that still bugs you today to have missed?
I was just thinking this morning about the evolution from when The New York Times produced something called Snow Fall in 2012. Snow Fall was then really breakout visual storytelling, a scrolling template that had visual media assets baked into the storytelling, like autoplay, high-def video. It’s absolutely beautiful. These kinds of things — I can tell you from working at The Washington Post — take a long time to produce, not only from a journalistic perspective, but also from just a web production perspective. Lots of different folks are involved.
What we know is that because the story is so long, users just flip through to the next visual element. At that point, I was sort of dismissive: this is a beautiful work of journalism and is built for audiences to spend a lot of time with, but they’re sort of missing the mark in that we’re not spending that much time on desktop and that this is not really optimized for mobile.
But if I flash forward to now, that same idea is actually what the Stories format is, sans all of the work. In fact, The New York Times has a recent piece, “My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing Food App Deliveryman.” A reporter from the Times basically put a GoPro on his head and did this very immersive piece on what it’s like to be a food delivery driver in New York City. It’s a much less produced piece than Snow Fall is, but it has all the visual elements that audiences want. If you zoom out and think about it from a mobile perspective, that’s what audiences are doing in an Instagram story in Snap. They’re tapping through these visual elements that produce a full narrative. While the format and the production of it has evolved, that visual immersive idea was right. It’s just not built for the desktop computer, it’s built for the mobile phone.
Conversely, I’m curious about what media trend or opportunity, broadly defined, you see as being underused or under-discussed? In short, what’s your wildest prediction for media in five years?
I’ve been saying for a very long time that I’m going to be producing holograms at some point. We kind of are, right? It’s just not at scale. If you think about VR, AR, that kind of thing, we’re doing it, but the consumption of that is not necessarily what we thought it was going to be, instead it’s on a mobile phone. Internet of Things could never be truer in terms of media. You’re going to be getting your update on the refrigerator and all of that. You go to a fancy hotel, there’s a television in the mirror in your bathroom. I’m happy to be a part of it and help to drive it.
I think the disruptor that we haven’t yet fully reconciled with is the revenue model. I saw that there was a newspaper in Salt Lake City that became the first newspaper recognized as a nonprofit. What I’m very excited about is to figure out what those kinds of models actually look like. It is why I got more involved in the business side of media: I think that’s the biggest place for disruption and for transformation.
On the storytelling side, we are all over it. I’m so excited for Vice Digital to continue to innovate because Vice Media was the OG of digital media since it developed the voice. We’ll continue to disrupt and create crazy, cool things. We will do some kind of hologram, mark my words. But how do we pay for it? That’s the other question. I can’t predict for you what that will be, but I know that it’s going to be something different than it is today.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media recently from an organization that’s not your own?
There are a lot of good ones. I’m partial in a lot of ways to my alma mater, The Washington Post, because they continue to innovate and I obviously stay close to those guys and gals. I think their new product Zeus is really exciting. In a lot of ways, it’s an answer to the programmatic ad network: it’s effectively a premium advertising network that’s automated. [Check out our Idea issue on Zeus as well as our Subscriber Spotlight with Jarrod Dicker, VP of Strategy, Technology, and Development at The Washington Post for more.]
While it may not be the sort of sexiest thing to talk about, that’s what I’m talking about regarding innovation on the revenue side, and we need more of that. I get very excited and nerd out on all of the new emerging platforms and how we do storytelling on there. It lights me up and gets me out of bed, but I’m finding more and more, on the revenue side when I see this kind of disruption and innovation, that’s where I really, really, really get excited because it’s going to help drive our business forward.
Rapid Fire
What is your first read in the morning?
Well, it depends on what time I go to bed at night. If I go to bed early enough, then I’m going to read Brian Stelter’s newsletter because I didn’t get to read it the night before. But chances are I read it the night before.
What is the last book or podcast that you read/listened to?
Educated. It’s about a woman who grew up in rural Idaho and never went to school formally, studied for the SAT by herself, and entered a classroom for the first time when she went to college. It’s an amazing story of perseverance.
What sort of job would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role, within or outside of media?
I’d probably be a reporter. Definitely in media, just not running it.
This Q&A was originally published in the November 18th edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
