Q&A with Jeremy Gilbert, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Washington Post

This week, The Idea caught up with Jeremy to learn about how The Washington Post approaches innovation in storytelling, from experimenting with new technologies like augmented reality and 5G, to investing in accessibility, which led to the most-read article in the Post’s history. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.

Tell me about your path to The Washington Post and your current role there.

My path to the Washington Post has been an unusual journey. I worked as an internet consultant. I worked in traditional newspaper newsrooms. I taught journalism for a little bit. I came to the Post shortly after Jeff Bezos had bought it. They were looking for digital people to help transform the newsroom from a print-focused institution to a digitally-focused institution, and I came to inject experimental technologies and experimental approaches to storytelling into the way that we did our news-gathering.

I think about the work that my team does as focused on creation, consumption, and distribution. How can we help reporters and editors find and report their stories more efficiently? How can we create new kinds of storytelling experiences for people who are news readers, watchers, or listeners? And how do we get that journalism into the hands of the audience when they need it?

What has been your favorite project that you’ve worked on recently?

One of the most interesting areas that we’re working on right now is exploring how the coming wave of 5G devices will transform the way that reporters and editors find stories and the way that videographers can tell stories. Even in the middle of the coronavirus, we have been experimenting with different ways that 5G handsets, 5G hotspots, and the 5G network allow us to do our jobs differently. Working very closely with AT&T, my team helped our video department do live broadcast coverage of the Democratic and Republican national primaries. We have done experiments with how we can capture volumetric video (meaning 360 degree video) of individuals using 5G handsets.

In addition to 5G, we’re constantly looking at technologies like blockchain and spatial computing as there are more and more headsets like Magic Leap and HoloLens and perhaps eventually devices from Apple and Google. The team is always asking, how can we take these technologies that are out in the field today but that are not commonly in use, and bring them into our newsroom?

How has the current pandemic shaped your thinking on new technology, or new uses of technology, that you hadn’t perhaps considered before?

We are often thinking not just about how technologies from the big platform companies or startups enable us to do things, but also how we can experiment on our own content in different ways. Certainly with the coronavirus, that has been the case. Even during the pandemic we have, for example, given 5G devices to our audio team to see if that can help them upload files more quickly for Post Reports, our daily podcast. We’re giving 5G devices to our video journalists to see if they can cover the virus from their homes more effectively.

Sometimes it’s not just about technologies. One of the most important things my team has done is explore different ways that we could handle translation of our stories. Most of the time, the Post’s audience is English-speaking. But for example, for coronavirus coverage, we did a very early in the news cycle graphic about how to flatten the curve. The response for that story was so overwhelming that we decided to translate it into more than 16 different languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese. That single story is now the most viewed story in the history of the Post. It’s even more viewed than the story that broke the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Even though that was a fairly non-technology oriented story, the idea that we could create an experience that would allow people to view this story in many different languages is really critical. So we’re trying lots of different things, both with technology, and with much more basic methods, to improve our storytelling and our distribution.

Given the diversity of emerging technologies, how do you choose which to prioritize?

The way we decide which technologies to work with is multi-part. We look at what needs the newsroom has. We look at the state of these technologies: are they robust enough that we can introduce them widely in our newsroom, or are they so experimental that the best we can do is some small testing? Then we think about what kind of a partnership we can establish. So for example, in the case of working with AT&T, we have access to network engineers, their experimental labs, and their partners who make handsets and other devices. That relationship enables us to go much deeper than we could if we were just able to access the commercially available technology. Finally, we try to think about how many different projects we can juggle at one time. So realistically, even a larger newsroom like the Washington Post can only handle a handful of experiments at a time. We have to weigh the experiments that we’re interested in pursuing against the work that we’re already doing.

Once you’ve started these experiments, how do you measure success?

We try to measure a bunch of different things depending on the project. For projects that are public facing, we look not only at how many people came or how many people shared it, but how long did people spend, how did people interact? Do they engage more deeply or differently than they would if they were reading or watching or listening to a traditional story? Sometimes what we learn is that the technology isn’t ready yet. We know what kinds of things we look for to try another project and then we wait.

For example, about four years ago, the Post did its first VR project. We helped explore a crater on Mars using a fully 3D-animated world where the user had control and could move about. It was made for VR headsets. We waited about two and a half more years until there were better tools, more people who had access to the technology, and more places that we could show the project, to do our second VR project. Whereas the first VR project was basically only accessible on our website and via a handful of device makers’ stores, this time we were able to show it in film festivals and to show it in VR entertainment spaces. What we learned from the first project, which we were proud of, was that we needed these other conditions in place before we could attempt the second project.

What point in the process of experimenting with these technologies do you start thinking about their implications beyond just the newsroom, say for the advertising side of the business or for brands?

There are two things that we look to do. One is we look to see if through sponsorship or other ways, we can essentially cover the costs of our experimentation. So another way to know whether our project was successful — and it’s not the overriding factor — is are we able to pay for the project itself? Will we be able to bring in revenue for the Post?

The second thing is, within the Post newsroom, we have a very clear divide between news and advertising. We don’t let the advertising side drive the news decisions that we make. On the other hand, when in the newsroom we discover new technologies that help us do our storytelling, we try to share those technologies, those methods, and those approaches with the people who are doing our branded content and with the people who are working on ad tech, because the ways that we want to communicate as journalists with our audience is not very different from the ways that the advertising team wants to help the brands they work with communicate with an audience.

Looking back, have there been projects that gained less traction than you thought they would?

The most disappointing technology we experimented heavily with in the last five years is definitely 360-degree cameras. We partnered with Google and used 360-degree cameras at the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions. We were doing a fair amount of work as were others — the New York Times started a daily project.

Today, there’s virtually no one using 360-degree video. What we learned is that users were definitely intrigued, but they also weren’t really looking to consume video looking around. What they would do was look to the right, almost always see that they could look around, move back to the left, going almost where they started, and then watch the video that way. So, it didn’t make sense to record a lot of 360 degree videos when people were only watching that same 16 x 9 rectangle that they would have anyway. So we paused that for now — maybe that will change in the future.

Conversely, was there a project or technology that gained more traction than you initially suspected?

We weren’t really sure what the adoption rate for augmented reality storytelling would be. We did a project about five years ago that required people to download a separate app and have a target image they could point their phone at. Almost no one can see a story under those conditions. Then in 2018 for Thanksgiving, we did an AR version of “How to Carve your Turkey” — more than half a million people used it.

We’ve been very aggressive with augmented reality storytelling to make sure that it has as few barriers to entry as possible. Now we don’t need to have a target image. It’s built into our native app, but it’s also available over the mobile web. We can share those stories in Apple News. In return, there’s a much larger audience and now it’s a much more common part of the kinds of storytelling that we do.

Looking to the future, what is a media trend or technology that you are excited about?

I am really interested in what you can do with personalization and customization without putting people in a filter bubble, which we haven’t gotten to yet. The coronavirus is a great example: We need to think radically differently about what kind of information news consumers need and when.

Most newsrooms — whether they are legacy TV newsrooms, legacy print newsrooms, or digital-only startups — still effectively publish stories the way that they would have if they were going into a newspaper. They report information, they publish the story, and then they go off and report more information and publish a new story.

But most consumers, whether it’s in a moment of crisis like what’s going on with the coronavirus, or if it’s how your favorite sports team is doing or what your favorite celebrity is up to, are essentially not looking to know today’s incremental update. They’re looking to know: What happened since the last time I checked into this story? I think there’s a real opportunity to both think about the way that we gather information, and what it means to publish a story. Do we publish it once or do we publish it over and over again? It could be more up-to-date, more current than Wikipedia, but less breathlessly breaking news-oriented than most of our traditional stories are today.

Related to that is that each person has different interactions with the news. What is new to each news consumer is different. And so, the personalization is not just — you like this type of story and not that type of story — but what can I tell you that you have not already learned? So, your update on the story might be different than my update on the story. We should personalize in a way that keeps all of us correct and all of us relevant and gives you the background if you need it, but not if you don’t.

In addition to the need to do that kind of personalization, there’s probably a need to have some machine-generated content because we cannot keep these stories up to date in the way that we want and need unless the systems are helping to update them as new information comes in. So I do think that artificial intelligence and natural language processing are going to play a huge role in this personalization and customization.

Thinking of personalization in this way seems like it would help address the problem of news avoidance.

That’s exactly right. We did a really interesting experiment at the Post where we focused on telling the 2020 election story for people who might be starting at any moment. So, instead of saying with every new story we do, well this is all based on stuff that happened before that you don’t know about, it said, if you’re starting today, we’re going to catch you up in the way you need to.

Very similarly, we just need to get out of the habit of saying, if you don’t follow the news as closely as a journalist, then you are somehow deficient. Instead, we need to say to news consumers, wherever you pick up, that’s the right place to start, and we will give you the background information that you need.

The other thing that I’m interested in, which touches a little bit on personalization and customization, is that interactive audio is transforming the way that news is consumed. I think the potential there is enormous.

What is most fascinating to me about interactive audio is the fact that it changes the relationship between news creators and news consumers. Historically, people in newsrooms said to consumers, here’s what you need to know and in the form that I think you need it.

What is happening with interactive audio is that news consumers are asking questions — asking Alexa, asking Siri, asking Google — what about this story? News creators now have to say, within these stories that we have historically created, we have a lot of different answers — but for each answer, there are even more questions that answer is right for.

We haven’t historically thought about our stories in a way that matches up well to that. We can break apart our stories and say, this section of my story is a great answer to all of these different questions. So, we’re going to have to really rethink what happens after the reporting process: How can we take the information that we gathered before we even start writing, and think about the questions that someone might ask that we can answer.

Where do you look to for inspiration?

As much as possible, I tried to look outside of journalism and find really inspiring and unusual things that we can bring back into the storytelling that we do. I love talking to startups. I love talking to academics. I love looking at how related but different industries like the movie industry or the gaming industry are trying to meet consumer needs or offer new ideas. For example, we’ve looked at how we could use telepresence robots to help cover stories. We’ve looked at different ways we could use drones. We’ve looked at different techniques for storytelling in the gaming industry. We’ve looked at how interactive movies are coming and what the studios are experimenting with.

What’s something interesting that you’ve seen in media from an organization other than your own?

There are really two things that I would point out. One is the Reuters graphics team based in Asia who were covering the Hong Kong protests, which feels like many crises ago, were doing incredible work. They did amazing illustrations of what different kinds of protesters on different sides where they did an unbelievable job hand-counting protesters to get better estimates because the media was so censored. I think their work doing visually-based investigative reporting is off the charts.

The other thing that I really love is the work that The Pudding does. The Pudding may not look at hard news, but the way they look at news is unlike the way anyone else looks at news. The kind of team-based, collaborative, visual journalism that they do is really multi-sensory because they make great use of video and audio as well as images and graphics, and it’s something that large newsrooms could absolutely replicate. The thing that makes their work so great is that they don’t necessarily try to do all the stories. They do the stories that they can do in the way that only they can do it.

What is your first read when you wake up in the morning?

I get a bunch of email newsletters, which is how I start my day. I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but I’ve gotten addicted to Morning Brew. I didn’t go to business school. I wasn’t expecting to love it, but I kind of do. I also love the SenseMaker from the team at Tortoise Media in the UK. The final thing is Ben Thompson’s Stratechery.

What is the last podcast you listened to?

I love 99% Invisible, Planet Money, and Reply All. I just listened to Planet Money last night, so that was the last one.

What’s the last book you read?

I just finished the Long Gray Line by Rick Atkinson.

What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t in your current role?

I’ve always wanted to be an architect. But I have to say, I feel very lucky. I get to do some of the most interesting work I can imagine. It’s hard to picture not being in journalism, especially right now.

This Q&A was originally published in the March 23rd 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.