When Cindy Royal, associate professor for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, first got the idea for a SXSW Interactive panel that would expand upon the importance of platforms in media organizations, she recruited the smartest people she knew to help her. Royal reached out to Trei Brundrett, chief product officer for Vox Media, and David Cohn, executive producer of Al Jazeera Plus (although Cohn was working as chief content officer for Circa at the time) to participate in the panel, “For Media, It’s Platform or Perish.”
Royal said she contacted Brundrett because Vox has been doing some interesting things with their platform lately, and chose Cohn because he can speak eloquently about platforms from his time at Circa. Before Cohn left, Circa was pioneering the idea of atomization of content and creating a platform that allowed them to do that. Royal also invited Katie Zhu of Medium to be on the panel, and although she is unable to attend, some of her input will still be included during the discussion.
Read the Nieman Lab article by Cindy Royal, mentioned in the video.
Both Brundrett and Cohn said they met Royal separately in Austin at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in the past few years, although Brundrett initially sought her out.
“I made a point of meeting Cindy Royal at ISOJ last year because I wanted to work with her on the intersection of Internet technology, journalism, education and diversity,” Brundrett said. “In addition to several other projects we are pursuing, she reached out to me about participating on this panel around this topic because of the work I’ve been doing at Vox Media.”
Even though Royal was the brains behind the panel idea, Cohn mentioned that he got involved after speaking to the Knight Fellows during her time there about the same things he always talks about: platforms and coding.
“Journalists need to own platforms because the platforms that you create end up defining the media that you create, and we need to take a more active role in that,” Cohn said.
Cohn believes that platforms and content management systems are so important for media organizations to take advantage of because it ultimately influences the content.
“The medium is the message,” Cohn said. “Choices that you make in your CMS define the type of content that you’re going to produce.”
Cohn said this became really prominent at Circa, where he was the chief content officer for about three years after it launched. The company wanted to do something different with their articles; they wanted to produce stories that were “atomic units threaded together.” But in order to do that, they had to create their own content management system.
“A CMS defines the type of content, and the choices that you make there end up defining what you can and can’t do in terms of media,” Cohn said.
Brundrett feels using platforms is just another way media organizations are handling how digital media and technology are evolving. He said a platform approach is a more technology-focused idea that provides a broad service to an organization’s users to scale their engagement.
“Frankly, platforms are the means by which media organizations will remain relevant to the way their users expect to discover, create and engage with other users around the reporting and storytelling that they do,” Brundrett said. “Platforms will also provide better opportunities to build business models that match this behavior. Platforms allow publishers to provide better value.”
Session Details
Tuesday, March 17
11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Hyatt Regency Austin
Zilker Ballroom 1
208 Barton Springs Rd
For more information on this panel about the influence of platforms on media organizations, visit http://schedule.sxsw.com/2015/events/event_IAP31308.