At sunset, the beachfront Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel resort, home to this year's WebbyConnect conference.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)DANA POINT, Calif.--When the economy heads south, anything involving beaches and luxury resorts is a terrific recipe for guaranteed bad press.
That's why there was a fine line to be walked at the WebbyConnect conference, the second annual retreat-slash-ideafest organized by the directors of the annual Webby Awards. In the diverse vegetable patch of media conferences, this one is the organic arugula. The venue was the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel resort, a sprawling beachfront complex and occasional filming spot for MTV's haute-reality soap Laguna Beach, just down the road from the St. Regis hotel where American International Group executives famously spent $440,000 on a spa getaway days after an $85 billion government bailout.
But even with wallets shrinking and belts tightening across technology, digital media, and advertising, the people who shelled out more than $2,000 for a WebbyConnect ticket insisted on one thing: this event, unlike so many others on the industry's calendar, is worth the price tag.
"What an amazing, diverse group of people we have gathered under this roof, and I know that's a cliche but like most cliches, it's true," Jamie Pallot, editorial director of Conde Nast's CondeNet, observed while moderating a panel on Wednesday. "We all work for a bunch of very different companies, we play wildly different roles in those companies...what brings us all together here and what we are excited about is the innovation that technology can bring, and how that can change the places where we work, and what we can do in those places."
An oceanview deck at the Ritz-Carlton that hosted a WebbyConnect reception on Tuesday night.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)Getting to the intimate, 200-person conference from the entrance to the Ritz involved winding through groves of palm trees and ponds of bright orange and white koi, past stunning ocean vistas dotted with surfers and pools surrounded by the resort's usual clientele, wealthy retirees in town for Orange County's famed golfing. The three half-days worth of conference panels featured a slew of digital media's glitterati, from The Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan to The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., to Aaron Koblin, the Google Creative Labs designer who worked on the video for Radiohead's "House of Cards."
In the afternoon, the attendees--mostly from media and digital advertising companies, or "digital strategies" types from entertainment and fashion--were encouraged to network, mingle, and spend time at the beach before the conference reconvened for evening activities. Those included cocktail receptions, dinners, or on Thursday, a heated geek-culture trivia competition. (Sample questions: name the five noble gases, name Pitchfork Media's top band of the 1990s, name the most-viewed video on YouTube.)
People at WebbyConnect were not oblivious to the image issues. "I feel like we'll be seen as the next Camp Cyprus," said one conference-goer, who works for a digital marketing agency in New York. He was referring to the recent gathering of spry young dot-commers (many of whom work at Facebook) on vacation in Turkish Cyprus, who demonstrated an extraordinary amount of pluck but a mild case of bad timing when they posted to the Web a video of them dancing and lip-synching to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the global financial markets were in crisis mode. The media gossip press went ballistic.
But the same attendee who brought up "Camp Cyprus" insisted that under the surface, the only similarities between WebbyConnect and the goofball geek vacation were the ocean views and the after-hours parties (which, truth be told, did get fairly Spring Break-worthy among a few of WebbyConnect's younger attendees, who caroused into the early morning hours in Webby President Rodger Berman's deluxe suite.) Though WebbyConnect is only in its second year, people who go have already come to expect an exciting conversation, fresh ideas, and a chance to connect with smart people--on the beach.
"When I go to conferences I just can't do a whole day of panels," Webby Awards executive director and conference organizer David-Michel Davies said in an interview with CNET News, sitting in a beach chair and watching the dozens of surfers in the water. He added that WebbyConnect, planned months before the financial crisis took root, did not see cancellations or cutbacks after Wall Street's woes began to hit the media and tech industries.
WebbyConnect is consciously highbrow, carefully avoiding anything too corporate. At a pre-dinner reception at the resort's Dana Point Lawn, as bartenders poured California wine and waiters passed around canapes like truffled chicken on endive lettuce, a Webbys representative explained to me that the conference was designed as a civilized alternative to the brashness of large-scale tech and media expositions, where business cards are passed around like currency and the magic word is invariably "monetize." That, she said, gets in the way of ideas and discussion. "Every panel's discreetly about making money," the Webbys employee told me, "but we purposely don't use the word 'monetize' or anything like it."
Anecdotally, there were signs that the retreat-y vibe of WebbyConnect was working. On the beach on Wednesday afternoon, a marketing director for an online video production company giddily announced to one of her colleagues that she'd met some of the digital-strategies representatives from big fashion brands and that they were interested in hearing about sponsorship and advertising possibilities. A few yards away, two start-up founders in sunglasses and swim trunks were debating whether it was more cost-effective to hire an external public relations firm or to employ someone in-house.
It was impossible to find anyone at WebbyConnect who didn't sing the event's praises. "This was the most productive conference I went to last year. I met more people and sold more work than at any other conference," said Rick Webb, co-founder of Internet marketing firm The Barbarian Group, which sponsored this year's WebbyConnect. "I'm coming for life, man."
At traditional conferences, "the speakers come, they talk, they promote their thing, they leave," David-Michel Davies said. "Coming here, people don't want to leave. It's a much deeper sort of conversation than you would have otherwise."
Davies continued: "I'd rather have the room be really full, and have people really interested, than have people just getting conference fatigue." His logic: in tough times, people will be more likely to pay $2,000 for a high-quality experience than $750 or $1,000 for a crowded expo that will be more hit-or-miss.
The tough question is whether by this time next year the recession will mean they choose not to pay for either, or whether a lack of sponsorship dollars will preempt or tone down many industry conferences in the first place.
"I think some conferences will disappear, and some conferences will totally thrive," said Betsy Morgan, CEO of liberal news site Huffington Post and one of the WebbyConnect speakers, "and you're going to be much more discriminating as an executive or manager who decides who in your company goes to conferences."
But Morgan said that for an industry like digital media, gathering and sharing ideas is particularly crucial. "I think the medium is still hugely evolving and we're still trying, whether you're a start-up company or a big media company, you're still trying to figure out how it's all going to work, and so actually gathering people to talk through that process, and see other businesses, and see how other people are doing it, is enormously valuable," she explained. "I just feel like it would be too depressing to go into 2009 saying the sky is falling on all fronts."
Sunset over the Pacific on Thursday night.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)Some people, however, would say that it is. Outside the stucco walls of the Ritz-Carlton, tech and media companies were laying off dozens of employees in order to get costs down, and stay in the business, and big tech companies like Yahoo, eBay and Xerox were announcing major layoffs.
So where does that leave the conference? This year's WebbyConnect was put together and paid for before Wall Street started to collapse, which won't be the case for next year's conference, or for the next Webby Awards early next summer for that matter. In 2003 and 2004, with the deep pockets that fund the lavish Webby Awards crippled by shrapnel from the dot-com bubble, the ceremony was canceled and replaced with an online awards presentation.
"Organizationally, I think we're much smarter and more professional than we used to be," said Davies, who was not in charge of the Webbys until 2005. But he wouldn't speculate too much about an uncertain future.
"We want to be reflective of what's going on," he mused, looking out at the ocean and a few WebbyConnect attendees who were trying to surf, their heads bobbing above waves that quickly flipped them back underwater. "We'll see where we are at that time."
DANA POINT, Calif.--When political pundit Arianna Huffington, along with a team of digital-media veterans, launched political news aggregator The Huffington Post in 2005, critics were skeptical of the left-leaning site. But it's turned out to be one of political journalism's great recent success stories, even amid controversy over the charismatic and opinionated Huffington and the site's business model, which utilizes thousands of unpaid bloggers in addition to full-time reporters.
Just over a year ago, The Huffington Post hired Betsy Morgan, head of CBSNews.com, to serve as its CEO, taking over from co-founder and former AOL executive Ken Lerer.
Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan
At the WebbyConnect summit this week, where Morgan was a featured speaker, CNET News caught up with her to find out just what the site plans to do after the presidential election that has carried it to the heights of digital fame.
Q: The Huffington Post has been riding high on the 2008 election, with ComScore numbers naming it as the top independent political destination on the Web. But everyone's acknowledging that traffic may drop significantly after the election. What is the company's strategy for this?
Morgan: That's a question that I feel like I've been asked a lot in the last couple of weeks. I think all news and information sites have been up this year. We look at our competitors' traffic really closely, too, and that political tide has lifted everybody's boats. I think a couple of things are going to happen after the election. One, what we've certainly seen over the interest in this election is that people are re-energized by the political process and they're very interested, particularly in light of the economy, in what a new administration will look like.
Because of that, you'll continue to see interest in that, in the new administration and who gets picked for what positions and what's the first thing they do and the second thing they do. Does the new president go abroad immediately and try to mend fences? Those kinds of things. I think there's still going to be a big interest in what's going on in Washington.
Do you have different strategies for if Barack Obama wins the election versus if John McCain wins?
Morgan: What's interesting about that is, that question assumes and even reading the headline in ComScore assumes that we are just a political site. Our tagline is "the Internet newspaper." So back to your original question, which I think answers the second question. We've worked really hard over the past year to grow all of our verticals, to launch a bunch of verticals. A bunch are new since this time last year...we have a lot of traffic coming to non-politics stuff, and prior to the most recent sort of frenzy of run-up and countdown, our traffic was sort of about 50-50, so 50 percent to political stories and 50 to everything else.
So we have really consciously grown and attracted an audience that's interested in a whole lot of things besides politics. I do think that one of the things that will be very interesting to see is the obsessiveness with which people are watching the election and being interested in the political process. We're also seeing that behavior on the business side with the economy every day: what happened to the Dow and what happened to the other economic numbers. We're seeing huge traffic for us in those areas so that in November and December, there may be more of a balance.
Have you been shifting resources to covering the financial crisis in more depth?
Morgan: Coverage of the economy folds into so many other parts of our verticals. The economy is tied so closely to politics that some of our politics writers and editors are writing about politics and also the economy: the impact, and what McCain thinks about the economy and what Obama thinks about the economy. The media vertical's another area. Media companies are laying off, their stock prices are getting hit, they're going through changes, they're prepping for the downturn, so that's business-related, too. So the economy is a big story across the board in many different areas, and that's how we're attacking it rather than, "No more style coverage! Start working on those Dow Jones charts!"
What's your election night tech strategy? Will Huffington Post have extra server power in? Will you be auto-refreshing the home page faster?
Morgan: Such a good question when you say auto-refresh. We turned off auto-refresh last December and we've got an AJAX dynamically delivered page. That was a decision we consciously made at the end of last year because we just felt that our page views were not authentic and that we wanted to see more authentic page view numbers, and the auto-refresh thing seems like a thing of the past, though a lot of news sites still use it.
In terms of election night coverage on the tech side, we did a pretty robust tech infrastructure overhaul over the winter in prep for a lot of fall traffic. The management team is in constant communication with the tech team. As we're hitting these record page view numbers daily, can our servers handle this? Can they handle 5x, 10x, 100x, whatever? Having come from a place that dealt with that stuff in spades, at CBS, I'm familiar with that super, super spike in traffic.
What was something that you wanted to do in election coverage and couldn't do for one reason or another?
Morgan: There isn't anything kind of top-of-mind. I think everybody feels like they've been pretty happy with the coverage we've done. I'd say, what could we do more of? We probably could've done a little bit more live blogging. But we feel like we've done a good job of engaging our bloggers.
What are some digital-politics features or applications that other media companies or Web sites have done that you think are really impressive?
Morgan: Yahoo's got a great electoral map that includes Huffington Post picks on who wins the electoral college in what states and what numbers that I think is pretty interesting. I think people like the kind of compare-and-contrast experience. We've liked working with them. AOL's done some interesting things with bloggers, sort of getting voices of bloggers and then getting real-time reaction, and they started that really, really early in the process.
On the mainstream news sites I've got to give everybody credit. I think everybody's evolved from this time last year, maybe having candidate pages, to experiences that are much more interactive where as a consumer you can add value and community.
People say that 2004 was the election where blogs took off and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube took off. What will people be saying was the digital trend that took off in the 2008 elections?
Morgan: What you've seen now in this political cycle is, you've really seen the blogosphere and both individual and mainstream news affect the political process. With Off the Bus, our citizen journalism program with NYU, we've had 12,000 citizens contributing and covering stories across the country, going to rallies, sitting in on conference calls, and really being able to bubble up all that information for mainstream media. It's been fantastic. They've broken a bunch of stories. So I definitely think that it's the rise of the empowerment of the individual journalist or the citizen journalist.
Media is getting hit hard in this economic climate. Ad-supported companies are getting hit hard. And there's a chance that The Huffington Post, like other sites, will see a traffic drop after the election. Are you going to have to do any layoffs?
Morgan: We don't anticipate that. We've had a really good year, ad-wise. We're in the game at a different point in our life cycle than the other mainstream players. We've seen the brand really grow to top of mind with both agencies and clients and the response has been really positive.
I do think everyone's looking at 2009 and thinking, "Do the projections I did in July still apply in 2009?" That's true, totally, across the board. But Internet advertising is still hugely more measurable, of great interest to more and more advertisers, and the value proposition of The Huffington Post is a strong one. You get not just politics, you get a ton of other news and information. It's a growing site and in terms of the audience it attracts, and granted this will change a bit as we get bigger, but it's a real influencer, educated audience, which I think will continue to be attractive to advertisers.
On the flip side, as a recent New Yorker article about Arianna Huffington highlighted, to some critics that demographic is known as "limousine liberals." Are you going to be changing your strategy at all to appeal to, dare I say, average Americans?
Morgan: For any news site, as it gets bigger the demographics change. Our advertising guys look at our demographics very carefully, and I don't think ComScore has a category for "limousine liberals," but our profile, our average user looks like the average user for other news sites, and we feel that we are in that sweet spot along with the other guys like CNN and MSNBC.
Did you have to do any damage control after that New Yorker piece?
Morgan: I thought the piece was great!
True, it wasn't as scathing as some people had expected. So, obviously, The Huffington Post has taken great steps to differentiate itself from just being Arianna Huffington's site. But how central is she to the operation? Should she decide to retire, would you have a Steve Jobs sort of situation where the heart of the company would be gone?
Morgan: Arianna is the most tireless worker in this whole company. She's a total force of nature, and she is a huge, huge promoter of the site, obviously. And we're absolutely grateful for all of her great energy and outreach and she's a very hard worker on not just being an external face of the business but being hugely influential inside the company as well as editor-in-chief. If you look at the company and how it's grown over the last year, we have a really solid management team. It's very much of a business structure, it's very evolved from what was started three years ago as a blog and aggregated news site into something more mainstream and more comprehensive. We're growing. And Arianna's a living brand and she's fantastic, but the site does a lot more than just politics.
On that note, you made your first foray into local news recently with Chicago. How's that going? When will we see more?
Morgan: Soon! You'll definitely see the next local vertical soon.
Which one?
Morgan: We're working on it. I won't name the city. But what we've been able to see with Chicago, and this a hallmark of The Huffington Post, because the team is nimble and agile and we have a very small team dedicated to Chicago--one editor--we can tweak...being able to tweak fast and quickly, on the fly has been huge.
The cute cast of TheWB.com's original series, 'Sorority Forever.'
(Credit: TheWB.com)DANA POINT, Calif.--For an event populated with digital media's self-styled futurists, there is a whole lot of talk at the WebbyConnect conference about a defunct television network.
Marketers, ad gurus, and production types alike showed a notable level of interest in TheWB.com, a video site launched by Warner Bros. this summer as a digital replacement for the youth-oriented television network that it shut down in 2006. Available on the new site are archived Warner Bros. shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek, as well as new just-for-the-Web series like Sorority Forever, which stars Jessica Rose of Lonelygirl15 fame. There's some mild hype building about a new one, the medical-drama spoof Children's Hospital, created by Daily Show comedian Rob Corddry.
In addition to having the Web hub, TheWB syndicates content to an array of partners like Veoh, Joost, TiVo, and Sling, adopting the "be everywhere" strategy that many big media companies have signed onto for their digital strategies.
Has it been an overnight sensation? No. "I was very excited about it. I have been less excited about it as I tried to keep tuning in," New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan said on Wednesday morning as she moderated a panel about Hollywood's rough adjustment to the digital age.
But what WebbyConnect speakers and attendees were upbeat about is the possibility that this is an online video business model that could actually work in the long run. That's because it has a library of titles with decades-long cult followings, not to mention a commitment to creating edgy new content from established entertainment figures who want to make a splash on the Web. And it has a target audience--a possible solution to the concerns of advertisers who are skeptical of YouTube because they just don't know who's watching--and the ever-important social-networking tie-in via Facebook Connect.
Conveniently, one of Thursday's speakers was Mark D'Arcy, chief creative officer of Time Warner Global Media Group, and he spent a good amount of time discussing TheWB.com. "If you're going to start a network for 18- to 34-year-olds in 2008, where would you start?" he asked hypothetically. "You would start online."
D'Arcy said that 1.2 million people watched the premiere of Sorority Forever in its first week. He held up the network's product-placement strategy, like a partnership with retailer H&M in which the Sorority Forever characters go shopping there.
But at the same time, he echoed the message of uncertainty and experimentalism that so many WebbyConnect speakers kept bringing up. "In Hollywood nobody knows anything," D'Arcy said. "We all have theories, and the world changes so quickly, and we try to adapt."
DANA POINT, Calif.--Could the Information Age's fast-paced news overload be a boon to the old-media companies that it was supposedly going to force out of business?
That was one of the suggestions brought forth by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of The New York Times Company, at his keynote address at the WebbyConnect conference here Wednesday morning.
"Our 21st-century news cycle, with its trials and tribulations, feels even more immediate because of our access," he said. "It is reasonable to ask: Do we need all this news and information? Do we want all this news and information? Can we tolerate all this news and information?"
In an age characterized by both extreme uncertainty and a glut of outlets to hear about it, Sulzberger said people will turn to trusted and pragmatic voices.
"Now that everyone is in their end-of-the-world mode, we should make a conscious effort to reject the increasingly frenzied 'apocalypse now, tomorrow, and forever' talk," he said. "Quality content matters...trustworthy voices are more important than they have ever been."
As Sulzberger addressed the small, exclusive crowd of media industry and digital-strategies types at a luxury hotel just down the road from the upper-crust towns that inspired The O.C. and Laguna Beach, the setting wasn't a perfect fit for his sobering message of adapting and keeping focused in hard times.
Neither was some of Sulzberger's underlying optimism about the Times' own future. The New York Times Company's stock has been trending downward for years now, its quarterly earnings haven't been sunny for quite some time, it underwent newsroom layoffs earlier this year, and no one's denying that many of the ad dollars once enjoyed by a few national news outlets are well on their way to distribution across a vast array of new-media publications.
Sulzberger would brand this not as a crisis, but rather as change that requires adaptation. "It's important for traditional companies to adopt strategies that enable us to be of the Internet, not on the Internet," he said. "There must be an institutional commitment to engage in reinvention, especially as the information revolution picks up steam."
That's why, he said, the Times has undergone some digital initiatives unusual for the print media business. It launched bookmarking and sharing service TimesPeople earlier this year. Soon, it will launch TimesExtra, which integrates acquisition Blogrunner onto the publication's home page to provide related links from across the Web. And it has also announced an API for developers to work with one of its most popular online features, the "Most Emailed" list.
The publisher also spoke about the Times' decision to stop requiring a paid subscription to access some of its online content, including its archives and op-ed columnists. Sulzberger said the subscription service, called TimesSelect, was a good idea in 2004 but not a good idea a few years later, and that the company's choice to get rid of it was a sign of its willingness to evolve--even though TimesSelect brought in $10 million in revenue annually.
"In those three years, the Internet changed so dramatically, and we had to adapt to those changes," he said. "Online news and information became unambiguously commoditized. Search became a titanic influence, as we all know today."
Since axing TimesSelect, Sulzberger said growth of the Times' Web site accelerated.
He acknowledged that the "evolution" pursued by the Times could mean that it will become less reliant on its venerable print edition. WebbyConnect organizer David-Michel Davies asked Sulzberger if the newspaper will even exist in 10 years.
"The heart of the answer must be (that) we can't care," Sulzberger responded, though he added that the radio, the television, and even the telegraph were all supposed to kill print reporting. "We do care. I care very much. But we must be where people want us for our information. It's the thought of cannibalizing yourself before somebody else cannibalizes you."
DANA POINT, Calif.--Jason Hirschhorn said negotiating with Hollywood has been "a soul-killing, ego-destroying experience."
But Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media Entertainment Group, also said it's been worth it. Sling is getting ready to roll out some big new projects that he hopes will make it more than the company that made the Slingbox.
In a panel called "A Hard Reset for Hollywood" at the beachfront WebbyConnect conference, Hirschhorn, the former chief digital officer at MTV Networks, talked about Sling.com, a video hub that's is currently in private beta and promises to deliver a huge library of TV and Web video content. (Hirschhorn said later that while making it the biggest is a general goal, the company isn't comparing catalogs and keeping statistics at this point.)
He showed a preview. It looks a lot like Hulu, but with more video (that's what it looks like from a preview, as Sling has not said whether there physically is more) and more social-networking tie-ins--and eventually owners of Slingbox devices will be able to watch streams from their own TVs on it as well. That's key, because it will eliminate the need to install any desktop software, but Hirschhorn couldn't demonstrate the TV streaming because the company has not finished building the Web-based Sling Player for Mac.
Also key? It'll be free. "Free is the name of the game," he said, adding that Sling.com is "playing with some ad networks." As for its hardware business, Sling's SlingCatcher device will soon have "" capability to take clips from their televisions and send it to their friends.
Hirschhorn elaborated after the panel that future releases of Sling.com--not the initial one--will be able to stream that content directly to SlingCatcher devices, something that has been rumored but not confirmed by the company. That means, yes, you'll be able to watch Hulu or any of Sling's other content partners on your TV. He is not announcing dates yet, but said that the press tour for Sling.com starts in very early November.
Most of this has been announced before, and in some cases it's coming out belatedly--"Clip-and-sling" was first previewed at the 2007 CES trade show nearly two years ago. Hirschhorn said, not surprisingly, that the industry has faced serious difficulties when it comes to online video: securing rights, getting people to keep watching, and figuring out models for making money. These issues are "choking Hollywood," as he described it.
In a world where we expect results on-demand, online video's slow crawl to maturity has left many frustrated, especially now that both the venture dollars and ad dollars are drying up. There continue to be plenty of dead ends and bad ideas. "We just landed on Plymouth Rock and we're on the way to L.A.," Hirschhorn joked. "Nobody knows anything."
Above all, he reiterated that media companies and content producers shouldn't be afraid of distribution, and suggested that exclusive deals are a bad idea--whether it's a network TV show that's not available on the Web or a Web series that's limited to a single site.
"I love television, but television is probably a finite world," he said. "You as the creator, especially when your model is different and smaller, the idea is that you need to go as wide as possible."
This post was updated at 3:56 p.m. PT with clarification from Jason Hirschhorn.
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