On the afternoon of May 6 for half an hour, CNBC was the most exciting place on television. Watching Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer try not to freak out — they acquitted themselves nicely — while the market tumbled like a drunken rag doll down a long staircase was amazing television.
The rest of the time, such as when the market is not suffering the largest drop within a single day of trading? Um, not so much. Even if you are an avowed business bobble-head, most of the time, CNBC and other financial channels are a kind of wallpaper. Businesspeople mostly live in narrow verticals. If you follow and trade in uranium, it’s not going to pop up all that often on the linear channels of television.
So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which began on Tuesday, is something like a YouTube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available only to Reuters subscribers, who pay as much as US$2,000 a month.
Using the main window of the service, called Channel One, subscribers can navigate by sector, date, markets or region, or apply filters to create their own personalized channel.
Thomson Reuters, which was formed in a merger in 2008, creating a US$30 billion behemoth in financial news and information, is making a big bet on Insider, about US$100 million. While its chief competitor, Bloomberg, is making inroads into consumer media with its purchase of Businessweek, Thomson Reuters is going in the opposite direction.
Why try to sell advertisers on a broad television network when you can get subscribers — investment banks, analysts, market players — to pay and pay dearly for the information ginned up by 2,800 reporters from 200 bureaus around the world, not to mention lots of other technical business intelligence from a curated group of partners?
The effort also tells us something about the place online video now occupies.
“The trend that we are seeing in professional information is not all that different than consumer media,” said Devin Wenig, chief executive for the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “People are increasingly visual and they expect to access information in that way. They want to be able to look at a chief executive and see the expression on the analyst’s face.”
Of course, just about anybody could go out on the Web and find gobs of people spouting off about financial matters. However, Reuters Insider also produces almost real-time transcripts through voice recognition technology — the renderings are pretty rough, but useful — and then humans come behind and clean up some of those transcripts, while adding additional tags, links and other relevant information.
That metadata, along with highlighted search terms that allow the viewer to go to the exact moment in the video when the term is mentioned, could become part of a new informational system in which links are passed, video is shared and Web stars can be born.
You don’t have to have an MBA from Wharton to know that making online video searchable has significant implications. With tools the new site provides, Thomson Reuters’ 500,000 users can use computers and PDAs to clip and share the parts of the video data stream most relevant to their corner of the world. In its social aspects and multi-platform delivery, the service reflects the lessons of the Web, brought to a gated community.
About 15 percent of the content on Reuters Insider will come from the service’s own studios and desktop nodes, while the rest will come from major media outlets like CNBC, Sky and Forbes, along with a lot of content from analysts at UBS, Roubini Global Economics and JPMorgan. Oh, and a long tail of hard-core niche providers most civilians have never heard of.
As part of the initiative, Reuters is sharing a suite of elegant and easy tools for desktop video production, even if some of the footage that comes back looks like a hostage video.
“Not everybody is going to take to this immediately,” Mike Stepanovich, the managing editor of Reuters Insider, said diplomatically. “Some of our partners will be quicker adopters than others.”
It sounds wonderful, and probably will be one day, but the density and relevance of information still need work. And on-demand Web video, as anyone can tell you, won’t always do what you demand. Thomson Reuters says that it will iron out glitches as they occur and that it expects that, as some of its partners begin to see a marketing benefit from their video content, their contributions will grow in depth and quality.
“When I got started, research was mailed first class and you received it a few days later and that was it,” said Jeffrey Tabak, co-chief executive of Miller, Tabak and Co, an institutional trading firm.
He said the firm was dropping significant time and resources into video programming for Reuters Insider because “we have to come up delivering information to a new generation of analyst.”
Wenig was frank in saying that Reuters might be ahead of the production and consumption curve by providing 3,000 weekly “shows.” (Actually, the programs are not much longer than commercials on regular television.) However, he reasons that these are good muscles for the company to develop as video gains on text and clutter from all kinds of information increases.
On the media channel of Reuters Insider on the morning of May 7, I found a video from ITN, a British content company owned in part by Thomson Reuters, which featured David Hasselhoff’s plans for a reality show, a Reuters fixed-income analyst talking about Virgin Media and a video from something called Market News Video about the earnings of Time Warner and the News Corp.
It’s not exactly Glee. It’s not even Mad Money, but it beats downloading and reading the PDF of the latest media research report by a mile.
Making such a big bet on video, Reuters is acknowledging that professionally generated text — no matter how relevant, no matter how actionable — just isn’t going to get it done anymore.
By creating a site built on not only their nascent video efforts, but also user-generated video content from inside the walls of its own service, the company is redefining expertise, news and the language of information.
This evolving model suggests journalism is not a megaphone of one-to-many, but a maypole where many gather and the people formerly known as the audience see themselves reflected on the screens.
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