Vivian Schiller Interview…

NetNewsCheck’s Michael Depp interviews NBC News’ Chief Digital Officer Vivian Schiller…

Are there any salient lessons from that process that now pertain to the work in front of you at NBC?

There are a lot of lessons. I’ll just list them without trying to say what is the most important.

Co-location is critical. To have legacy journalists or newsrooms who are involved with whatever the legacy platform is — television, radio, print — co-located with the digital folks is absolutely key.

The second thing is the integration of the coders — the software developers, the people that think in zeros and ones — with the journalists is a huge difference. The folks that build things on the Web, their brains are wired differently than yours and mine. They think about the presentation of data and information in a way that those of us who are not versed in that never can. My experience has been the great flowering of innovation — both news gathering and the presentation of journalism on digital platforms — has come when the people who think in zeros and ones are collaborating from the get-go with the journalists, as opposed to some places where the journalists come up with an idea that they think is brilliant for the Web and they hand it over and say, ‘Here, build this.’

The third thing — and this is still a challenge in many places — is thinking about how your audience consumes your content or your brand or your program. Thinking about it not just in terms of how can we take what we do in TV or radio or print and pluck it on to the Web, but thinking about capturing the essence of that and delivering it in a Webby way.

That’s key. The pivot point for a news organization is looking at a digital platform not as a companion to TV, radio or print, but as a destination and a way to deliver content in a way that best suits that form factor.