Exploring the future of media technology
MEET THE MEDIA GENIUSES AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF TECH
02 CLOUD FOCUS Wildmoka
Words by Neal Romanek
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv Stay connected by subscribing online to the annual print subscription or read digitally for free! WWW.FEEDMAGAZINE.TV TUNE IN EACH MONTH! FEED is the first monthly magazine fully dedicated to educating the exploding online video industry about the latest technologies and how to use them. Whether you’re a brand that is just developing its video presence or you are a top-tier OTT video service, FEED exposes the key decision makers in your organisation to the latest technologies, forefront techniques and major players in the online video industry.
Welcome to our first gathering of geniuses SIT DOWN WITH THE GENIUSES
A favourite regular feature in FEED magazine is the Genius Interview. Each month, we engage in a long-form, deep discussion with a visionary in the media industry. These include everyone from data scientists and sociologists, to coders and software developers,
to activists and CEOs. The interviews are always enlightening, engaging and – we hope – offer a view of the media and entertainment sector that inspires a newer, better way of seeing the future. This first issue features a sampling of our favourite Genius Interviews from previous issues of FEED . Some of the interviews you’re about to read are provocative and disruptive. Dr Taha Yasseri of the Oxford Internet Institute tells us that we aren’t as smart as we think when it comes to decision-making – and that digital media platforms understand this only too well. Some are inspiring, like Andrea Barrica in her work to create the world’s top online video resource for sexual health. And some are only too timely, like our interview with The Weather Company’s Greg Gilderman and Kevin Hayes who talk to FEED about reporting on the environment in a changing climate. We hope you get as much out of these conversations as we did, and for those of you who might not know what FEED is: we’re a monthly magazine, exploring the cutting edge of streaming video. Whether it’s Netflix, YouTube, corporate video or esports, the new media ecosystem is taking centre stage everywhere. FEED aims to help creative businesses and organisations use video to boost their reach and empower their customers and stakeholders to make informed decisions. You can subscribe to our monthly print magazine to get a hard copy delivered direct to your office or home, or you can always read our interactive digital editions online on our website for free. Sign up to our newsletter to be kept in the loop. Enjoy your conversation with the geniuses, and we hope we can look forward to reading about your accomplishments in the world of video in a future issue of FEED magazine.
NEAL ROMANEK, EDITOR
JOIN US ON SOCIALS
SIGN UP TO NEWSLETTER » VISIT FEED ONLINE » READ FEED BACK ISSUES »
@ FEEDZINESOCIAL
04 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
Words by Neal Romanek
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
05 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
NONNY DE LA PEÑA: “IT’S GOING TO BE UP TO US TO EDUCATE THEY PUSH THAT SHARE BUTTON” Nonny de la Peña has been called the ‘godmother of VR’. She talks to FEED about the power of VR to transmit real life experiences and ways of making VR creation more accessible PEOPLE BEFORE
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
06 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
FEED: You started in traditional journalism, as a freelancer and then for major magazines like Time and Newsweek . How did you come to virtual reality and eventually the field of ‘immersive journalism’? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: After years as a journalist, I did a number of documentary films. In 2007, I was working on a film, while teaching myself to code. I got a grant from the Bay Area Video Coalition to take a sequence that featured the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and bring it into the virtual world. I wanted to continue the conversation around that issue and the result was the immersive project Gone Gitmo . Of course, the prison is still open – I should build that project again. Building the art from scratch took a while, so we created the piece in Second Life. We used a heads-up display so you could take control of your avatar and that was a very unusual approach. Essentially, it puts you in a C-17 transport plane and then it puts you in the Camp X-Ray cage. That project led me to start thinking about the ideas of using virtual environments to tell journalism stories. And that became my journey – thinking about putting people inside the story and thinking about body-ness, and what it means to have an embodied experience of a news story. More and more, you think about how you can put people on the scene. I always quote Martha Gellhorn, who was a reporter in the second world war; she called it ‘the view from the ground’. And that’s our goal, right? To put people closer to the story. I thought that we could use virtual reality to offer that connection. FEED: The projects youʼve worked on since are all about pulling people into
a perspective they might not normally have. Recently, for example, you did a film on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet... . NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Yes. Greenland Melting . There were also After Solitary , Project Syria , Out of Exile – which is a project on LGBTQ homelessness – a piece on domestic violence called Kiya , and there is a piece on the US border patrol about the death of a man who is beaten by the border patrol. I just did one with the National Butterfly Center, which is a place situated right on the Mexico/US border that faces losing up to 70% of its land if the Border Wall goes through. And at my company Emblematic, we’ve started a new project called Reach (reach.love), which enables people to assemble their own VR stories. I use the same kind of journalistic practice that I used in films, but then am applying it to letting people be on the scene at an event. And the material that it’s based on is always very carefully researched and calculated to present it as it happened. FEED: How can VR convey new things about these subjects?
IMMERSE YOURSELF VR films, such as Project Syria (above) and Greenland Melting (below) offer viewers a chance to be ‘on the scene’ in locations they are unlikely to be able to experience in real life
NONNY DE LA PEÑA: A lot of climate change science has been very difficult to understand in a visual way. Many people think climate change is something that happens far off in other places and so can’t understand how the science affects them. What’s great about Greenland Melting is that it puts you on the side of a glacier as it’s melting. We also put you on a NASA airplane, with a guy literally dropping a tube down the back of the airplane through the toilet so it’ll land in the ocean so they can measure temperature. You feel like, when you’re standing there, it might as well be you dropping a thermometer down the back of the plane. And we did it in conjunction with two of America’s premier journalistic organisations, PBS Frontline and PBS Nova. To me, what that does is take a subject that was very inaccessible and make it very accessible, so that you can understand
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
07 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
giving them something that’s sensory and emotional? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Well, both of those pieces are fact-based, with the same narrator for both pieces. They’re issues that are covered by traditional media all the time. But this immersive experience kind of removes the middle man. The National Butterfly Center is an emotive place, but it’s got a very important factual story. It might lose 70% of its land if there’s a border wall. I think it can be really hard to imagine that unless you see how it goes along the banks of the Rio Grande. The Mexico/US border is so far away. And so are the streets of Aleppo, right? It’s difficult to imagine, too, why people become refugees, but standing in the street like you are as a viewer when you watch Project Syria ; when you experience close to the kind of onslaught they’ve been exposed to there, you go ‘Oh, this could happen to me too’.
what’s happening. You’re literally standing next to a glacier as it recedes. And that’s probably the only way to actually get you to Greenland. After Solitary presented something that’s a very important issue for a lot of people, including prison wardens. You just can’t imagine what it’s like to be inside of the cell in solitary confinement unless you’re actually in it, so we created that experience. Journalistically, these stories are ones that are difficult to convey without really giving people a sense of being on scene. I think that’s something that runs across all of these – how do we tell a story that’s very difficult to access and make it readily understandable? But I think that’s our job as journalists. FEED: It seems like youʼre talking about giving people this full sensory and emotional experience. How do you juggle that traditional ideal of presenting the cold hard facts, versus
I THINK WE’LL SEE SOMETHING IN THE FUTURE WHERE AR GLASSES, VR GLASSES AND YOUR PHONE WILL CONVERGE
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
08 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
FEED: Do you see VR and immersive technologies being rolled out in a much broader way in the future, becoming a regular part of a newsroom’s production? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Absolutely. USA Today won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Trump border wall project, which included VR. I was giving a talk last week and there was Hans Zimmer, who is a very famous film composer. He was in front of me as we were being introduced before I went on stage. He said: ‘Film was the 20th-century medium. VR is the 21st-century medium. It’s the medium of the future’. And that’s for sure. It’s just a matter of how it’s unrolled. And that’s why we built the Reach platform to make it really easy for people to make news content and distribute it. There is still the problem of headsets, but back in 2010, I was working at University of Southern California as a research fellow, and there was a project that brought journalism students, business school students and engineering students together to try to create an app for news organisations. There was resistance to building anything for a smartphone. It was like, ‘Nobody has a smartphone. Why would you ever build a thing for a smartphone?’ Within a few years, there was no longer any obstacle to building a journalism platform on a phone. I think we’ll see something in the future where AR glasses, VR glasses and your phone will converge. FEED: Is news and journalism the killer app for VR? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: For me and you, since we’re both interested in journalism, probably. For many folks, they’re probably looking for an entertainment app or a game app. But gamers are growing up, and they’re going to expect their immersive content to go across all the media, from games to journalism. I think that’s going to be the expected. They’re going to want their entertainment, their news, their
games, etc in an immersive format. The world isn’t flat, so why should media stick to being flat? FEED: Can you tell us more about Emblematic’s new online platform? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: It’s called Reach.Love. The point of creating that platform was that we had worked with Spectrum News and launched the piece on the National Butterfly Center at South By Southwest. And we wanted to start helping these organisations make pieces that were otherwise previously too expensive or difficult to produce. We wanted to make the technology more accessible. We got a grant from the Knight Foundation, because it’s also interested in seeing new methods of journalism made available. Right now, to make VR you have to learn C# and game engines, and we wanted to eliminate that. Anyone can go to the Reach.Love beta and play around. The whole point of the website is to make it easy for people to make VR. You
can grab all kinds of pre-made, and pull in 3D assets straight from other sites like Sketchfab, and assemble the components and actually make your VR story. FEED: How do you see the world of VR developing? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Our whole world is being captured in volume. Phones have two cameras on the back now so they can capture things in depth, so that they can capture the steps. And these tools are becoming more commonplace as a way of displaying our world with added volume. On a 3D asset site, such as Sketchfab, you can find a 3D model of absolutely anything. More and more people are putting things out, so objects are represented as they are rather than with flat photographs. To me, there are certain ethical questions that start coming up in VR. Because everything’s going to be captured with depth, are we going to let people see the bodies when we capture a bomb going off, or a disaster? Those are the ethical questions that we’re going to have to figure out. How do we tell these intense stories and have some kind of editorial stance that’s ethical and appropriate when our world can be fully captured with depth? FEED: Because VR has the power to really immerse people in a situation, and the messaging is potentially much more powerful, is there a question
WE HAVE TO TEACH CRITICAL THINKING. WE NEED TOMAKE SURE THATWE HAVE AUTHENTIC SOURCES THATWE CAN TRUST
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
09 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
NONNY DE LA PEÑA: “We need to make sure we have authentic sources that we can trust. And I think that we literally need trust campaigns for major media organisations, so that people can have renewed trust in their veracity.”
about the ethical use of such an influential tool?
organisations, so that people can have renewed faith in their veracity. We also have to have transparency, and I think we have a need to figure out how we’re going to be more transparent in virtual reality. And then we have to have a population that believes they have a responsibility for how they share media, and for the truthfulness of the information they share. One study showed that it’s people aged over 50 or 60 who are sharing the most false information. And I think it’s because they have no literacy in this medium of the new technological age. To illustrate the problem, I show pictures of Hillary Clinton when Osama bin Laden was captured and assassinated. It was
being livestreamed back to the White House, and there’s a photograph with two women in the room – Hillary Clinton, and another woman in the back. And for a number of news organisations in the Middle East, they photoshopped out the women, because they didn’t want the women in the room with the men. So the fake news problem is not a new one, and it’s not going to go away, but we need to be constantly vigilant. There was a great MIT study showing that fake stuff will hit the internet at a speed that is much greater than truth. So, it’s also going to be up to us to educate people about the issue of fake news before they push that share button.
NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Well, that’s another ethical question that gets talked about a lot. I was on a commission with The Aspen Institute and the Knight Foundation on trust, media and democracy. It tried to deal with how you make sure that you have veracity with your sources and material. There are a lot of tools now for creating deep fakes, and it is a very thorny issue. What we need is critical thinking. We have to teach critical thinking. We need to make sure we have authentic sources that we can trust. And I think that we literally need trust campaigns for major media
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
10 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
Sabina Hemmi is co-founder and CEO of Elo Entertainment, the company behind gaming data sites Dotabuff, Overbuff, Fortbuff, Artibuff and Trackdota. She talks to FEED about being a tech entrepreneur, the beauty of data and negotiating sexism in the games industry WHEN I SEE DATA I JUST SEE OPPORTUNITY
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
11 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
FEED: How did you start your company, Elo Entertainment? SABINA HEMMI: I’ve always played video games and been involved in esports, as a participant and player; ever since 2000, when I attended my first esports event and caught the online gaming bug. For five years I led a top World of Warcraft (WoW) guild, Blood Legion. I studies computer science at the University of Texas, Dallas, but I dropped out and I was working in tech and finance for a while. Then I had a weird life situation and I quit my job and moved. I was young enough that I didn’t have an established career to worry about. I needed a job and I had all of this expertise in esports, so eight years ago I ended up starting a company with two other people, Jason Coene and Trevor Schmidt. The idea behind Elo Entertainment was really simple. We noticed League of Legends was just coming out at that time and we knew it was going to be a huge game. It was going to be an esport. FEED: What was it that tipped you off to how big LoL was going to be? SABINA HEMMI: In alpha and beta, people played and liked it. Riot, at that time, was an unknown publisher and was running it like a tech company, which was hot for that time. We noticed that when players started playing it, they seemed to really enjoy it. The growth wasn’t as instantaneous as, say, Fortnite, but League was intentionally trying to appeal to core gamers, which I think is, to some extent, necessary for creating an authentic esport. We knew the data existed and nobody was doing anything with that data. We said, ‘Let’s just do something on the web this week in beta’. We also knew from our World of Warcraft guild that really good players have data tools. In World of Warcraft, we would write our own simulations, we would write our own odds, and for that time period that was not very common. Really motivated, competitive gamers do that. We thought, could we take some of the tools that we would make for ourselves and apply it to League of Legends, and then take that data and democratise it? You’re looking to ideally make players feel empowered. You want to show that certain gaming strategies are more successful or less successful than others. Also at that time, you couldn’t get that kind of good game data anywhere. So there was a little bit of – I don’t know how to describe it – almost a journalism aspect
EVEN FROM A REALLY YOUNG AGE, IF YOU SHOWED ME A NUMBER, MY FIRST QUESTIONWAS, ‘WHERE DID THAT NUMBER COME FROM?’
about it. We were exposing this new data. Really good players would have instincts: ‘This feels really good. This feels really bad’; but they couldn’t validate that with data. FEED: Did you ever feel at a loss with what to do with all that data? SABINA HEMMI: It’s funny. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a data person. Now, obviously, I do. I’ve established myself working with data for a while. When I see data, I just see opportunity. It was never like we saw new data and we thought, ‘I don’t know what this is good for’. It was always more that we saw data and had ideas. Back then people were asking, what is actually good? How do you measure how somebody is good? How do you quantify that? Is it better for you to play a character that you’re personally really good on, or is it better for you to play a character that is the most strong right now? I think as I’ve gotten more intertwined with the data, and have made it a career, I have realised that I’ve always been a data person. I just didn’t think of myself as one.
number come from?’ Which to me is the mark of a data person. I also think in a data visualisation way. Numbers and data are just a common way that I use to express things. I would rather express how I feel emotionally by showing you a graph of what an emotional journey looks like. That’s an easier way for me to describe or present an idea, than trying to use words or trying to show you a single number. I think data visualisation is an extremely powerful communication tool. FEED: How much does data match up with instinct when you look at how gamers actually play? How good a judge are people of their own skills? SABINA HEMMI: That’s a hard question, because now everybody instantaneously has the data. It’s hard to measure the difference because people are perpetually validating their instincts and validating their ideas naturally as they look at data, especially if they are analytical, smart game players. When we were first uncovering pro player data, one of the things I saw that I found really interesting was that there would be a new player on the scene and that player would be really famous for playing a specific character. But what we would see when looking at the data, is that they
FEED: When did you “wake up to data”?
SABINA HEMMI: Even from a really young age, if you showed me a number, my first question was, ‘where did that
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
12 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
IT TAKES THICK SKIN, IT TAKES A LOT OF TOLERANCE AND PATIENCE TO BE AWOMAN IN ESPORTS
would be really bad at playing against that character in the same way. You wonder why would they be bad at that? I have a theory that they are so good with the character, that they know how they would counter everything. They’re so focused on it, that they almost become a little scared of the capabilities of the character. For some pro players, that’s a hard thing. It’s their signature character and they are actually awful at playing against it, when they should be good because they know that character very well. FEED: How does data collection in esports compare with that in traditional sports? SABINA HEMMI: I think the digestion of the data is somewhat similar. But the data is less accessible in traditional sports. They have developed great data collection mechanisms, but a lot of them have taken years and years to develop these heavy data visualisations. They do things like measure a player’s body movements and position and things like that in an automated way, and that just takes a ton of technology to do. Not to say that esports doesn’t take tech, but the initial accessibility is a lot easier for us. We can see every single input that a player
has in a match. We gather billions of data points for a single Dota 2 (Defence of the Ancients) match. Then there’s a million Dota 2 matches in a day. There have been billions of Dota 2 matches over the lifetime of the game. The initial data gathering of it is a lot easier. But a lot of the adoption, interpretation and digestion of the data, I don’t know if that’s different from traditional sports. What’s unique about esports is that, because the data collection is so much more accessible, normal players can see it. If you played a pick-up game of basketball with your friends in the park, you wouldn’t expect a month later to be able to see all the data, the scoring details, from that game. But in esports, we can do that. On the surface we’re looking for game insights and reporting things, but in the long-term I hope that we’re preserving history and, on an individual level, we’re preserving your memories. I have this great memory of the international WoW tournament one year, and a pro game went really long, over an hour and a half. After a while, everyone was asking, ‘how long is this game going to go on?’ I was sitting in the stadium, watching people go to my website, asking questions like ‘what is the longest pro game ever?’ But we also have a personal records page for every player so everybody was asking,
‘how does this compare to my personal longest match ever? Is it longer than this?’ I could see them discussing the match with their friends: ‘do you remember how we used this strategy, and it went on forever?’ People can see the place where all those hours put into a game can get distilled down. They can revisit the individual memories that they had when playing. Everybody has fond memories, and being able to revisit them in an easily digestible way is a gift that you don’t always get in traditional sports. FEED: Do you work with any other tech vendors or have you developed all your data technology internally? SABINA HEMMI: We will look at other vendors, but I think because we’re a data company, we’re a little wary of vendors that don’t reveal how they get their information. There are a lot of aspects to esports data, and it’s very much still the Wild, Wild West. There’s not necessarily a warranty on how good data is, how well it was cleaned. A lot of the companies that are currently trying to sell or market themselves for the esports data are really focused on getting the biggest number they can, because that helps get them business. They’re incentivised to inflate numbers, rather than to use authentic numbers. For now, it makes sense for us to use internal tools and create things ourselves. In the long-term, I hope that space gets cleaned up. I’m not opposed to considering other options or maybe we’ll have our own option where we can share some of that data with the industry.
DATA OF THE ANCIENTS Hemmi believes data is more than just facts. To her, data is history and a way to connect to the past
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
13 GENIUS INTERVIEW Sabina Hemmi
FEED: Esports and gaming have not been great about diversity and the participation of females. What has been your experience as a female gamer and entrepreneur in the gaming space? SABINA HEMMI: There aren’t very many female entrepreneurs, right? I think at times it’s been lonely, but when I look at where we are today versus ten years ago or 20 years ago, when I started being active in esports, it’s got so much better. To me, I always feel like I have no choice but to be an optimist about these things because if I wasn’t an optimist, I’d be thinking: ‘what am I doing with my life?’ But it has certainly been challenging. The interesting thing is that esports does have more women now, and at every event I see more women. But as I get more successful and I get into more important meetings, I am always, always the only woman. It’s a short list of female founders in esports. It’s a short list of female founders in tech, and it’s a really short list of the intersection between tech and esports that has female founders. I think my company is also unique in that we’ve been around for so long. We’ve been profitable. It’s not a common situation, so it
can feel pretty lonely. When we launched this company, I was somewhat well-known in World of Warcraft because of my WoW Guild. I never hid the fact that I was a woman, but for the first few years, I wasn’t out there. I wasn’t out in the community, I wasn’t talking to people. I wasn’t doing interviews about being a woman. In the years of growing my company, I was head down, working hard. I wanted my product to speak for itself, and I was worried that if people knew a woman was behind, say, DotaBuff, which is a really popular website, then the conversation would be all about what a woman is doing in the industry, rather than the product itself. I’ve spoken to some female founders in esports now, and it feels like they get to be a lot geekier than I could because times have changed. I’m grateful that they have that ability. But everything you hear is true. It takes thick skin, it takes a lot of tolerance and patience to be a woman in esports, because there are challenges that are trickier or different to those that most male founders have to deal with. This is because, in this industry, male is the default. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry means that you’re always going to be seen as different first.
I feel like this industry is not always friendly. On a personal level, I had a rough childhood where I was abused. I think that meant that I left childhood thinking that certain behaviours were more normal than I would have if I’d had a more ordinary childhood. I really think that the fact that I was abused primed me for dealing with more bullshit in this industry, because I probably would have got out of this business a lot earlier if I’d had more self-respect! Maybe that’s a dark interpretation, but I truly believe that. FEED: How can other people in the industry help to promote diversity in tech? SABINA HEMMI: One thing we did for our Overwatch site Overbuff was have a trans woman doing our social media, and she did things like retweet on Trans Visibility Day. That allowed her to create her own voice, let her be really out there, and present and visible. We saw after we hired her that our Overbuff Twitter, which served the Overwatch community, grew from 9% female to 15% female. I thought that was a really interesting case study. Just having visible women can increase the participation of women in a community like that, and I’m hopeful. For me, I am an entrepreneur, so I’m running a business. I’m really busy, but I do try to look for opportunities to mentor women. I do look for opportunities where I can try to be a role model for other women out there, because I don’t want to be the only woman at every board meeting. I want to see the industry change.
WE SAID, ‘LET’S JUST DO SOMETHING ON THE WEB THISWEEK IN BETA’
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
14 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
FEED talks to The Weather Company’s editor in chief and global head of video, Greg Gilderman, and Kevin Hayes, executive editor of Weather.com about providing weather and climate information through video, podcasting, news and raw data BEGINNING TO FEEL THE IMPACTS OF IT IT’S REAL, IT’S HAPPENING AND WE’RE ALREADY
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
15 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes change from what The Weather Channel was then. At the time, most legacy media companies in television viewed their online and digital properties as just a way to showcase clips from the linear television broadcast, and I would argue that’s not the best way to serve the digital audience. We brought on our own digital-only meteorologist. Our first was Ari Sarsalari, who understood what we were trying to do. We didn’t have a studio for him – we would shoot him on the newsroom floor and edit in clips. What we recognised would make us different is that, where television wants to engage conversationally for as long as viewers can be engaged, we wanted to create visually driven short clips that were dense with information. So a large part of what we did, at the time, was find clips that people had shot of weather and get their permission to use them in our forecast. Whereas the TV model – which was very successful, it’s not a criticism – was to use maps and people interacting and talking to each other. We had to think about how to convey information if the digital user didn’t have the sound on their desktop or mobile device, which got us in the business of 45-second to one-minute videos, visually driven, with a clip for each story, versus the very long clips from TV. FEED: How are you analysing and presenting the huge amounts of data available on climate? GREG GILDERMAN: First, we have IBM’s proprietary algorithm for forecasting. The Weather Channel uses it for consumers and for business clients. But part of data journalism is being a data translator. There’s an enormous amount of data and information about everything right now, and there’s a ton of it about climate change and different aspects of climate change. How do you take all that information and present it in a way that a large audience who are interested in the news will be able to understand and enjoy? That’s where our writers, our off-camera meteorologists (who work behind the scenes and write articles or prepare the on-camera meteorologists) and the on-camera meteorologists (who all have background in meteorology and atmospheric science) – really shine. KEVIN HAYES: I have the absolute luxury of calling one of my colleagues, who’s a meteorologist, and saying, ‘What’s the deal with this? How is weather behaving in southeast Georgia? Because it looks like farmers there are having a hard time’. Then
FEED: Can you tell us how you began at The Weather Company? Greg, do you want to start? GREG GILDERMAN: Sure. I’ve worked in digital-only news, at a newspaper and in broadcast TV news. Then I moved to digital video in the mid-2000s. I launched the video unit for The Philadelphia Inquirer , then was at The Daily Beast – and that’s how I got my start at The Weather Channel. KEVIN HAYES: And I was at CBS News for about a decade, mostly on the TV side and primarily with the show 48 Hours . Then I spent a couple of years on the digital side, came over to The Weather Channel and I’ve been here for six or seven years now. I started off building out vertical coverage and photo coverage for the site and the app. I’ve transitioned now to overseeing feature coverage and enterprise coverage, largely with climate change as a focus. FEED: Can you set us straight on what The Weather Company is, and how it is separate from The Weather Channel? GREG GILDERMAN: The Weather Company is owned by IBM, and The Weather Company includes The Weather Channel digital properties – so The Weather Channel app and Weather.com, as well as Weather Underground. The Weather Channel network is no longer owned by The Weather Company, but IBM does still own the brand, so The Weather Company licenses the brand back from us. We still work hand-in-hand with them to be sure the brand is protected and discussed correctly for our users, because the user should not see a difference between the brands. But it is interesting that the back-end business is owned by two different companies. In point of fact, The Weather Company is actually more than those consumer properties like The Weather Channel and Weather Underground. We also have a large B2B side of things where our weather data and our meteorologist teams work with clients across many vertical mini industries, such as aviation, government, insurance, retail and energy – anyone who is impacted by weather, which – as we say – is everyone. FEED: How has weather coverage developed since you’ve been there? GREG GILDERMAN: When I started, we began by doing original editorial video with a digital audience in mind, which was a
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
16 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
getting real data back. Talking to people who know the importance of that data is just an absolute joy.
THE WEATHER BOYS The Weather Company’s Greg Gilderman (left) and Kevin Hayes (right) are innovating in climate change reporting
Stories also originate from our meteorologists. Our on-camera
meteorologist, Kait Parker, has worked on stories about toxic algae in the Gulf of Mexico and the story I just mentioned about farmers in southern Georgia. These are people using the data to tell them where the stories are. FEED: How has The Weather Company been expanding and innovating in its coverage around climate change? GREG GILDERMAN: We have a very easy starting point that makes storytelling and coverage of climate change much clearer: it’s real, it’s happening and we’re already beginning to feel the impacts of it. Once you say that, it frees you up to really engage with the ancillary and human issues of climate change. A lot of our philosophy around covering it is to look for human impact, see how it’s affecting people on the ground and look for
unexpected impacts. When people pitch polar bear stories, we start getting bored because it’s been covered in depth. We know the impact there. Let’s go beyond that; see how people are being impacted. KEVIN HAYES: Two years ago, we did a graphic novel about the Marshall Islands, drawn by Nate Powell, who was the artist who drew the National Book Award-winning March , which was a comic biography of civil rights leader and US PART OF DATA JOURNALISM IS BEING A DATA TRANSLATOR
congressman, John Lewis. The Marshall Islands have a covenant with the US that stems from atomic bomb testing in the fifties. The Marshallese have essentially all the rights of permanent residents in the US automatically. Marshall Islanders can move to the US, get jobs, get an education. It isn’t citizenship, but they have a lot of rights on US soil. At the same time, the Marshall Islands are being impacted by sea level rise. So younger Marshallese moving to America are actually worried that after they come here, after they get that education to get a job, they’re not going to be able to move back home or they’re not going to want to because the island has changed so much. I think that’s a creative look at that story and one of these ancillary impacts that deals with diplomacy, history and migration, with climate change beating in the background the whole time. GREG GILDERMAN: We’re also doing podcasting. We have an enterprise podcast series about the history of misinformation
THE TIDE IS HIGH Climate change stories often have political angles, such as rising sea levels seeing young Marshallese migrate to the US
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
17 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
and climate change. Its working title is The Big Lie . And we have a climate change- focused podcast called Warming Signs . So, this is in addition to the documentaries, the feature projects and enterprise projects Kevin has overseen. Also, once a week – or more than once a week – we do a short-form climate change story. We’re really trying to reach people and using every form of media we have at our disposal. In addition, we are able to segment audiences using push alerts, which isn’t a way people thought of communicating climate science to a mass audience a few years ago. But we know a sizable portion of our audience loves these stories, and we’ll send them a push alert when there’s a new one. They’re some of the most committed people in our audience in terms of reading stories and watching videos. There was a long time where it seemed like news organisations talked about the numbers around sea level rise or the mean temperature change for the planet – which
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
18 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
is incredibly important – but doesn’t really engage the average news consumer in the same way as a story about a person whose livelihood has been destroyed because of climate change. In the case of our podcast series, we’re looking at scientists who have been attacked by the misinformation apparatus. These folks have had some really serious consequences to their lives. FEED: There often seems to be a split between news and weather with the TV meteorologist – even physically separated from the rest of the newsroom. Where do you draw the line between weather and climate reporting and ‘the news’? GREG GILDERMAN: Most people in the US get information about climate and weather from the meteorologist who’s giving them a short-term forecast. We think it’s important to have those same trusted on-camera meteorologists explain what’s happening with climate change. I would encourage other news organisations, whether it’s a small TV station or a major news network, to let their on-camera meteorologists have that same freedom to tell the full story when it’s appropriate. KEVIN HAYES: We did a project last year called The Exodus, which looked at climate migration and again looked at the other ancillary impacts that often aren’t talked about. Our reporter, Rachel Delia Benaim, went to Jordan and interviewed two groups of people there. She interviewed
WHEN IS IT APPROPRIATE TO PULL CLIMATE CHANGE INTO THESE STORIES? FOR US, THE ANSWER IS USUALLYWHEN THE SCIENCE SAYS SO
WINDS OF CHANGE As extreme weather events become more frequent, The Weather Channel reports on the human impacts
olive farmers from Jordan whose olive trees are dying and she interviewed Syrian refugees at a refugee camp, and she looked at the intersection of issues of water management, drought, war and migration, again through the lens of climate change. It’s an interesting question. When is it appropriate to pull climate change into these stories? For us, the answer is usually when the science says so.
There are different levels of confidence in how individual weather events are being impacted by climate change. We know that flood and drought events are going to increase on average in a lot of places. We know that extreme heat is going to increase in a lot of places, again on average. So it’s following the lead of what’s been established and not over-emphasising things that haven’t been.
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
19 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
THE BUSINESS OFWEATHER
One of The Weather Company’s most important businesses is its B2B services. The company supplies an array of organisations and commercial interests with up-to- the-minute weather information, forecasting and weather insights. Aviation is a key industry, and one that can be affected dramatically by sudden changes in weather. In fact, The Weather Company has meteorologists embedded with some airlines at air traffic control and operations centres globally. The company also works with airports and cargo carriers. It can offer weather data for planning around flight delays or help with rerouting, cancellations and flight tracking. This includes pilot briefs and weather data sent directly to the cockpit crew, which can include en route hazards or the warning about potential rerouting or lightning on the way. Turbulence, though rarely dangerous, can ruin a flight, so The Weather Channel has a number of turbulence solutions, which include sensors in the planes providing pressure and turbulence information, which can then be sent to the following planes to let them know about likely turbulence ahead.
The company’s weather services extend to the ground crews, with WSI Hubcast products that send alerts to ground crews and can provide alerts to the people working on the tarmac. Energy companies are also a big customer, including those companies working with long-range transmission and maintaining power lines. The energy solutions extend to traders working with the energy commodity world. The outage projection tools allow the company to make predictions about when weather might impact the power grid or create outages. These tools can help power companies be proactive in getting help in areas where it might be needed, getting customers back online faster. The company can also send weather alerts for worker safety and integrate weather data into operations for crews working in the field. One solution uses AI to look at power lines and transition poles across a company’s territory to see if rain or foliage has had an impact on the network. Storms taking down power lines is a common cause of weather-related power outages and wildfires have been sparked by foliage too close to power lines.
Insurance companies are also beneficiaries. They can access weather data analytics to protect their policy holders and cut costs by reducing claims. If companies can monitor potential damage coming from storms, they can better alert their customers before damage occurs. There is a correlation between weather conditions and consumer buying patterns. The Weather Company has fascinating data sets showing what kinds of purchases people make in different weather. When a hurricane is coming, there is apparently a rise in pop tart sales – strawberry pop tarts, specifically. This helps retailers better plan their supply chain management, product demand, pricing, inventory and staffing.
They also work on the B2B side with advertisers, using IBM’s Watson Advertising, to help connect marketing messages to the right customer with the right message based on their location and what the weather might be. If the temperature reaches a certain point, or if a type of weather has been forecast, an ad can be changed on the fly. And, of course, there’s the media. Work across TV, mobile and online allows broadcasters to enrich their weather graphics and reporting using the advanced sets of weather data and broadcast production tools, including visualisations and AR tools. It would appear that anyone doing business under the sky is a potential customer for The Weather Company.
FEED: How have you been engaging with audiences beyond just the stories about headline-grabbing events? GREG GILDERMAN: It’s not a separate issue from all of the other issues people are passionate about right now. There was a time where no names were mentioned at all. It was just facts and figures. But when you look at misinformation for example, you’re talking about the role of news organisations, tech companies and social media. If you’re talking about policy, you’re talking about all the politicians, about where money’s going to be spent, about migration, about war. If news organisations begin to see how climate change affects everything else they’re already covering, I think we’ll see greater breadth and much deeper coverage. We have been surprised at how much our audience was interested in our look at climate change. I think there was some
concern about whether a general audience was ready for The Weather Channel to really step up and try to be a prominent voice on this issue. If you had said to someone five years ago that The Weather Channel would win three Emmy Awards in four years for climate change-focused documentaries – about how climate change intersects with kids who work outdoors or the pollution of a giant lake – people just wouldn’t have believed that. KEVIN HAYES: I also think my concern was that people would think it was boring. That climate change is a far off problem. One thing I’ve learned covering climate change is that it’s not a far off problem, either temporally or geographically. And there’s no reason for it to be boring in your coverage. I think that’s on media outlets to find good meaty stories that resonate.
EYES AND EARS As well as visual content, The Weather Company produces podcasts, such as Warming Signs
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
20 GENIUS INTERVIEW Andrea Barrica
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
21 GENIUS INTERVIEW Andrea Barrica
Andrea Barrica is founder of sexual health site O.school - and people just can’t get enough ANDREA BARRICA OUR MISSION IS TO CREATE THE MOST TRUSTED SEXUALITY BRAND IN THE WORLD
FEED: Can you outline the journey that brought you to founding O.school? ANDREA BARRICA: Growing up, I was told that my worth was dependent on my virginity, and taught a lot of religious, anti- scientific dogma about sex and sexuality. As a queer woman of colour, a lot of this caused lasting trauma — I wasn’t out, but my family knew something was going on, and I really went through a lot emotionally that took me years of therapy to overcome. When I got to university, I really started to understand how wrong most of what I was taught was, and was thrust into an environment that I felt wholly unprepared for. Even after graduation, it was tough. I had co-founded my first company, an online accounting software called inDinero, but was still uncomfortable looking at my own genitals. I knew I wasn’t alone, and I knew the resources were lacking or exacerbating the problems. When I started working in
venture capital investing in internet and technology companies, I did not see any innovative companies doing anything about the lack of resources for people struggling with sexuality. I decided that I should do something about it, which led to founding O.school. ANDREA BARRICA: O.School is a non- judgemental online resource for sexuality and dating. We tackle issues of sexual health, wellness and pleasure through medically accurate videos, articles, graphics and livestreams. Our mission is to create the most trusted sexuality brand in the world. FEED: What technology platforms and tech partners have you used to build the O.school video platform? FEED: So what is O.school?
ANDREA BARRICA: O.school’s livestreaming product was a custom
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
22 GENIUS INTERVIEW Andrea Barrica
product built with Wowza, since many livestreaming tools available prohibit sexual content. We currently use Webflow for our CMS and Wistia to host our video content. FEED: Who are the O.school team and how do they work together? And how do you develop new content? ANDREA BARRICA: The internet is great at allowing a variety of people from different communities, different regions, different identities and different educational approaches to produce knowledge. What the internet hasn’t been so good at doing is harnessing all of that knowledge, or separating it from the massive amount of ignorance, rumour, fear-mongering, outdated thought and just general misinformation that’s available. What O.school does is to create a dependable, non-judgemental resource on all issues related to sex and sexuality. We build from a knowledge base of our sex educators, therapists, coaches and medical doctors, as well as other writers, researchers and journalists to produce specific, medically accurate, stigma-free articles relating to sexuality and dating. We have an amazing team of freelancers across the world, who work with our editors to create content where they have specific knowledge.
THERE’S NO COMPLETE GUIDEBOOK FOR HOW TO DEAL WITH SEX AND SEXUALITY , BUT WE CAN HELP PEOPLE UNDERSTAND HOW OTHER PEOPLE HAVE DONE IT
FEED: What are you hoping to develop in the future, particularly around video or other online content? ANDREA BARRICA: When we launched, we were really focused on livestreaming classes, and in connecting all of these amazing sex educators who were working in different communities across the country and the world. We quickly realised that the need was even more basic than that, so we’ve shifted some of our focus to creating articles, guides, graphics and video content that can be accessible at any time, and ranges from advanced to rudimentary. As for the future, we plan to continue building and iterating tools that create transformative spaces that help people feel safe, share their stories, explore new content and also interact with us as a brand. Live, interactive video is one medium, but we are exploring many other ways to help create transformative experiences that help people learn about themselves and their sexuality. One tool that we plan to release is our ‘orgasm order form’. One day, I ordered a sandwich from a Whole Foods grocery store by filling out a short form about my sandwich preferences. It occurred to me that this experience could help people communicate about pleasure, so we created a simple PDF. People loved it, so now we are creating an interactive online version. FEED: Can you talk about online content, including social media, and it’s influence – for good and ill – on sexuality? ANDREA BARRICA: People still talk about the internet as if it’s this new thing that has disrupted the world, but it’s more than two decades old. That means that a lot of content you stumble across is really outdated. And for someone who is trying to find out information about gender identity or STI prevention or menopause, there’s no dependable way to really know if what
We also work with partners in the community to develop specific content, such as first person video essays, or more pointed opinion pieces, or individuals who can fill out the content with individual voices. Because sexuality is never by the numbers. It’s individual. We’re trying to provide our users with factual resources, certainly, but also with ways of existing in the world, of negotiating consent, of coming out, of healing from trauma. There’s no complete guidebook for how to deal with sex and sexuality, but we can help people understand how other people have done it. Most of all, we see ourselves not as a static media site but as an organism, a community. Something that is both responsive and curated, and that engages with those who come to us in a way that a traditional medical site or a Wikipedia-type resource does not.
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35Powered by FlippingBook