How to Make Online Content Convenient

People were coming onto the web and drove to express themselves and we figured out that what we wanted to build was tools that help people better manage that information that people are creating. Zorianna Kit: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony, I’m Zorianna Kit. Brian Norgard the vice president of Fox Interactive Media and general manager of Newroo has developed a website that helps users customize their own news aggregator servic. Brian, welcome! Brian Norgard: Thank you very much. Zorianna Kit: What’s a news aggregator? Brian Norgard: Well, we go and look at a variety of source around the web, everything from blogs, domain stream stuff like ESPN or CNN.com or even Fox News for example and bringing it all in to one place and then essentially build an experience so that users don’t have to skip around and look for all that news, all basically in one little area. Zorianna Kit: So, you customize it for the actual reader? Brian Norgard: It depends on the user. Some people like to customize other people though. Zorianna Kit: So, is it like the Drudge report? Brian Norgard: The drudge is actually edited by Matt Drudge or this is actually done with computer algorithm so they’re very different though what you’re seeing is a collection of links which is actually very similar. Zorianna Kit: So, tell me about the technology then that enables you to not use a human being to do this? Brian Norgard: What we’re doing is basically creating a spiral that goes up along the web. It figures out what’s going on, what’s interesting we have—that we looked at different sources. How often they’re published, what the demographic is, all sorts of different things then we sort of factor that into algorithm and then wallah, at the end of the day you see this link. These set of links which then our users end up voting up or down and it becomes sort of a popularity contest so we actually mixed algorithmic news with human edited news at the same time so it’s kind of a—of services. Zorianna Kit: Do newspapers have amazingly well read websites like NewYorkTimes.com or LA Times or are they doing breed online as well? Brian Norgard: I think there’s good writers everywhere but the individual voice, meaning bloggers and microcontent publishers is really sort of gaining attraction. Zorianna Kit: Do you fancy yourself being well read because technically your generation is not supposed to be interested that much in news, world news, local news? Brian Norgard: I would say that our generation is actually more interested. We have more sources, more source diversity. The ability to read things that we would never have been able to see or even get our hands on five or 10 years ago so I actually think we’re more well read. And I have the opportunity to cover more topics today than I ever would have even five years ago. And a lot of that has been attributed to blogging and ability for anyone even someone is walking down the street that just graduated from journalism school, create a blog and create an audience and really buil a community around that. Zorianna Kit: Are you a journalist at heart? Brian Norgard: Absolutely not. Zorianna Kit: No. Brian Norgard: No, I’m an entrepreneur. Zorianna Kit: How does your service work? Brian Norgard: We have an index. And index is basically is comprised of sites. Right now, we have run 10,000 different new sites within the index and like I’ve mentioned before, some of them were very small individual publisher’s that with no advertising and really just on a simple platform like blogger then we have other people that are very big, you know the TMZ’s of the world and—Wall Street Journal and we bring everyone in and sort of based on the community sentiment try to figure out what’s interesting. Zorianna Kit: How many no name bloggers are vying to be a part of that? Brian Norgard: A lot, a lot. A lot of publishers are vying to get a place within our system and basically we have a simple submit form on our website that allows you, it’s news.myspace.com and some link and allows us to take a look. And if it’s good, we’re going to put in the index. Zorianna Kit: Yeah, it could be a huge career maker breaker for a young blogger. Brian Norgard: Yeah, absolutely. Zorianna Kit: How did your company make money? Brian Norgard: Advertisements. Zorianna Kit: What’s your pitch to the advertisers? Brian Norgard: The current iteration of Newroo resides in MySpace which is MySpace News, what we’re selling to advertisers is a demographic that is engaged, interested in current events and it is all together but we would consider an intelligent batch of users. Zorianna Kit: We’re going to play game right now called None of your Business. Brian Norgard: Okay. Zorianna Kit: I’m going to ask you a series of questions and you can either answer them or tell me that it’s none of my business. Brian Norgard: Sure. Zorianna Kit: So, the more questions you answer, the more bragging rights you get. Who is your personal hero? Brian Norgard: My mom and dad. Zorianna Kit: And what’s the most important thing you learned in high school? Brian Norgard: How to get homework done quickly. Zorianna Kit: And how do you get home or done quickly? Brian Norgard: Read very fast. Zorianna Kit: What are your favorite news sources? Brian Norgard: —Venture Beat and Venture Hacks. Zorianna Kit: What’s the biggest shortcomings of your company? Brian Norgard: Not enough time to create the staff that we want to build. I think there’s a lot of innovations happening in news today and I think that what we want to do is basically build tools for the users and we’ve been hearing all sorts of stuff that people want and it’s literally a raise to get some of this done to prioritize what is important and then how to build that tool that the users want. So, that’s really our major impediment today. Zorianna Kit: What possessed you to start Newroo? I mean you don’t consider yourself a journalist but what you’re doing is very much journalistically inclined. Brian Norgard: In 2003, when I was at Senior University, we’d notice some things that we felt were very important which were people were coming onto the web and drove to express themselves and we figured out that what we wanted to build was tools that helped people better managed that information that people are creating. So that led really to formulation of Newroo and since then it’s all big blur. Zorianna Kit: What is your business card say? Brian Norgard: Business cards are very 1985 in my mind. Zorianna Kit: What’s the equivalent in 2008. Brian Norgard: Give me your email and I’ll email you anytime. Zorianna Kit: Thanks for plating None of your Business. Brian Norgard, a general manager of Newroo, thank you so much for joining us. Brian Norgard: Thank you very much. Zorianna Kit: If you have questions, comments, or ideas for guests, please email us at info@dogandpony.com. I’m Zorianna Kit. Thanks for watching!