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CNN’s VP of digital services and Online Media Award judge on what he looks for in a news site

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By Jennifer Faull, Deputy Editor

March 13, 2014 | 6 min read

Ahead of the Online Media Awards, The Drum caught up with judge and CNN International’s vice president of digital services, Nick Wrenn, to discuss what he’s seeing in the digital media space at the moment and what he’s looking for from this year’s entries.

What trends are you seeing in online media at the moment?

Speaking within the news environment, there is still a big emphasis on live, a growing emphasis on video, and an increasing acceptance that news can be pushed anywhere on a variety of social platforms. Certainly at CNN we’ve done a lot of work with platforms like Instagram, we want to get people wherever they are and on whatever platform they’re using.

You’ve worked in Europe for CNN and the BBC and are now based in Atlanta, what cultural differences do you see?

I honestly think there are different dynamics in different parts of the world. Having had the benefit of living and working in Europe for years and the past five years of living in the US, there’s a higher level of tolerance around alternative voices around stories from the audience. And that’s partly around the US freedom of speech philosophy. Whereas in Europe there is still a lot of resistance to unpalatable voices around some of the content. It’s different wherever you go. If you go to Europe, Middle East, Central Africa, which is an increasingly mobile audience, I think it is impossible to say there are global trends. There are national and regional trends.

Is this changing in Europe?

I go to Europe about three times a year for work, so I’m not seeing the whole of the elephant. But there is a lot of interest in what’s coming out of Silicon Valley. There is a lot of interest in new ways of working with new media. It’s an exciting time to be in digital media, there are so many different roots you can take, so many platforms, so many ways of telling stories and organisations which encourage people to experiment, sometimes take a risk that might not come off in order to push the boundaries and see what else can be done, are the ones which are pushing the industry forward.

What are the realities of being a journalist today?

There are really exciting opportunities if you’re setting out into journalism as a career at the moment, because so many different opportunities and varied opportunities for you to get your work to an audience. The challenge remains as it always has done, speed should follow accuracy. That context and facts should always be the primary driver in journalism for telling stories. In an age where we have so much information about our audiences, we have real time analytics, we have data about how watching, for how long, when they turn off, where they come from, historical data, real time data. The role of the journalist is to understand that and how it translates to what the audience is demanding.

What makes a great news website?

Trust. I think the trust of your audience is really important. A balance of content between important heavy weight content which may not be the most heavily clicked but stays true to your brand as a news organisation. And also stretching into new areas your audience might be interested in. So, for example, at CNN.com international the news comes first and that big slot in the top corner is generally some big, heavy weight world news issue. But we also do sports and leisure, and travel and style. It’s about having that diversity of content and staying true to your editorial values.

Best Use of Crowd Sourcing or Citizen Journalism is one of the categories in this year's awards, do you think news organisations doing enough around user generated content?

They are doing more than they used to, there is a difference between just reflecting the comments of an audience or photos from whatever stories are coming in from an audience and actually curating it to make it part of your storytelling. Where I sit in CNN’s centre, I have the privelage of sitting next to a team of really smart journos who form part of our iReport team. And that’s been going for seven years now and they’ve really set a trail in citizen journalism but it is something that is continually evolving. It’s that sense of having a two-way conversation with our audience and citizen journalists, it’s not a case of “give us your content and we’ll leave it at that”.

The news organisations that accept and celebrate the fact that their audience has an important part to play in their production of news stories are only going to see great benefits from that.

What are you looking for from this year’s entries?

I would like to see a real sense of creativity. That people have really thought about the stories they want to tell, and have thought about the media they are using to tell it so that it is reaching the audience in the best possible way. Creativity, possibly some risk taking, real thought into using the media beyond the classic article, still picture and maybe a video. And a real variety of storytelling and perhaps some stories that I’ve not read anywhere else.

Deadline for entries for the Online Media Awards, sponsored by iomart and Unanimis, is 14 March. For more information visit the dedicated website.

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