At a paidContent Live session hosted by Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg, three media companies described a new breed of creators who are equally at ease with content and technology. This has led to the emergence of non-traditional media influencers such as comment communities at Reddit, and at Vox Media sites The Verge and SB Nation.

“In the day, if you wanted to create media, you had to start as an intern making coffee,” said Vox CEO Jim Bankoff, adding that now anyone with $100 can make a movie. He explained that this democratization of content creation has resulted, in some cases, of Vox hiring people on the basis of their comment contributions.

This has led to a culture of empowerment in which everyday people are as fluent in media as many traditional journalists. More and more, they are taking to public platforms to not just report, but to take part in the news.

Erik Martin, GM of Reddit, cited “random acts of pizza” — a community on the site that sends pizza as a gesture of support, most recently to emergency workers in Boston.

But does this new culture of public participation also has a dark side? Slate’s Weisberg pointed to Reddit’s current efforts to identify the Boston bomber, including posting a suspect’s photo on the site, as approaching vigilante justice.

“Reddit may be creating the next Richard Jewell,” said Weisberg, referring to a police officer who foiled an Atlanta Olympics bombing plot only to be falsely accused as a suspect in a traumatizing “trial by media.”

Martin said he regarded the role of Reddit employees as “groundskeepers” who helped discrete communities determine their own standards.

Dan Roth, a former Fortune editor who now oversees news on LinkedIn Today, offered a further example of how non-journalists are creating media. He described how executives like Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson are now writing regular columns in their own voices. While such contributions in traditional media typically amounted to no more than press releases, Roth said that readers’ ire at inauthenticity has forced even corporate executives to reevaluate how they write.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

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It should probably come as no surprise that Gawker Media is in the latter camp, since founder Nick Denton has a penchant for zigging while others are zagging, and is more than happy to rip up much of his existing network in order to try something new. The latest new thing is the Kinja discussion platform, which Denton talked about with me last year just before it launched — describing it as the core of the Gawker empire’s future. The latest version of the platform was just rolled out to users at Jalopnik.

Every commenter now becomes a blogger

As Tim Carmody at The Verge describes in a post on the new features, the platform essentially turns every commenter into a blogger. Prior to the latest change, readers had a profile page that showed their latest contributions, but now they have what amounts to a full-fledged blog with publishing ability — complete with their own custom address at Kinja.com. And editor Matt Hardigree says that the site, and by extension other Gawker sites, will be looking at the comments as a source of content and even future hires:

“If you want, you’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.”

It’s worth noting that Gawker already has a history of hiring writers from its comment section, something that the political blog network Daily Kos has also done a number of times. And it’s not just blogs: Yoni Appelbaum, a PhD candidate in history, commented so intelligently on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ posts at The Atlantic that he was eventually made a guest blogger.

Denton’s plan with Kinja isn’t just to create platforms for Gawker readers to hold forth on whatever they wish — the new system is also designed to function as a potential marketing vehicle, with advertisers and brands encouraged to participate (and possibly even sponsor) discussions that begin in the comments on a story. This is just one of a number of revenue-generating experiments that Gawker is rolling out over the next little while, Denton says.

Others also want to turn readers into bloggers

And Gawker isn’t the only new-media entity that is trying to reinvent reader contributions: The Verge, which is published by Vox Media, has turned its discussion forums into content hubs of their own, and often highlights them on the front page (Note: Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The question-and-answer site Quora, meanwhile, has launched something that is like an amalgam of Gawker’s approach and The Verge’s: the site recently turned its reader forums into blogs — which means that every contributor to those forums now has a blog page. And as my colleague Jeff Roberts recently described, The Huffington Post has launched a “Conversations” feature that gives popular discussion threads their own webpage.

In a sense, these efforts are just an evolution of the approach that the Huffington Post took when it first launched, which was to give almost anyone who wanted it the ability to publish a blog post. Will these new players produce anything valuable, or just a lot of sound and fury?

Images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy King and Pew Center

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In the month of October, comScore reports The Verge racked up 3.1 million unique U.S. visitors. It’s an impressive start but still a ways behind longtime incumbents like Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, which had 6.5 million uniques. The number for AOL’s Engadget, which Vox raided to create its editorial team, was 6.3 millon.

The Verge is “very profitable” and has sold out its advertising inventory for months, according to Chief Content Officer Marty Moe, who credits a “super premium experience” for attracting large brands like Ford, BMW and Microsoft. The Verge is one of three sites where Vox Media has applied its strategy of choosing a news vertical and then hitting it hard with sizeable staffs of specialist writers and elaborate publishing tools. The company’s other properties are sports site SB Nation and newly launched video game site Polygon.

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After teasing the site’s arrival for months, Vox finally launched Polygon on Wednesday night. The site is a soup-to-nuts source for video game news, covering
everything from hardcore gamer staples like Call of Duty to casual mobile fare like Words with Friends. Polygon will also feature human interest stories about developers and players and even offer long-form journalism. The site has Vox’s typically elegant layout – here’s a screenshot:

“Video games have always been defined by change and right now we’re living in the middle of the most rapid change in video game history with mobile gaming, social gaming and web gaming, said Editor in Chief Chris Grant, in a phone interview.

Grant, who used to edit popular game blog Joystiq, says there is a lack of mature press coverage for what is now a $25 billion industry. He adds the audience for video game news is far more diverse than the stoned Halo players we may remember from college — a Polygon reader is more likely to be a young woman or a 39 year old lawyer than a couch-ridden burnout.

If Vox is betting that gaming is a large audience, it’s probably right. In the past, the company has shown no appetite for nibbling at the edges of a topic but instead prefers to go all-in with a big investment in staff and its Cadillac-like publishing platform known as Chorus (at paidContent 2012, CEO Jim Bankoff compared the platform to Lucas Films studios which George Lucas created in order to make Star Wars possible). Vox used this “go big” approach with The Verge which, in less than a year, has become a force in tech reporting.

Polygon managing editor Justin McElroy says the site also hopes to attract non-gamer readers with “people centric” stories. These include the tale of a couple who got married after meeting in a game video or, more darkly, a game developer who let his profession wreck his relationship.

Polygon is certainly thinking big, but who will pay for its fancy new canvas? Chief Content Officer Marty Moe says the site has already attracted premium advertisers from inside and outside the industry — Sony, Microsoft, Geico and so on. And as is the norm with media properties these days, Moe says Polygon also expects substantial revenue from off-line activities (read: events).

The Polygon launch means Vox now possesses mega-properties in three fields: tech, sports (SB Nation) and now gaming. This raises the question of whether Vox will use its formidable resources to scoop up another news domain such as health, fashion or food. In our phone interview, Moe said its existing three coverage areas were vast in themselves and left the company with plenty of room to grow — no new properties soon, in other words. He also said Vox has no plans to license its prized platform.

(Image by auremar via Shutterstock)

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Jim Bankoff, Chairman and CEO, Vox Media

Data helps destroy containers, and that’s a good thing. Data creates new content and information experiences and helps bring an end to the notion of content silos, Betaworks’ John Borthwick said: “The moment you start thinking about it as information, you start to think less about the package and more about the users.” Forrester’s James McQuivey pointed out that it’s not just a “tablet or iPad world,” but an “everything world” — and millions of people are consuming content not on iPads or e-readers but on gaming systems like the Xbox 360.

Digital storytelling is a native art. Stories on the Internet are not a new form of magazine or newspaper stories, but a medium in their own right — just like radio or TV. Publishers should develop their platforms accordingly rather than just repurposing other print vehicles. When Wenner Media released Us Weekly on iPad for the first time, it figured out a way to enable the “passalong” that’s so popular with the magazine’s print edition. As Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told us, George Lucas had to build a new story-telling platform called Lucasfilm so that he could tell the story of “Star Wars.” And don’t say blogging is dead: “That’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expression is dead,” said WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Not all “media” are created equal. Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Betaworks’ John Borthwick gave a rude awakening to Big Media executives, urging them to give up control of their content — and even to stop calling it “content.” But declaring new digital networks victors over somewhat different traditional print and broadcast operators after simply labelling each “media” can sometimes seem counterproductive and insufficient: What’s being created now are entirely new kinds of information vehicles. The industry is truly “at the crossroads” suggested by the paidContent 2012 conference’s subtitle– but technologists and information producers may now be heading in different directions, as well as speaking different languages.

Publishers have to sell their brands directly to consumers. “Publishing companies need to understand that the thing [companies] like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers really respect is a brand,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in an explanation of why those companies agreed to send customers directly to the Pottermore site to buy e-books. “If we’ve demonstrated anything, it’s the power of a brand,” he said, noting that over half of Pottermore’s e-book sales result from readers coming directly to the site instead of being referred there by the retailers. Not every brand is Harry Potter — but “need to understand that their role in the future is creating these brands,” Redmayne said.

It’s time to toss CPM as a yardstick for online advertising success. How can Facebook be so inept at advertising? Because it’s handing advertisers a sledgehammer not a scalpel. Betaworks’ Borthwick and GigaOM’s Om Malik say it’s time to discard old-fashioned display ads as the basic unit of online ad success. Instead, it’s time for advertisers to adapt their ads to the evolving nature of the internet itself. That means forgetting about CPMs and focusing on data and social dynamics. On a broader level, it means re-imagining basic precepts of advertising and product discovery in a world where Web pages are being eclipsed by new types of online discovery and interaction.

If you didn’t make it to the TimesCenter yesterday, you’ll find video of all yesterday’s panels here (registration required). And let us know your takeaways from the day in the comments.

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Vox Media CEO and Chairman Jim Bankoff

In order to tell the story of Star Wars, George Lucas had to create a new technology company that was powerful enough to tell that story. The same thing has to happen in digital news publishing.

That’s the conclusion of Jim Bankoff, CEO and Chairman of Vox Media, whose sites The Verge and SB Nation have shaken up the world of tech and sports journalism.

“Story telling digitally is a native art just like broadcasting,” says Bankoff, who argues that publishers must build themselves in response to the shape of the web and its audiences.

In practical terms, this means building content that is tailored to the fractured, passionate communities that make up the web. The audience isn’t “sports fans” or people interested in “health” but rather New York Rangers fans or those suffering from gout. Bankoff also touted his company’s proprietary tech platform that he says allows writers to better tell stories.

Bankoff was speaking at a paidContent 2012 panel with incoming USA Today publisher Larry Kramer and John Paton, a longtime newspaper veteran who is now CEO of Digital First Media.

Kramer and Paton addressed the familiar challenge for newspapers of how to manage legacy structures while trying to keep pace with nimbler digital natives like Vox. Paton described newspapers’ longtime practice of repurposing existing content as a lousy strategy and predicted that papers’ cost-cutting phase would last another five years.

The upshot is that legacy news companies will remain hard-pressed to leverage their biggest advantage — powerful brand equity — fast enough to be part of the new publishing world.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Image courtesy of Angela Waye.

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While it won’t do much to ESPN viewership in the near term, it will surely put Yahoo Sports & its video efforts under pressure. Nice move Jim Bankoff (CEO of Vox). They have launched six shows as part of this effort. I loved the first episode of Shutdown Fullback, a college football show, that is very much like Digg Nation, except for football — the American one. It is hosted by EDSBS.com‘s Spencer Hall and SB Nation’s college football editor Jason Kirk. I will also be tuning into Team Reports as well – it is baseball season after all.

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