Frontline has received $5 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to expand and upgrade its website and put its documentary content on new platforms.
David Fanning, executive producer, says the PBS doc production unit at Boston's WGBH hopes to make its site more timely.
“We need to rebuild the actual infrastructure of the site and of our companion Frontline/World site,” Fanning says, “and really make the material extraordinarily deep ... [and] much more accessible.” The goal, he says, is “to leverage the kind of interest that lies in the subjects that we’ve covered ... so that people come across our material.”
Sam Bailey, director of new media and technology, says Frontline’s site has reached a turning point of sorts. “What we’re going to be able to do first and foremost is show our current video in a much better format than it is now,” he says. “The homepage of our website will be even more focused on video.”
Frontline will build a new video player in cooperation with the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Through this partnership, Frontline will be able to offer NewsHour video as related content. “Stations will be able to present content from both series in the same player—sort of a one-stop shop for news,” says Bailey.
Frontline’s site has clearly become as relevant as the on-air program, says Fanning. “The broadcast has been the visible tip of the iceberg,” he says. “The huge weight of the material—the stuff that’s been gathered—is there on the website, but it needs to be organized and ordered [to] be very navigable.”
To that end, Frontline is categorizing its web content — including video and other documents — so that site users can search particular topics, effectively assembling their own packages. “People can pick up themes within our shows,” says Bailey, “that we wouldn’t have even seen.”
Reorganizing the content will also make it pop up more readily on search engines like Google. New topical web portals will bring together related content from Frontline and its sister series Frontline/World.
The sites will also provide access to old content from Frontline’s archives as well as new material just shot, even before completion of a full documentary. “In the course of these long productions, which take six months or nine months to make, we come across stories we’re either reporting or we’ve done an interview with someone that turned out to be quite revealing,” says Fanning. He does not expect, however, to feature web-only full documentaries.
This new online push is not out of character for Frontline. Although most news organizations and programs these days have no choice but to continually develop their online presence, Frontline was already posting on the Web in 1995. It was one of the first programs to offer full documentaries online.
An ethic of transparency prompts the posting of some material. “Transparency’s something we’ve always believed in,” says Fanning. “I think the most vivid example of that is the fact that we were the first people to put all of our interview materials up on the site—documents and other things—so that people could then judge our films against that material.”
And though the Web fosters interactivity by allowing people to navigate information in their own ways, says Fanning, the site will continue to be guided by an internal editorial voice. “It’s not just dumping everything on the site you’ve got,” he says. “It’s a series of editorial decisions.”
Part of the project’s 5-year plan, says Bailey, is to look at how Frontline can spread its content in cooperation with other media outlets—such as YouTube, where the show already posts video.
Fanning emphasizes that Frontline will remain a decidedly journalistic organization. “We publish under journalistic guidelines,” he says. “We’re not going to get into the business of people mashing up pieces of Frontline and having fun with Dick Cheney’s quotes.”
Web page posted July 9, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee