RNC Day One: Our Interview with ABC News Digital Chief Colby Smith

Just in time for the kickoff of the Republican National Convention, ABC News quietly revamped their app for three of the biggest platforms — iPhone, Android and web. The result is a clean, intuitive, feed-style delivery with a big emphasis on video.

I spent a fair amount of time with the new iPhone app over the weekend. The main takeaway is the app’s navigation bar that quickly gets you to the right place:

• a “News” tab that works like a Twitter feed of ABC News’s most recent political coverage;
• an “Alerts” tab that allows you to subscribe to notifications on topics like “#RNC” and “#BatonRouge”;
• a “Live” tab that includes a choice of eight live video feeds — including, so far today, footage of convention speakers, an interview with the head of the Log Cabin Republicans, a State Department briefing on the failed weekend coup in Turkey, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign rally in Cincinnati;
• a “Shows” tab that has recent clips from ABC News flagship shows like Good Morning America; and
• a “Listen” tab with audio feeds from This Week, World News Tonight and several ABC News podcasts.

We caught up with ABC News digital chief Colby Smith about the new apps, this week’s Republican National Convention, and coverage of the presidential election going forward into the fall.

DECIDER: ABC News is on a lot of platforms. Which of those are getting the refresh?

COLBY SMITH: The new products are the iPhone app, Android app and Apple tvOS app. We also have a new responsive-web ABC News home page. We were not a responsive site before.

What does “responsive” mean for a website?

It means that the design is optimized for your screen size. The layout that you see is different on desktop, different on tablet, different on mobile phone.

In the apps that you redesigned, are you at the beginning of a redesign cycle, or is this catching up with redesigns on some of your other platforms?

This is the first patch of apps that we are redesigning to put greater focus on a few things. We’re focusing on live video with our apps supporting eight concurrent live streams. We also added the functionality for videos to play inline on pages, which is new. Across all of our products on mobile and desktop, we added personalized push alerts so that users can sign up to follow stories or topics. We’re starting this wave of new apps where our users most frequently find us, which is web, mobile web, smartphone and tvOS, and we’ll be looking next to refresh Roku, iPad, Xbox One and other platforms.

The new apps give more prominent attention to your major ABC News shows.

We want all of the products to support our show brands, which is not a new strategy for us. The people who download the apps are typically fans of one of our show brands — Good Morning America, World News Tonight, 20/20, This Week — so one of the things we added to the smartphone apps is a dedicated tab that makes it much clearer how to get recent stories from David Muir, from Robin Roberts, from George Stephanopoulos.

In a normal week — if there is such a thing this summer — what will those live feeds typically be?

That will break down into three different buckets. The first is traditional live streams from our correspondents on the ground. Each of our journalists carries technology on their smartphones that allows them to live-stream from their phones to our control room in New York. It’s like our version of Periscope except that we can publish to our own platforms, to Facebook Live, to Periscope, to YouTube Live. We also rely on our 235 local affiliates who provide us with live feeds that we turn to during breaking-news events. The local affiliates are likely to be on the ground first when there’s breaking news. And we have international partners like BBC. So those are the traditional live streams.

We also have user-generated live streams. One of the great things about living in 2016 is that technology has made it easier for anyone to become a broadcaster. Those live streams can be on Facebook Live, Periscope, etc. We can look across those platforms for things we think would be interesting to our users, reach out to that person, and say, “Hey, can we feature your live stream?” So that’s the second.

The third bucket is partner live streams. This is where it really helps to be a part of the Walt Disney Company. We’ve done live streams around Star Wars. We have access to ESPN. We’ll have Comic-Con with Marvel. There are all these live moments around other Disney brands that could be interesting to ABC News viewers.

What is ABC News’s approach to cable authentication? Is everything open, or does some content require authentication?

On ABC News apps, there’s no authentication but there also aren’t full episodes of shows. We’ll look in a later version to offer full episodes, but that content now is behind a gate similarly to how a lot of ABC’s entertainment content is on the ABC app. Right now, what a user sees from our show brands is highlights of those shows.

Is that the same for the audio?

The audio feeds are focused on some of our more popular podcasts. We have a podcast called 10% Happier with Dan Harris that has has been a really popular podcast. And some of our shows like This Week and World News Tonight have full episodes available as audio a day or so after they air. One of the big reasons we added audio as a main feature is for users to have the ability to hear stories on the go — in their car, while they’re commuting.

How differently have you found people using your smartphone and iPad apps? Is it engagement time? Reading vs. video?

We’re looking more for the commonalities. We want users to find a set of common features across screen sizes. If a user can see eight different streams in their iPhone app, they also need to be able to see that in their Android app and in their App tvOS app. One of the core strategies for effecting that in this new release is cross-platform push alerts. News alerts have been around for a long time, but sharing those alerts across platforms is pretty innovative. We’re looking for ways for users to access ABC News throughout the day where ever they are.

There is carping every election year about the broadcast networks showing less and less of the political conventions during prime time. With cable news and so many streaming outlets, it actually seems unnecessary to broadcast the convention on ABC at all. What’s your attitude about that?

I actually disagree with you on that. Even though there’s more footage than ever before coming out of the conventions, this election cycle has more happening than ever before. We’re not just going to carry the traditional convention coverage like the speeches; we’re also going to have journalists walking the convention floor talking to delegates and super-delegates and talking to people outside the convention. We are trying to rethink how we tell those stories.

Do you think your main competitors for political news coverage are the other broadcast news operations, or do you think everybody competes with everybody?

It’s an interesting questions. On the one hand, everybody competes with everybody to publish for the screen. On the other hand, we talk all the time at ABC News about how we can do things different than everyone else in a way that the user really needs. We’re looking at the unmet needs of the user and asking what we can uniquely provide. Our products are focused around video live experiences, which is what we do best. That’s really where we’re trying to win the day.

Are you starting to see some uniformity in the kinds of jobs across different types of news organizations? What a digital producer does? What a reporter does? What an editor does?

I don’t think so, actually. One thing about ABC News that’s core to what we are is that we have esteemed journalists. That core to what we are. I’ve been in my role for about a year and a half, and I’m still really focused on is finding the skill sets in the organization that aren’t native to news. In particular, we didn’t have an audience development team to look at how an audience interacts with our stories on each screen and communicate that back to our product team and our editorial team. It took us about 12 months to build that.

One thing that looks different to me with this election is that the process of selecting running mates has been conducted much more openly than in previous cycles. Do you that’s almost entirely attributable to social media?

Technology has obviously made it easier for any person — a politician, a celebrity, any person on the street — to share their stories. It’s easier to get that message out. The Facebook Live streams are showing that.

Those things are encroachments on the core, understood functions of ABC News, aren’t they?

I don’t think they’re encroachments; I think they’re a big opportunity. As it becomes easier for people to share, create and publish stories, there’s going to be more content and it’s going to be harder for audiences to cut through the clutter to find the truth. In that sort of environment, the need for a trusted, authoritative curator to explain what’s really happening only increases. In this new environment, we think there’s a tremendous opportunity for us. The fact that there are more stories to tell is good for everyone.

How will ABC News’s explanatory and investigative work between now and the election manifest itself on your digital platforms?

We’re really focused on context. We’ll have explainer videos that try to boil down complex topics in a way that users can understand. On our investigative unit I don’t want to share anything yet, but over the next two weeks I think you’ll see a lot of really great journalism from that team.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.