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Erik: How is news reporting becoming increasingly relevant in your career?
Mark: As everyone sort of knows there are literally thousands of websites, blogs, Twitter
feeds, people and their Facebook pages, everyone is sort of a news source right now and disseminating.
And the way that you can separate your coverage from other people's coverage is to bring original
reporting into the light, into the world. And so one of the advantages that we have
at VH1 that a lot of other of our other competitors don't necessarily have is the fact that we
have access to talent, be they bands, musicians, actors, things of that importance, so because
we have access to talent and because talent does drive a lot of conversation, you know,
not only in terms of what people are interested in reading, but they're also a disseminator
of news sources. You know, if you work together with a band, and put together an interview
that you feel has met your objectives in terms of what information people are looking to
get out, and also something that they are interested in promote—using to promote a
project that they're working on at the current time, that's a really powerful way to get
your story out past your normal core readership. So original reporting is super important and
something that we have been focusing tons of time and effort on and something that I've
personally been working really *** building up my skills in that sort of arena over the
course of—largely since the last time I did this last year, my Year 2 interview. This
year I've interviewed a number of musicians, both sort of small, breaking artists as well
as bigger names. You know, earlier this year, I got a chance to interview Lana Del Rey who
is a new musician, that went really well. I talked to Maroon 5 at the Crosby Hotel last
week, which was really great. I had sat down with Gym Class Heroes for a recent VH1 Unplugged
Special, as well as some, you know, younger artists who people really haven't heard of,
there's an artist named Rebecca Ferguson who is going to be our July and August You Oughta
Know artist for VH1, and really sort of, you know, I'm sort of honing my skills in talking
to these people about their work and their craft and what motivates them, and what drives
them to create the art that they put out into the world, and the universe. And those are
things that frankly a lot of other sites that we compete with don't have that sort of access.
And so being original and coming up with ideas to present content to them in a fun way, that
they're willing to play ball with, that we're able to put together into fun interesting
packages for people to consume largely in video online is hugely important and a major
differentiator, and frankly, one of the only ways that we can get, that we can bring new
readers into the fold.