TMZ executive producer Harvey Levin says that TV and the Internet are converging into a single box, and Hollywood is failing to understand that “a second screen is a big deal, but a second screen isn’t integrated.”
Levin was speaking during a solo session at the SXSW conference in Austin. Below are some of the highlights, with our live blogging below that.
“They’re trying to sustain an old model,” Levin said of Hollywood and television in general, while saying that as much as he’s trying to do different things, even he doesn’t know what the ultimate answer is.
He remarked that it’s hard to find TV shows that have good websites or vice versa. “It’s either or,” he said.
“It’s almost like flying by radar,” he said of tapping into social signals that readers provide, to understand if what you’re doing is working. He also spoke to the need to be constantly reshaping headlines and opening paragraphs to ensure that good stories really take off in the way they should.
“I think journalism has become a very lazy profession,” he said near the end of his talk, concluding with a plea that no one should feel a site should have a single voice that could be ultimately constricting.
Instead, he said, sites should have a personality.
“I don’t think people go away from you if you have a personality,” he said. “If you’re creative, you can win.”
Below is the live blogging of his talk.
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