DMW: What’s been the recent focus of your work?

Peter Price: The most important single thing we’ve done this year has been to create the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences as a peer group of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, because the world is going digital.  Not just the television business, but the newspaper business and all the print media, and I think most companies are now dealing digitally with their customers. 

And in this sense it’s an on-demand world, an immediate world, and those of us who have been dealing in a linear, step-by-step way with our jobs, our careers, and even with our leisure time now find that we have to change the way we do things.  And you can’t abruptly go from one analogue world to a digital world; you have to find a bridge, you have to create an education for people.  So this media group within the Academy is designed to 1) Help our members move from one world to the other as digital media becomes more important in their careers, and 2) To reach out to all those in the print media and all forms of media, and even students, who want to understand this world, get hands-on with it, and work across platforms. 

How long ago did you begin looking at the evolution of digital technology and know the time had come to address it?

When I arrived at the Academy 5 years ago my challenge was to adapt the new technology to bring the Academy into the next generation of media.

I had some experience in that, having run a high-speed wireless internet company in New York.  And prior to that, having been in the newspaper, cable, and magazine businesses, as they too were beginning to use computers ten, twenty years ago, as they were going digital step-by-step, I took some of that experience and brought it to our traditional award ceremony.  

I basically turned up the heat and encouraged our executives and our chapter presidents around the country, as well as our trustees, to think digitally and see how we might shape what we’re doing to accommodate all of these new technologies and creators who, prior to this, might have looked at broadcast television as a sandbox too big for them to play in. 

What we’ve tried to do, therefore, is introduce into our ceremony, starting a few years ago, categories for broadband or digital work, where people could be accommodated who might be doing videography for newspapers, for example, or who might be working in Silicon Valley, or who might be aspiring professionals but not experienced people working in big companies, and make them feel empowered, not just to work in digital media, but to win an Emmy.

Most people think that an Emmy requires a credential for entrance; no, they require a credentialed expert judge to decide if an uncredentialed person is doing excellent work.

There used to be a line between big, traditional media and digital media, but are you finding that line breaking down, and that all media today is, more or less, digital?

Digital media is becoming mainstream media.  We’re at a period now that’s sort of like the 50s when people understood radio, but didn’t quite get television.  Or the period in the 70s or 80s when people knew television but didn’t quite get cable.  They thought cable was used to get a better, clearer picture.  And then, of course, they understood that this medium was capable of doing amazing new things that the old medium wasn’t able to do. 

So I think where we are now is in a bridge-building stage to embrace all of this new digirati and make them feel comfortable in what is still primarily an analogue world.

We have to learn to adapt to digital media and learn how to live with it.  We really are in a side-by-side world, and eventually we’ll become more digital, but we still live on an analogue planet, so we have to learn to live with a foot in both worlds.

What we’re trying to do is introduce categories for specifically digital work in news, entertainment, and sports ceremonies.  And of course, most importantly, in our upcoming Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, which used to be a linear event, strictly an engineering event, now it has eleven categories for specifically broadband work, and cutting-edge work that’s going to lead the creators around the corner. 

That room at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 7th, the nominations that we’re harvesting now and are open for submission until September 20, will be filled with work not just from technologists, but work from creative people working with technologists to enhance their programming with technology. 

What, in your opinion, has been the most important piece of technology in developing digital media over the last several years?

I think it’s been an evolution.  A few years ago it was the PC, and a computer was necessary to interact with a television screen; to really bridge one from that analogue signal and help one interact with it through a digital device. 

Now more and more the digital device itself, a single device, will give you what you want without even a two-screen application.  So today the PC is doing a lot of the heavy lifting all by itself. 

We’re also seeing that mobile is becoming increasingly important as the next step of wireless transmission becomes more and more important, and then as you migrate further, digital gaming is not necessarily a separate device.  It lets you play that game on a handheld device rather than one that made you have to plug the device into a television.

The evolution isn’t happening every decade, it’s happening every year.

The entertainment categories you cover with the awards have expanded to video games.  How recent was that addition?

This is the first year, and I think it’s worthy of special attention because the industry is booming. 

Gaming is not just for kids, it’s becoming a much more prevalent pastime for adults as well.  It’s becoming mainstream entertainment and obviously the technology companies, the Sony’s, the Panasonic’s, are paying a good deal of attention to that world.  And more and more you’ll have this screen in addition to the mobile screen and the PC screen and the classic television screen interacting with one another as they all become part of a seamless entertainment system. 

One of the categories, the “Creation and Implementation of Video Games and Platforms,” sounds pretty broad.  Does it mean you’re going to be comparing all kinds of games and platforms within the same award?

We learn every year from the entries where to go next.  So in the first year when we introduced the digital aspect into our news award we then saw what came in, what types of work, and realized that one category for digital news wasn’t enough because we were having longer-form investigative reports resembling 60 Minutes competing with short-form hard news, and we had to make a distinction there. 

We found that local community newspapers were doing exceptional work, but it would be tough to have that subject matter compete with big, international work, so we had to carve out regional work, programming with a regional focus.

So every year you find us refining the categories.  I think you’ll find us starting with one gaming category, learn which platforms are the ones with the greatest gravity, and develop it from there.

But you did decide to have a separate category for in-game advertising.

What we do is listen to our customers, and what’s important to them.  We found that a lot of the best creative minds were working not just in the programming area, but in the advertising area.  And in that area they were focused not only on banners, they were progressively moving into adapting digital work. 

And the integration of in-game advertising has to be much more subtle.  So we basically identified that genre by finding where people were working and a lot people were finding this a very rich area to apply their work, assuming they could do it without interrupting the consumer experience.

Where did you get your start in media?

My first media gig was at the college newspaper and my editor back then on The Daily Princetonian was Frank DeFord.  We eventually worked together again when I was the publisher of The National Sports Daily and Frank was my editor. 

I remember an interview Frank gave to Newsweek, I believe, and they were asking him about his undergraduate education and he said it was great vocational training.

And I think it’s telling.  I think a lot of journalists and people in the media had been working for a long time in the business.  And ink-on-paper was where they got started, and it’s where I got started.

And now everything’s moving in the digital direction.  But have you seen the evolution coming or has it sprung up on you suddenly?      

I haven’t found it that surprising, because I think it’s been moving very fast for a while now.  If you look at the GSM G3 networks in Europe, they’ve been gaining some traction for a decade.  If you look at what’s going on in Korea and Japan, these people are way ahead of us.  And I think it’s because their infrastructure was so poor to begin with that they began from scratch and didn’t have to wean off of the old media system to get on the new media; they jumped right on.

Take Rupert Murdoch.  I think what he’s doing is using his experience and his instincts and his guts…you can have all the smarts and money in the world, but you have to be a real plunger too.  His MySpace transaction took a lot of guts.  People say he stole it but they could have outbid him, and he could’ve been outbid for The Wall Street Journal.  It’s not a man with a mission here; it’s a man with incredible instincts and incredible guts.

Having been the Publisher of The New York Post in the late 80s, you’ve seen the evolution of that medium from a great vantage.  What’s changed from your perspective of the business and what hasn’t?

Well first off there’s still a lot of quality papers being published.  On September 24th we’re going to have our annual News & Documentary Awards and we’ve introduced one category for broadband.  And last year we must’ve had 60 entries for that award, which included all of the major television companies.  There ended up being 6 nominees, including TheNewYorkPost.com, WashingtonPost.com, Newsweek.com, NationalGeographic.com, and the only network nominee who got past our expert judges was MTVNews.com.  So newspapers are dominating this award, and other categories like it.

And so I think people underestimate the ability of newspapers to transform themselves into viable information companies.  And yes, it won’t be easy for papers to make the switch, and it’s going to be hard to make the same kinds of profits as before, but they’re going to find their way into the video world, and they’re already doing it aggressively.  If you go to the top newspaper websites in America, they’re all producing high quality video content.

What do you see as being the major component of the next evolution of digital technology?

The things that will be important in the next five years are not technological, they’re more cultural.  It’s how people use what’s there to get smarter, to enjoy the media more.  I think the tools are there; everyone’s been given the picks and shovels, and now they have to use them to mine for gold. 

Now that people are empowered, what are they going to do with it?  All of these millions of people creating social networks, professional communities, how are they going to use it to connect and work with one another, and to create things?

Sociologically what’s most important here is that there will be a social convergence.  Kids in small town America, in poorer neighborhoods and from diverse backgrounds, who maybe traditionally weren’t exposed to the same level of technology and sophistication are now exposed.  They’re equally able to play the game and have access to the great libraries of the world, to manipulate media as fluidly as people at Columbia University. 

I think it bodes well and will produce an incredible new society where a lot of the limitations we thought were there because of wealth and race are simply disappearing.

Scott Goldberg