ABC News’ Paul Slavin on Challenges in Iran

ABC News head of digital operations Paul Slavin spoke with Beet.TV last week about the difficulties of newsgathering in Iran, and this was before the government there tightened its rules regarding foreign journalists.

“The government is not particularly friendly toward Western journalists, and that’s an understatement,” he said. As a result, in addition to traditional satellite newsgathering, ABC News has been “monitoring [the situation in Iran] via Twitter and via other social networks to gather information that we might not have been able to gather three or four years ago.”

As far as producing news video for the Internet and other new media versus tradition broadcast media, Slavin said, “There seems to be an infinite capacity for consumption in these emerging media and new media, and some of that media needs to be of a different style because we’re dealing with a different audience.” He later added, “We put out, in a month, on average, 80 million video clips to all sorts of different partners, and even that isn’t enough.”

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