Newsvine will join a rapidly expanding group of online media companies—such as backfence.com, Bayosphere, and Pajamas Media—that fuse traditional journalism with reader contributions.

Most recently, Jeff "Blogdaddy" Jarvis announced that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark was an angel investor in Jarvis' media startup, which is still in stealth mode.

Amid all this huff and chuff about online journalism, we caught up with Newsvine's CEO to ask him where Newsvine fits in the crowded media field.

Thanks for taking the time to chat, Mike. Before we get started, Keith Robinson tells me he's kickin' your butt in Fantasy Football right now.
Yeah, Keith beat me in a down-to-the-wire Monday Night bloodmatch last year and went on to take the championship. This year I avenged the loss though and am in first place heading into the playoffs. However, last Monday night, in another league, I endured what could have been the most brutal loss in fantasy history. I was up by about 8 points going into MNF and my opponent had only [Colts' defensive end] Robert Mathis left to play. Mathis got a fluke sack and forced fumble -- like 12 points -- on the last play of the game in total garbage time. Seriously. With like zero seconds left on the clock when it happened.

Yeah well, I feel ya. I've got Terrell Owens and Priest Holmes on my team. Or should I say "had."
Ouch.

So anyway, you're a design guy. You worked at ESPN as an art director and stayed on at Disney when they moved. How'd you get interested in journalism?
Well, I've been working in big media for five years now, and I'm just a big news junkie. And I'm idealistic about news on the Web, and I always think there are ways it can be done better. Better user experience, better interaction, more conversation.

That's interesting, I never hear other journalists or editors say anything about user experience. Why the focus on that?
I think traditional journalists, writers, they spend a week, two weeks, a month, however long they work on an article, and they publish it and that's it. An article's life sort of ends when it's published. We feel the opposite. We feel an article's life begins when it's published, and there's a conversation that surrounds it. One of the main features of Newsvine is that every page is a conversation.

We don't like the idea of one or two editors having control of the front page. And we also don't like the idea of computers doing it. We believe in the wisdom of crowds. I love digg.com, but I don't feel they've even made an effort to keep the news on their site heterogeneous. Their audience is techies and that's great. We're going to be casting a wider net. And we're also allowing the user to set the focus. We have this thing we call focus. You can set the focus of your front page. Your front page starts out pulling in all the normal information, like world news and politics. But if you want all sports or to combine sports with technology, you can do that. It's putting the control of the information mix into the user's hands.

You're also providing a voting system where people can vote for the most interesting content.
Yes.

Oftentimes when you have user voting systems, a lot of sensationalism rises in popularity, and deeper, more involved news gets lost. How will Newsvine deal with that problem?
I can't say we've dealt with that problem at all yet. We have what we think is going to happen, and we'll see what happens when users get on.

What about the idea of the hometown paper? Will Newsvine speak to the need for local coverage?
Yes, absolutely. We cover 225 regions right now, with URLs like Tokyo.newsvine.com and Beijing.newsvine.com. Right now it's a fairly automated process to get content into each area, but we hope that will change when the service opens up. We feel like local news is a very important part of news coverage because local news is so underserved on the Web.

Do you feel there's any tension between objective journalism and subjective blogging, or is that debate over and done with?
Yeah, I feel like objective journalism is a lot harder to do than editorial journalism. I don't think a lot of our users will be doing objective journalism for whatever reason, because they aren't trained journalists or didn't go to journalism school. But that's why the AP is so great. They have hundreds of reporters all over the world. There's a time and a place for objective and subjective writing…On some days you want to read objective news and some days you want to read opinions. People interested in politics, for example, probably want to read more opinion…like I'm a liberal democrat and I like to read liberal democrat opinion because I find myself nodding my head and agreeing and that makes me feel good. But whichever you want to read, opinion or objective journalism, you'll find it here.

What about video? There are a lot of news mashups in the works these days—Bayosphere, OSM, Backfence, you guys. But nobody seems to be dipping into video except the big networks (ABC News Now, CNN Pipeline, etc.) Is that because of the cost of publishing and hosting video, or does it have more to do with the Internet ideal of interactivity?

I feel like video over IP will be quite compelling at some point in the future, but there are so many things conspiring against it right now that I'd rather spend our resources on things we have more freedom to innovate with right now. As I see it, there are four major things holding video back on the net right now:

The first is rights. Content producers don't seem to mind republishing articles—or at least excerpts of their articles—in places other than their own domains. But ask a TV station if you can capture some footage from their broadcast and display it on your own site and you probably won't get permission. To compound the problem, the station often doesn't even have the rights to give you those rights even if they wanted to. For example, a company like ESPN has video deals with major sports leagues but those deals do not transfer authority to ESPN to then pass those rights onto other parties. So when a company even as big as ESPN has trouble with video rights, you can be sure that everyone else down the food chain will as well.

The second major problem with video over IP is that of video quality, resolution, and bandwidth usage. These issues will work themselves out naturally in only a few more years, but I've always said that video on the Internet will never really take off until the quality approaches television, both in visual grade and speed of delivery.

The third problem with video on the Internet is production quality demands. Reading a great article by a fly fisherman in Montana can be a very enjoyable thing. Watching that same fly fisherman sit on his couch in front of a camera and speak those same words is probably not going to have that same positive effect. There's a reason why most people you see on TV are attractive, well trained, and enhanced by all sorts of lighting effects and camera work. It's because the medium has evolved into much more of an entertainment vehicle than an information vehicle. It's really always been that way, but technology has evolved to the point now where if you don't have great production quality in your video, it's noticeably lacking.

And finally, the last problem I have with video on the Internet is the linear pace at which it moves. Watching video has traditionally been a "lean back" experience, meaning you're just kind of sitting back and letting it play, but everything else on the Internet is "lean forward". Even when you're just reading an article, you're constantly controlling the rate at which you scan, scroll, and skip around. I'm not sure how to best enable that sort of behavior with video, or even if it's a good thing to do so. So anyway, I'd say that we certainly aren't against video at Newsvine and we do plan to do some very cool things with it in the near future, but for now, we're content to be a little patient.

Who else out there "gets it" when it comes to online journalism? Who should we be keeping our eye on?

On the "big media" side, I'd start with the Washington Post, who just hired Adrian Holovaty to be the "Director of All Things Cool". Adrian is one of the smartest guys in the business and he's getting a lot of freedom over there to do what he does best: innovate. It's hard to rely on the same people who keep your flagship site running all day to also lead the charge towards groundbreaking ideas, and by creating a separate department for Adrian and crew, The Post will continue to outpace the competition in the cool factor for as long as it's cool to be cool.

On the "small media" side, Digg.com is really showing the world the power of the people right now. A lot of people seem to want to compare Newsvine to Digg, and I think that's just great since I love Digg, but I would definitely say that we look and feel a lot more like a mainstream news site than Digg does. What Digg has done that is fantastic, though, (among other things) is expose the power of the citizen as not so much a journalist but as a contributor and an endorser.

With all the excitement about "citizen journalism" a fact that should not be lost is that in general (but not always), citizens are better at finding and critiquing articles than they are at writing them. The reason this sort of user behavior works so well on sites like Newsvine and Digg is that we don't mind sending you off to other sites. We just want to point you to where the good stuff is…whether it be written by our own users on our own site or somewhere else on the Web. Most big media companies would never dream of letting you click away from their domains, but to us, it's part of the experience.

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