How CNET covers tech news and gadgets by experimenting

Connie Guglielmo is editor in chief of CNET News, directing the operational and editorial aspects of the tech news site’s news team, from breaking news to analysis and features.

Guglielmo joined CNET in March 2014.

Guglielmo previously worked at Forbes, where for two years she wrote cover stories, interviewed notable CEOs and helped direct the team’s technology coverage nationwide. She also spent seven years as a financial reporter and enterprise editor for Bloomberg, where her stories and her team’s coverage of the most-important publicly traded companies moved markets.

Additionally, Guglielmo served as the Silicon Valley bureau chief for Interactive Week, a position she presided over during the dotcom bust. She has also served as a news editor for MacWeek, and as vice president of corporate communications for Hewlett-Packard.

CNET has been making a number of changes since Guglielmo joined the CBS Interactive operation. Last week, for example, it launched a fiction section to its website and unveiled a new phone application called Tech Today. It has also started a print magazine shortly after she started.

Guglielmo spoke with Talking Biz News by telephone on Tuesday afternoon about her career and about CNET. What follows is an edited transcript.

Why did you decide to join CNET?

I have been a tech reporter in Silicon Valley for more than two decades. When CBS Interactive approached me, they offered me an opportunity to come run the news team. This was a much more interesting opportunity because I was around when CNET launched and knew the people who helped launch it. I knew CNET and I knew what its role was in the evolution of tech coverage.

But I also knew that the news side had been overpowered by the review side, so it was a fascinating opportunity to work in a startup mode at a company that is owned by CBS. So that is why I joined. It was an exciting opportunity. When you are in charge and get to set editorial vision, that’s an exciting thing.

What did you learn at your other business journalism jobs that you’re using at CNET?

A few things. When I joined the news team, I assessed how we were doing news. CNET had been writing a lot of commodity news journalism. I came from Bloomberg, which is very fast-paced and a big part of the reason why they exist. CNET was doing some of that, but that is not a strength that we needed to play off of. Our role is to provide the context from our extremely knowledgeable tech people.

So we looked at what we could do to add value, to provide context to all of our coverage, starting with breaking news.

Another thing we did was starting to look at long-form analysis pieces, which is what I had done at Forbes. We started looking at what we could do there. The first package right after I joined was called “Vexed in the City” on how the tech industry was changing the society. Since then, we have done many special reports. They include a package a year ago about women in tech. We did a big package last January on net neutrality. We’ve done packages on Google Glass.

What do you see as CNET’s mission?

There are a lot of sites that cover technology in a variety of ways. Our difference versus other publications is the lens through which we look at tech. Bloomberg, the Journal, Dow Jones, Fortune and Forbes all look at tech through the lens of business. Other sites look at it through gadgets. Others look at it through policy. We look at it through consumers, how it impacts your life, the tools that you use and the services that you use and the culture around the tech scene.

There are people who have channels who cover tech, like Forbes. We are 100 percent focused on tech, and the focus is on the consumer.

Who do you see as competitors who cover tech from a consumer perspective?

I think people do slices of it. Vanity Fair has recently gone into tech in a big way. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the more mainstream publications that are not business focused. Everyone covers it through the lens that they speak too. But we’re the only site with the depth and the breadth that we cover, focusing on the consumer aspect.

When I joined CNET, the head of reviews was a woman. And I am the editor in chief of news. There are women who cover technology and run different sites. But as a major technology brand to have the editor in chief and the head of reviews both be women — I thought it was very notable. The staff here is very diverse. Half of my staff is women. And there’s racial diversity as well. That’s how you get the depth and the breadth.

How does that diversity help you cover tech news?

Our team gets together every Friday,and we talk about what we’ve done and what we want to do in the coming months. People have different interests and perspectives.

When I started writing about technology 20 years ago, it was a niche thing. My first job was with MacWeek, which was devoted to the Macintosh computer. Tech coverage at that time was minuscule, and it was thought of as very niche and never going to be culturally relevant. Over the past 20 years, that has changed.

What is tech? That is so broad and it has changed people’s lives. It changes depending on who you ask and where they are in their life and what they care about. I have a whole group of people here interested in debating the merits of getting unplugged from the grid. Then you have a group of people interested in productivity apps and how you can do things more effectively. There are so many things that tech touches. That’s why you have to have diversity on your staff.

What are some of the areas where you’d like to see CNET improve its coverage?

We’ve been experimenting since I got here. We’re looking always at things that are obviously in the news. The Apple vs. FBI case has encryption back in the queue. It’s never gone away.

We’re constantly looking at what is the next thing. We’ve looked at marijuana and technology and the opportunity that entrepreneurs see. In January, we had a reporter go to the big pornography show in Los Angeles after the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and look at how that industry is changing due to technology. We looked at virtual reality and talked to some of the professionals working in some of the legal brothels outside of Las Vegas.

We’ve been looking at election coverage and the social media memes being used. We covered one of the very first debates and watched it in virtual reality and how that might change coverage. We’re constantly experimenting. That has been incredibly fun.

What are you most proud of that CNET has done in your two years there?

It’s like which of my children do I love better. I’m very proud of the fact that I work at a place where I can experiment. Our net neutrality coverage is not an obvious area of coverage for CNET, but it was extremely important. We invested the resources. Even the FCC thought that our coverage was so detailed and a public service on a complicated topic. Trying to make it understandable to the average person is something that very few people devote time and attention to. With the whole Apple/FBI drama that has unfolded, we did an FAQ before Apple did its FAQ to lay out what was at stake.

Rather than pick one thing, when you see a great story and don’t have to explain why you cover it, that’s a great thing. You do journalism because you love what you do. If you don’t come to work every day and love what you do, it shows in your stories, having the opportunity to experiment.

Tell me about the CNET magazine and how it is doing.

The magazine started just after I got here. I helped launch the first issue. It’s quarterly, which means we have had eight issues. CNET started out as a cable TV channel and went online and then embraced video. It was one of the first sites to do broadcast quality video on its site. We do a lot of storytelling through images.

The magazine was about how people view their news today. It is another channel. Are people done with print or not? A lot of people still read print. So the experiment there was what do we do if we had an opportunity to expand into print? We planned our editorial coverage on a quarterly cadence. We’re not a weekly or monthly.

We don’t want to duplicate the content on the website. We decided that we were going to approach the content in the magazine differently. On the web, we approach it by categories. For the magazine, we anchored it around four main section — you, your house, your work, and your ride. Those are the four main places that tech touches you and affects you. But rather than the 10 best this or that, we did it by price. If you’re going to buy a piece of tech for someone, price is going to factor in what you spend.

We also looked at the limitations of print. We have unlimited real estate online. For the first issue, we had a story on what happens when a smart phone gets stolen. It was 1,200 words. But we ran a 2,700-word story online. So if you wanted to read it all online, there was a link. We can play with the fact that we have this print publication tethered to an online presence in how we tell stories.

We’re going for premium as well. We want it to have a longer shelf life. Obviously we think it has value. All of the stories are original. Some of the stories are posted online, but not all.

What’s behind the decision to add fiction to the site?

Think about what I’ve been telling you about experimenting and how tech touches your life. Every writer on the staff is also a reader. They love to read. They are avid consumers of all content. And fiction was not an area that we had played in. As an experiment, we thought let’s try and take the short story approach.

We know that people are interested in long form. They read it, and I have the data to support it. That’s what we invest in those stories. So we weren’t worried about people wanting to read a short story.

We had someone who is local who is connected to a lot of writers in the Bay area, and our instruction to them was to write a short story that has tech in it. We didn’t give them any more details or instruction. We wanted to see what would happen and how readers would react. We wanted to see what people came up with and how tech touches their life. Again, it’s an experiment.

I covered Apple for many years. And one of the things that I loved about covering Apple was that Steve Jobs was his own best critic. He didn’t do a lot of market research. He just asked his team: How would you want it to work? That’s the part I love about being here.

What non-CNET tech writers do you like to read and look up to?

How do you define tech? I’m a big fan of Isaac Asimov. He did a bunch of stories and short stories that envisioned technology that I still find very compelling. I have a great respect for a lot of the journalists that I worked with or who were contemporaries, like John Markoff and Steve Levy.

Right after I joined CNET, I had a meet-up of female tech journalists here at our office, organized with the help of Jessica Guynn of USA Today. Some people thought we’d have about a dozen. The first meeting had more than 100. It just goes back to technology being part of our culture.