CNBC.com ME talks online biz coverage

Jason Raznick of Benzinga.com interviewed CNBC.com managing editor Allen Wastler about online business news coverage in a recent interview.

Here is an excerpt:

How do you decide, in the morning or the afternoon, what you’re going to put on the site? Is there a set pattern to that?

Allen Wastler: The website sort of works independently. We’re very aware of what the TV side is doing and what’s going on, and we take advantage of that, and we look for ways to use it on the website. Do we do everything the TV side does or use everything the TV side does? Not necessarily. Sometimes something will work on TV that doesn’t work on the Web, and sometimes something will work well on the Web that doesn’t work well on TV. You gotta keep those differences in mind. But naturally we’re connected at the hip with the TV side so we’ve got to keep an eye on that.

We have our own planning meetings. We have two news meetings daily, and a lot of impromptu meetings beyond that. We have weekly planning meetings, we have monthly planning meetings. We’re constantly looking ahead at what the schedule is.

How do we decide in the morning? We’re looking at the major headlines. And we have an advantage: we’re 24/7 during the business week. While we were asleep, we had our Singapore bureau manning the site, and then our London bureau manning the site. When our U.S. crew gets in, we’re already on news cycle. We never go off news cycle.