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Your impression when tuning in to CNN's The Situation Room for the first time is likely to be, "Geez, there's a lot going on here."
There is. And much of it involves technologies familiar to internet regulars, but mostly unheard of in the context of TV newscasts.
Throughout the daily, three-hour show, a split video wall behind host Wolf Blitzer displays up to six separate feeds, often topically unrelated to each other.
Then -- bam! Time for an iChat AV interview with "Interdictor," the blogger holed up in a New Orleans data center, or blogger Joi Ito, live from Japan with a Borglike headset.
Now we jump to RSS feeds trickling in from newspapers. Blitzer surfs the headlines, just as you might skim an RSS reader on your laptop. Next, "internet reporters" Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner read excerpts from selected blogs.
Launched in August and modeled after the White House Situation Room -- where presidents confer with advisers on fast-moving matters of utmost importance -- CNN's Situation Room has become something of an R&D lab for news-gathering technology.
"It's like bringing viewers inside our control room and allowing them to move through all of that raw, incoming information with us," Blitzer told Wired News.
"We go to a helicopter flying over New Orleans, where they're narrating what they see -- there are people trapped on a roof somewhere. Then we bring in Tom Forman, who used to be a reporter in New Orleans. We're looking at satellite maps of the city, comparing this with video feeds that come in, then we'll zoom in on Google Earth, see what's nearby -- a university, Lake Pontchartrain -- and all of this together delivers the story in a richer, more immediate way."
Some critics cry "buffer overrun" -- that all these overlapping sources, some of which are provided by way of unorthodox tech, add up to an unpleasant overload.
But Blitzer counters that similar criticism bubbles up any time something new is added to a familiar medium. Remember the outcry over screen crawls when they first hit the bottom edges of our TV sets?
"We try to use all of our resources without making it too busy or crazy out there," said Blitzer. "I'm sensitive to how this is going to play in Peoria, how average viewers -- say, my uncle, who may not know what Google is -- might respond."
The show owes much of its future-forward feel to CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman, whose tech credentials include having served as CEO of Pseudo Entertainment. Founded by internet wild man Josh Harris, the New York-based interactive media company was among the first to produce internet TV shows, amassing a wide online audience in the late '90s dot-com boom years. Situation Room's Schechner is also a Pseudo alum; she was a former "EJ" at the network, hosting show-related chat rooms.
In January 2000, Bohrman left an earlier stint at CNN for Pseudo, which was known at the time for surreal, Warholian mega-parties that defined the Silicon Alley scene.
"The party stuff was interesting, but what lasted is that we defined a new form of participatory programming that fused TV and internet," Bohrman told Wired News. "That's what I brought back with me when I returned."
After coming back to CNN, Bohrman produced presidential convention coverage for the network in 2004.
"We had Wolf walking out on the convention floor, paying attention to what was circulating on the blogs, and we tried an experiment with (blog search service) Technorati," Bohrman said. "Not everything worked perfectly, but we learned a lot."
For election night coverage in November 2004, the network rented out Nasdaq headquarters in New York, and displayed data on a wall of screens throughout the broadcast.
"It worked, and that taught us something about spatial display of information -- it's possible to do things that aren't linear," said Bohrman.
Newly appointed CNN President Jonathan Klein, who joined the network that same month, later asked Bohrman to help him revamp the network's daytime roster with those election-season tech lessons in mind.
"OK, let's bring on the bloggers," Bohrman recalled thinking at the time. "But what became apparent after a few of those is that putting bloggers on TV to talk about bloggers blogging on blogs doesn't work. The whole reason they're blogging is because they're not on TV. I said OK, gimme a week, and I'll come up with something."
After borrowing furniture from other shows' sets and throwing together a proof of concept, Bohrman came up with a set of ideas that eventually became part of the Situation Room. Among them were plans to bring in otherwise-inaccessible voices by way of webcam interviews. Bohrman set up a pair of workstations in the studio that were capable of hosting up to six guests simultaneously using iChat.
"The first thing that goes wrong in TV is always sound," Bohrman said. "Figuring out how to make the right blend of sound to go back into the computer, sorting out which video source is displayed with sound -- those were challenges. Over time, we figured out how to blend environments without feedback or delay."
Blitzer believes much of what's considered new on the program really isn't.
"Thirty years ago, we used to do MOSes -- man-on-the-street reactions -- for big stories. This isn't all that different," said Blitzer.
"We don't want to put false or libelous things on air, so everything goes through an editorial filter," he added. "It seems inevitable that at some point we're going to get burned and something ridiculous will come across, and we'll have to apologize for it. But we're trying to make things relevant to viewers in a new way, and that's one of the risks."
Bohrman says next steps for the show will likely include ratcheting up corresponding online components, and upping the interactivity ante.
"One e-mail question of the day isn't enough, we're not doing enough web chat.... We need to dabble in audio and podcasts, and we need more information coming through web portals," Bohrman said.
"But this is the most existential program ever. It exists for right now. Everyone working on the show makes plans for what we're going to do early in the day, but I tell them -- I expect you not to do the program you planned because things change constantly.
"Life happens. Remotes come up. News happens."
