Here’s a suggestion to my friends at CBSNews.com and 60 Minutes (you know who you are, Dick and Larry):
Take the outtakes from the very good 60 Minutes story on Howard Stern and put them online. Good on you for putting up the segment itself. But Howard’s huge audience wants more.
Howard talked this morning about asking 60 Minutes for the video to put it on his pay-per-view channel. Thanks to damned Cablevision, I don’t have that yet.
But if you took all that material — more of the Howard interview, his trip to Roosevelt, interviews with the staff, scenes from the studio and office — and put it all up in separate chunks with permalinks to each, you’d get incredible traffic. Howard said this morning that 60 Minutes on Sunday got 17.5 million viewers, up from 10ish million usually (please comment and correct those figures if they’re off). And you can bet that the age demographic took a pleasant dive that day.
So you can attract that large and young audience to CBSNews.com if you’ll offer more of Howard. You’d also find yourself getting tons of links; you’d be in the conversation.
Now if you really wanted to be revolutionary and modern, you could take all those segments and put them up in downloadable form so people could remix their own segments on Howard. But I don’t want to push it too far. We’ll get there.
: MORE: Paul in the comments reminds us that for a higher cause and purpose, Jay Rosen also tried to push CBS to publish full interviews here.
