Jeff Gralnick

Jeff Gralnick has been a broadcast veteran at CBS, ABC, and NBC over the years. After graduating from NYU, he began his career at CBS in 1959. Gralnick has worked as a field reporter, Vice President and executive producer of Special Events and World News Tonight, and Executive Producer of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.

His biggest accomplishment in web journalism has been overseeing the development and launch of http://abcnews.go.com/. This ethos makes me believe he will have a lot to say when discussing web journalism with our class.

In an article he wrote back in 2001, Gralnick says,

What won't win this game is a "plain vanilla" web site like the ones you see far too many times in far too many markets as you prowl the Net. You know the ones. Minimal graphics. Local weather but not well done. No local traffic. Minimal content beyond headlines. Brand building limited to schedules and those mandatory "meet Glen and Glenda" anchor profiles.

Remarkably, this quote holds up to the test of time. Just because a company or organization has a website, doesn't mean they are web savy. They still need to put effort into the site and post relevent content.

Two questions I would ask Mr. Gralnick are, 1.) Have websites improved at an appropriate rate since he made the quote, or is that statement still relevent? and 2.) What ideas he brought to the development on abcnews.com that have shown up on other sites.

Hopefully, Gralnick can expand on this idea in class today.