Meredith Artley, vice president and managing editor of CNN.com, gave the second keynote at the 2011 International Symposium on Online Journalism, and opened with images from the aftermath of the disaster in Japan. The traffic behind those images was the argument. In the ten days after the earthquake of 11 March, CNN averaged 75 million page views a day on desktop and 9 million a day on mobile, with 15 million video starts a day and a million mobile app downloads. Mobile had drawn 174 million page views in February and was expected to pass 200 million in March because of Japan; the iPhone and iPad apps had been downloaded 5 million times.
The projects Artley described were about participation, video and mobile. Open Story was a collaborative story-telling interface that pulled traditional reporting, user-generated content and data into one page, the Japan coverage among them. A feature letting users leave a video comment on a story was due that summer, and Artley raised the possibility of those videos being used on air. A new video interface was in preview, with a more cinematic feel and HD, alongside work on continuity so that a viewer could pick a video up on an iPad after starting it on a desktop.
Her summary of the strategy was a Pilates analogy: strengthen the core, stretch into new areas.