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Jordan Hoffner is an accomplished media executive with two decades of digital media, traditional media and technology experience. He is the CEO of Salon Media Group, which operates the pioneering, award-winning news site, Salon.com. Prior to joining Salon Media Group, Jordan served as CEO of Federated Media, a Media General company and leader in native advertising and influencer marketing for digital and TV. Based in San Francisco, he has held senior level strategy and business development roles at Google and YouTube. He earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors from Vassar College and a MBA in finance from NYU’s Stern School of Business. He currently sits as a council member for the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media.
This week Hoffner discusses one of the biggest obstacles that Salon has faced over the past year and how the company reacted to it. The CEO also emphasizes on the importance video will play in Salon’s strategy for 2018.
Videoink: Salon.com was recently redesigned to support the company’s growing video efforts. What role will video play in Salon.com’s near future? How important is Live-stream video in Salon.com’s growing strategy and why?
Jordan Hoffner: Salon TV will be an extremely important for Salon Media Group going forward. We currently do 10-15 hours of live programming per week with in depth interviews and discussions with newsmakers, cultural icons, political leaders and authors about contemporary issues cutting across news & politics, innovation and entertainment and culture. We expect to expand eventually into a 24/7 global live network.
There’s a lot of competition for the hottest commodity — attention — what are you doing with Salon‘s brand and entertainment strategy to grab and retain audience attention?
We already have a vibrant, engaged and intelligent audience reading our award winning journalism and have been systematically introducing them to our video content along with new audiences across our millions of followers on social channels.
We are continuously booking great guests which is a tribute to our brand equity and that helps bring in the audience. What keeps them coming back is a strong user experience on our platform. We believe the redesign will help with that.
A lot of the publishers in video heavily embrace Snapchat, is Salon approaching emerging platforms that cater to video like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Etc?
Yes, we have been using Facebook Live and Periscope and have been seeing terrific engagement. Instagram has been growing after recently putting more emphasis on that platform. YouTube is my alma mater and is our next platform to scale.
Salon has evolved a great deal in the past year, where do you see the company evolving to in the year to come? Any possibility of launching a digital channel on Roku or Apple TV?
We will be focused on both our core product of longer form journalism as well as continue with scaling out live video programming and getting to the living room through technology platforms like Apple TV and Amazon as well as looking at some strategic partners in the traditional media landscape.
What has been the biggest obstacle Salon has faced in the past year and how did the company over come it?
Salon CEO Jordan Hoffen on the Company’s Biggest Obstacle in 2017 was last modified: December 18th, 2017 by
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