When the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story became a cultural sensation this past fall, Vanessa Strouse-Kenney, VP and head of digital at Scripps News and Court TV, recognized the unique position her company was in to capitalize on its emergence. New to Scripps, she learned from a colleague that a grim treasure trove of taped interviews with the show’s titular serial killer, which had aired on a Scripps affiliate in the 1990s, was lying around in storage. Strouse-Kenney and her team lifted the content off the old tapes, tagged the digital transfers with metadata and uploaded it all into a repository, now accessible to anyone at the company. This process would not only pave a path for new content that Court TV broadcast during the recent period of renewed interest in the case, but for possible future projects across Scripps stations as well.
“We’ve really done a lot of educating on how important it is to be able to tag things appropriately because then it’s much easier to discover it,” Strouse-Kenney told the audience at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum on Tuesday in New York City. “It’s an uphill battle, but the idea of getting all this content into a singular repository that we can all access, as things come up, we can look back.”
The anecdote was shared during a panel discussion, Creating More Content for a Multimedia Audience, moderated by TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp. It highlighted the importance of improved visibility and transparency within networks as publishers scramble to