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You really can't call CNN Interactive a pioneer anymore. With 612 million page impressions worldwide as of February, it's gained such a solid foothold on the Internet it's considered one of the Web's founding content fathers. But today's Web may look nothing like tomorrow's media world. In this interview with Matt Stump, Scott Woelfel, SVP/GM and editor in chief of CNN Interactive, sketches CNN's "anywhere" vision, spurred by wireless deployments and ubiquitous broadband infrastructures.
CW: Where's your content headed these days and your goals for 2000?
Our biggest goal is always to keep up on the news, and find new ways to bring news to people and interact in ways that leverage all that we do with our television product and what we do online.
We're looking at doing a lot more with video and enhanced TV products. And we're doing a lot more original reporting on the interactive side.
CW: Where is the audience going? What do they want?
The main audience is actually going to the wireless area, when you look at what's happening with Sprint PCS in the U.S. and numerous operators worldwide. People are using phones and Palm Pilots as real-time information devices much more than they've ever done before.
CNN Mobile is in more than 20 countries with 41 million subscribers. That's been quite successful worldwide. It's a headline service with updates every half hour.
What's interesting is where that's going when you start to talk about broadband. Broadband is going to be very important on mobile, and video will be very important with on-demand and personalized video. That's an area we're looking at a lot.
CW: Can you quantify your wireless usage?
It's hard to quantify because it's not an apples-to-apples comparison because it's used differently. The wireless service is a push service, so there's no way for us to meter usage. We know how many operators we have, and we know their subscriber numbers but we don't know exactly how much people are using it yet.
CW: Is there still a clear line between your narrowband content and broadband content?
It's a pretty clean break. The reason is distribution more than anything else. The stuff that we throw out on the open Web site, I won't...