The Charlatan (TC): How did you come to host The Young Turks’ university show?
John Iadarola (JI): About a year and a half ago I was in a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. I was doing a PhD in government. I’d been a viewer of The Young Turks for quite a while at this point, probably four or five years, and Ana [Kasparian] and Cenk [Uygur] announced that they were going to be starting a university channel. And for this one they wanted to have video submissions from students and faculty about issues they wanted to talk about. So beginning the first episode I submitted videos and I did that pretty much every week for several months. Through doing that I got to know [Kasparian] a little bit and eventually at some point during the summer I decided that it would be worth asking if they were looking to hire anyone. So I did a short internship and was hired to work full time at The Young Turks. And so I’ve been managing the university since late January of this year.
TC: You’ve had a few different co-hosts. How else had the show changed since you started?
JI: There has been a change actually, quite a bit. When I started we were only doing about one story a day on average. And it was mainly very serious news about academics and what’s going on at universities and that sort of thing. But now we do three or four stories a day. We cover all different facets of university life, not just the academics but also what it’s like to be a student, relationships and fashion and dealing with people, sports. We cover gaming and technology on a section we have. We have our common room show which is also on the channel. That’s where we get together young people from around L.A. to talk about the various things I would be talking about if I was in a dorm room still at college. In sheer number of stories we cover, different topics, and areas of college life we cover. We’ve become much larger as a result.
TC: Is the increasing number of subscribers the reason why you were able to add more content?
JI: Partially. You have to understand that before I came on when it was hosted by Kasparian and Jayar [Jackson], people had any number of responsibilities and shows they were working on. They were doing as much as they could for the channel but they had other shows they had to work on. But when I came on, that was my main responsibility and I obviously had a lot more time that I could devote to it.
TC: Your show and TYT in general isn’t objective journalism because you all comment on the news. Do you think this is the best strategy to deliver information to people?
JI: We certainly don’t see ourselves as objective, just presenters of the news. TYTU doesn’t break stories or anything like that. We’re more interested in providing commentary based on our life experience and based on our academic experience. I think that striving to be truly objective on YouTube is probably a waste of time. There are so many potential channels and personalities that people could watch that I don’t think people go on the YouTube looking for that. I think newspapers and to a lesser extent the mainstream media provides that. I think that when people go on YouTube they’re looking for the information to be presented in an interesting and engaging way. I think that the stories we cover and that’s one of the reasons people watch our show, but I think it’s much more the various personalities that we’ve assembled.
TC: But you still consider yourselves to be a credible news source?
JI: Oh definitely. I think our show in itself may not be that objective but in the territory of being a strong liberal progressive. I was in academia for quite a while because I have a strong interest in science and evidence and research. And so we have a particular viewpoint that we come at stories from but we don’t do much to selectively report news that makes our point look good. We cover stories that make Obama look good and stories that make Obama look bad. We cover how well American universities are doing and also how bad they’re doing. So I like to think that while we come at it with a certain perspective, we do the best job we can to also play devil’s advocate and do what we think is an honest evaluation.
TC: Do you think YouTube is the new television? What is the appeal of YouTube that we can’t get from TV?
JI: TV was matched up with the sort of lifestyle that people had back when TV was the biggest and the only show in town. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s and even earlier it suited the way that people lived their lives. But we don’t live the way that people did back in a previous decade. We want news on the go. We want things to be on demand especially. I mean, look at what’s happening to TV. It’s trying to become more and more like the Internet and that’s the only way that I think it’s really surviving.
I don’t want to go on at 8 o’clock and see what episode of Friends is on. I want to go and watch the episode of Friends that I want to see. And TV is trying to become better at that but Internet and all the Internet shows are already inherently better. You can go and watch any of the 999 videos that have previously been released on TYTU any time you want. You can watch them all over, you can pause them, you can search through our metadata to find specific stories about the subject that you’re interested in. I think that TV will linger on for quite a while to the extent that it’s able to mimic some of those advantages that YouTube naturally has.
TC: YouTube has always been an alternative platform. With bigger news industry players coming in, do you think they’ll have to adapt to YouTube?
JI: When I started working with the Young Turks, the thing that surprised me the most was how different YouTube is than I thought it was. I didn’t know all about the big media companies, big conglomerations and production companies. I thought it was much more just a kid in his bedroom putting on a show. It’s not really like that. There’s some really large companies already. Now specifically the established mass media companies like if CNN comes in, tries to do a big channel. I think that it would be to their credit to try and if they’re to succeed they’ll probably have to bring in established YouTube people because it’s just such a different world that if you just go in and try to make it the previous way you operated your business to work, I don’t think that you’ll understand. I have a few organizations in mind but I don’t know whether I want to throw them under the bus. YouTube works in the way that it works is because they have been tested over long periods of time with thousands and thousands of videos. You can’t do an 18-minute story about something. It has to be fast and engaging and you have to get to the point very fast. And I don’t know if most of these major media companies are good at doing that. I guess we’ll see. They’re inevitably going to have to try. I mean you saw the Huffington Post, which is an actual online magazine, they’re getting into video as well now and I think that that’s sort of a first experiment into the sort of thing you’re talking about.
TC: Can you describe a typical day at TYT?
JI: I either spend my mornings or late at night for the next day prepping videos for release. So we generally film one big block of stories on Tuesdays. We also have our common room also shoots every other Tuesday night. So that’s when we generate most our videos. Then we dole them out over the course of a week. But in terms of finding stories, both myself and Lisa Ferguson are constantly going over any number of different sources we follow. All these sorts of different college blogs. I’m a big fan of following stories on Reddit, which has a big college subreddit. So we’ll be emailing and tweeting throughout the week and compiling a long list of potential stories. So we’re constantly getting comments and tweets from them on videos about their university, or events going on, or stories in another country. We have to unfortunately cut down on our list pretty drastically because we just don’t have time to film them all of them. So it’s the combination of myself, my co-host, and thankfully our audience providing us stories from around the world really.
TC: Tell me more about the producers because traditionally in newscasts, they don’t comment. But on TYT they interject. When did this start?
JI: I think the reason mainly; Rick Strom who does the audio for us, he does like to interject, not most of the time but I’d say 25-35 per cent of the stories. We do allow him to speak because it’s really a relic of the fact that we started with the co-hosts being Ana Kasparian and Jayar Jackson . So they’re from the main Young Turks show and that show has always historically had [Jackson] and Jesus Godoy, the producer and director, speak. Because [Uygur] doesn’t want to talk by himself for three hours so they’d occasionally ask some questions. And I think that people like it. Rick went to University of Indiana and he had a very different college experience than myself or [Ferguson]. So especially when it comes to anything athletic or frats and partying, he just had a very different perspective. So if we feel that we’re not representing different facets of university life or if he feels we’re not, he will try to cut in and tell us what the other side thinks about various things.
TC: With the freedom to present the news however you want online, do you still have some form of code of conduct?
JI: In terms of the sorts of stories we’ll cover, just by the rules that YouTube places on videos. Obviously we can’t show certain types of violence, we can’t show explicit sexual materials . . . simply because the videos will be taken down if they see that. And also our hosts are all different. I’m very different about in how open I am about than . . . my life than my co-host is for instance. There’s not that much about my life that I won’t talk about because I want the audience to feel like they know me better after watching for a month. I think with many shows, you can watch any number and you really don’t know that much about the host, especially if they’re just reading something from a teleprompter that’s put in front of them. I rarely censor anything I say, even if it casts me in a negative or silly light. But in regards to my other hosts they’re certainly areas of their life they don’t want to talk about particularly about their personal lives and relationship history. We try not to be too salacious. There are stories we will not cover because we feel like it would be exploitative if we were to. But for the most part we cover stories that we think college students and people out of college but still interested in that world want to read about.
