>> Welcome to your 8th Special Edition of Loaded we're off for the holidays. We get a lot of e-mails asking how we put the show together and in celebration of my first year here at CNET we wanted to show you a little behind the scenes look on how I bring you your daily dose of Tech News. Take a look.
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>> My name is Natali and I started covering the technology industry as a journalist about four years ago. I used to live in the Silicon Valley before I moved to New York and basically as a freelance writer if you want to write in the Silicon Valley, you have to write about technology news so having a Master's Degree in Sociology I also had a knack for figuring out how things in technology really affect our everyday lives. I consider my show and my reporting to be a lot about technology and culture. I was discovered on a show called Cranky Beat [assumed spelling] and the audience really didn't respond to me that well and I was very nervous admittedly and they wrote in the forums, "Who is this girl--we hate her. She doesn't know what she's talking about." So then I felt like I had something to prove because I was learning my beat and I did know what I was talking about. So I kept doing that and did it maybe three or four times and then one day out of the blue I got a call from Adam Curry who had an online TV network called the Pod Show and he said, "I saw you on Cranky Beat [assumed spelling] and I think you're good. Would you like to do your own show?" And I was like no I'm a print journalist I don't know how to do this. But it is a daily technology news show and to be honest there are not really a whole lot of them out there. There's no place where you can go and find out what are the new technologies out and how do they really affect my life. When I write Loaded I try to think about my mother as a target audience because I want her to be able to understand it and I want it to be something that she could learn from and it really would enhance her life. So I write it for kind of the everyday news consumer--not just the geeks. We try to cover technology news from a sociological perspective so it's not just here's the data; this is what's new in Tech news and this is how you might actually use it in your life. And that was our purpose when we started Loaded was with something where you can get in the morning, watch five minutes of Loaded and just kind of know, "Okay there's a cool new Blackberry that I want to keep my eye out for; or there's a cool new promotion that Amazon's running that I might want to keep my eye out for," and hopefully things that will make your life better. Loaded is only a five minute show but it takes about 24 hours to produce. So the day leading up to every show we're researching and writing stories and making sure we have everything that we think belongs in the show, and then once it comes time to shoot the show, I get up at 5 and I make sure that I have everything that I want in the show and that no news has broken over night that I've missed and so I'm writing the script at the same time I'm blow drying my hair and getting ready to come into the studio. I get here around 7 and we film--it takes about 2 hours in post production to put it together and then we post around 9 or 10 a.m. Eastern time. And again the point is that people coming into work will be able to watch it first thing in the morning or people on the West Coast again will have to get it earlier so you'll be able to open it and just to note this is what's going on in Tech today. As soon as the show is posted, that full cycle starts again and I'm searching for stories for the next day. We have two producers that work on Loaded and they basically shoot the show and run the teleprompter and then cut the show together in final cut after it's done. But all the writing is basically me. I decide everything that's going to go into the show and I'll write everything. Sometimes if I get busy I'll assign a story or two out to another producer but for the most part for better or for worse it's me that writes the whole show--it's the Natali show. I think the audience does use Loaded the way that we intended them to use it. We have a lot of people who really engage with Loaded and we have a lot of viewers who will write in when I ask for an opinion on say, "What will happen to the desktop or will Shrink Wrap [assumed spelling] software go away," and people do respond to that and they have very strong opinions and they write in and it is very interactive--thank you for alerting me to this thing it actually helped or thank you for answering this question. So I think people do use it as their sort of touchstone for what's going on in the world of technology. If they want deeper in depth analysis they can always go to cnet.com. The technology community took a long time to kind of let me in let me prove myself as one of them and prove that I do have the chops to write and report on this stuff; but now that I do they feel some kind of ownership to me like they open their browser everyday and they expect a certain product. And so I do like that and I do feel very much a product of that community. Every now and again I'll get an e-mail from a woman who's like, "I love this stuff, I love that you're a woman and that you're delivering this in a very kind of gender neutral way and it's not just for guys." I was really glad to hear from a young girl who said, "I really respect what you're doing and hope that I can carve out a career path like that for myself." I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded.
