DMW Interview: Peter Price, President & CEO of The NATAS

Peter Price was named President and CEO of The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in February, 2002. He has expanded the role of the National Television Academy as a professional service organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of television and the promotion of creative leadership for artistic, educational and technical achievements within the television industry. Last year the Academy created a new Emmy Award for video content on new delivery platforms, including the Internet, mobile phones, iPods, PDAs and similar devices. Price also spearheaded the development of the Business & Financial Reporting Emmy Awards, and he expanded the Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, one of the Academy’s oldest ceremonies honoring patent holders of television technology, to recognize the technical applications of patented technology via the New Media Technology Awards. I sat down with Peter to discuss his current job, and get his perspective on new media.

DMW: What’s been the recent focus of your work?

Peter Price: The most important single thing we’ve done this year has been to create the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences as a peer group of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, because the world is going digital. Not just the television business, but the newspaper business and all the print media, and I think most companies are now dealing digitally with their customers.

And in this sense it’s an on-demand world, an immediate world, and those of us who have been dealing in a linear, step-by-step way with our jobs, our careers, and even with our leisure time now find that we have to change the way we do things. And you can’t abruptly go from one analogue world to a digital world; you have to find a bridge, you have to create an education for people. So this media group within the Academy is designed to 1) Help our members move from one world to the other as digital media becomes more important in their careers, and 2) To reach out to all those in the print media and all forms of media, and even students, who want to understand this world, get hands-on with it, and work across platforms.

How long ago did you begin looking at the evolution of digital technology and know the time had come to address it?

When I arrived at the Academy 5 years ago my challenge was to adapt the new technology to bring the Academy into the next generation of media.

I had some experience in that, having run a high-speed wireless internet company in New York. And prior to that, having been in the newspaper, cable, and magazine businesses, as they too were beginning to use computers ten, twenty years ago, as they were going digital step-by-step, I took some of that experience and brought it to our traditional award ceremony.

I basically turned up the heat and encouraged our executives and our chapter presidents around the country, as well as our trustees, to think digitally and see how we might shape what we’re doing to accommodate all of these new technologies and creators who, prior to this, might have looked at broadcast television as a sandbox too big for them to play in.

What we’ve tried to do, therefore, is introduce into our ceremony, starting a few years ago, categories for broadband or digital work, where people could be accommodated who might be doing videography for newspapers, for example, or who might be working in Silicon Valley, or who might be aspiring professionals but not experienced people working in big companies, and make them feel empowered, not just to work in digital media, but to win an Emmy.

Most people think that an Emmy requires a credential for entrance; no, they require a credentialed expert judge to decide if an uncredentialed person is doing excellent work.

There used to be a line between big, traditional media and digital media, but are you finding that line breaking down, and that all media today is, more or less, digital?

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Scott Goldberg