Swimming World Publisher Brent Rutemiller Details Company’s Past, Present and Future in USA Swimming “20 Question Tuesday”

Photo by Peter H. Bick

PHOENIX, Arizona, September 17. BRENT Rutemiller, Swimming World’s CEO and Publisher, participated in USA Swimming’s “20 Question Tuesday” on the heels of accepting the Media Award from the American Swim Coaches Association.

Below are some of the highlights of the Q & A. You can read the full article on USA Swimming’s website.

Being on the cover of Swimming World magazine is such a big deal to everyone, do all of you in the office have a great awareness of that?
Well, I never really thought of it from our point of view. I’ve heard it from a lot of different levels, including our advertisers who sponsor athletes – earning the cover is a part of their conversations. The cover selection is a very important decision for all of us at SW and we are thrilled that it is viewed as such an honor.

You were really out front with video, when did you see that becoming part of the model for your publication business?
It’s an interesting story because in 2006, I think, I remember seeing that you could put a video up on the internet, but no one had the bandwidth to download it. I had this vision that we would create Swimming World TV. We made a little studio – and it’s a modest studio. The original version of Swimming World TV was to have daily programming. We were even going to report what the weather was and the pool temperature was at events – Junior Nationals, for example – news of the day, and those kinds of things.

But you went all in from the get-go, didn’t you?
We started out with the Morning Swim Show. Peter Busch, anchoring at NBC in Fort Myers now, was a huge factor in the success of that. But the challenge was the bandwidth – WMV, MP4s weren’t even around. So the technical learning curve was just tremendous. The hours we put in…we were up until 2 in the morning. A four-minute show would easily be 10 man-hours of work. I didn’t know if it would pay off. Being in the little niche market however, we were able to keep pioneering. We’re still moving forward and we have some new ideas we want to continue with. We have it down now and can crank out the Morning Swim Show in about two hours.

We then moved to live streaming, and we were one of the first out front on that. I’ve used every neuron (laughs) in my brain to implement the technology of our live streaming model. I think I can talk on all levels in that industry and, at the end of the day, it’s still a lot of fun.

You have done a good job with getting information first, but the focus, you believe, is on always getting it right first, correct?
That has to be the most important thing. If not, our credibility is zero. We also have people go off the record, and we protect their information and our sources. I credit our editor, Jason Marsteller (former Sports Information Director at Indiana), with that – our level of ethics is very high. We have to make sure we’re not writing on a level to be sensational or social-media driven.

What do you do to ensure that?
The vetting of news – anything we get, we double check with a second party. One of the challenges with SwimInfo.com (the website that preceded SwimmingWorld.com) in the early days was dealing with rumors. You have to have the ability and ethics to take on those issues and deal with people.

You can read the full article on USA Swimming’s website.

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