Hello and welcome to Zing Talk, where Benzinga brings you the biggest names and brightest minds from New York to Silicon Valley.

I'm your host, Jason Raznick. Today our guest is Allen Wastler, Managing Editor of CNBC.com. How you doing today Allen?

Allen Wastler: I'm doing fine Jason, considering there's all this snow around me.

You recently wrote about someone I'm a big fan of, Bill Griffeth. Could you address the conspiracy theories surrounding his departure?

Allen Wastler: He's an empty-nester. He decided he wanted to take some time off, do some traveling [with his wife]. He decided to take about a year off from the network, and they graciously allowed him to do so.

This is a great in the media business, especially when a TV personality suddenly goes off the air, the rumors just fly around. Bill did his darndest to make it clear that he just wanted to have a little time off. So there were some conspiracy theories out there. Well, now I have a big raspberry to them all, because Bill's back on the air in the afternoons on CNBC. Sometimes when you tell people the truth, they don't want to hear it, but that's the way it is. So Bill's back. We're glad to have him back. He's a big contributor to the network and a very good voice to have in volatile financial times.

How do you decide, in the morning or the afternoon, what you're going to put on the site? Is there a set pattern to that?

Allen Wastler: The website sort of works independently. We're very aware of what the TV side is doing and what's going on, and we take advantage of that, and we look for ways to use it on the website. Do we do everything the TV side does or use everything the TV side does? Not necessarily. Sometimes something will work on TV that doesn't work on the Web, and sometimes something will work well on the Web that doesn't work well on TV. You gotta keep those differences in mind. But naturally we're connected at the hip with the TV side so we've got to keep an eye on that.

We have our own planning meetings. We have two news meetings daily, and a lot of impromptu meetings beyond that. We have weekly planning meetings, we have monthly planning meetings. We're constantly looking ahead at what the schedule is.

How do we decide in the morning? We're looking at the major headlines. And we have an advantage: we're 24/7 during the business week. While we were asleep, we had our Singapore bureau manning the site, and then our London bureau manning the site. When our U.S. crew gets in, we're already on news cycle. We never go off news cycle.

So we see what the big stories are, and more importantly, we see what our readers are interested in. ‘Cause we're looking real-time at what stories are getting the most traffic from readers, what kind of data pages they're looking at. We say it's our job to serve our readers, let's figure out what we need to do to keep them informed on the subjects they want to be informed on.

Do we look at traffic for all our decisions? No. Sometimes we put something up there because we think it's an important story that people really need to see. Let's say, a big food recall or toy recall. Yeah, not everybody might be interested in that. But if the right amount of people look at that, and if it saves a few lives, saves people from getting sick, that's sort of what journalism is about too. So we use a mix of metrics and basic journalistic imperative.

Recently you've begun to market a new subscription service, CNBC Pro. What does Pro bring to the table?

Allen Wastler: First of all, that's done by our digital team. We've got a crack digital team over there. What it is, whatever is new technology-wise, and whatever can be helpful to CNBC audiences worldwide, they are constantly looking for new ways to develop that.

CNBC Pro, it's done by a group that doesn't really report to me. However, they do such a great job of taking the content that my team produces and gets out on the website and reorganizes it in ways that are really helpful to our readers. Pro takes our content and gets it out to subscribers. It also adds in a lot more data, real-time data, data from around the world, custom portfolio and custom watch list offerings – all sorts of tools so that an investor can stay in touch with what's important to them and what's important to their portfolio.

Basically, that's what pro is about. It's really a very customized and a very real-time offering that combines what we offer on the website in terms of content, as well as some really juiced up data feeds. If you're a hardcore investor, Pro is really something you want to look at.

CNBC Real-Time on the iPad – do you work with that?

Allen Wastler: It's our digital team again, and it's the same sort of concept there. What they've done is, they've seen the popularity of the iPad and tablets in general, and they immediately started working on ways to harness that, so that people who use tablets can get all the CNBC information that I and the TV side produce, and get it to them in a convenient and useful way along with all the data feeds as well.

Where do you see the future of online media going with the proliferation of cell phones, tablets, etc.?

Allen Wastler: That's a really interesting question. And it's interesting because it's a really hard question! [Laughs]. All the hard questions are the interesting ones ‘cause there's no easy answers. Right now we are seeing a plethora of different devices, and they're all trying to divide and see who's going to become the top one. So you see content providers like ourselves trying to accommodate each and every platform coming down the road, and you sort of wonder, how long can this go on – dividing it up?

I think we're gonna see a lot more, which platforms get popular with readers and how to accommodate all that, and it's going to go through some pretty serious permutations, I think. Because it's a game-changer. You've got to think about, are we doing TV? Are we doing text? Are we doing audio? How do you combine all those? How do you get people to look at it and absorb the content?

I think eventually, once we have the flurry of activity of different devices introduced, there's going to be some sort of shakeout period. Whenever you see this kind of phenomenon happen in business cycles, you know, you have an explosion of offerings and then some sort of shakeout when it comes down to just a few that will be the industry standard moving forward. I don't think we've seen that yet. I think we're probably a little ways off from that. But that's what it's going to be.

The beauty of it from my perspective is that content, news and information and quality news and information is always going to be desired, no matter what the platform is, no matter what the node is in getting it to the end user. So if you're concentrating on providing that kind of quality information, you should be able to continue on the course.

Are there any big stories from 2010 that stick out in your mind? Any that you'd like to highlight?

Allen Wastler: There were two major reports that we did in 2010: one was during the fall, and it was called Man vs. Machine. It was a deep-dive into high-frequency trading. And [uncover] the repercussions of that, how it works, how deep it's gotten into the market, how it might have contributed to the flash crash, who the major players are (people you've never even heard of).

I think people who come to that special report can walk away with a much better understanding with how the market is different now from a decade ago, and what that means to the small retail investor. As I a journalist, I think it's always important to get back to that – what does it mean for the average investor?

The second major report – and everybody snickers when I say this – it was our marijuana report in the springtime. That was extremely popular. But that's not why I'm proud of it; we put up all sorts of things that are popular. Some are good, some are just playing to the masses.

But the marijuana report, that was a deep-dive into a subject that I think is extremely under covered. And what I mean by under covered, I mean by serious journalism. Because there's a lot of what I call giggle journalism around; people say, ‘Now I'm gonna report on marijuana, teehee, teehee.' That's not approaching it from a serious way.

We did our lead off article for that, we did a hard look at what it means from a money basis, and we walked away from it we figured out that that's a $40 billion industry. Are you kidding me!? People get into the uproar over the movie industry, and that's only a $12, $14 billion. We're talking about an industry that's $40 billion, and for the most part it's illegal, untaxed. What are the repercussions of that? Our special report went deep into all those issues, looking at what it means on a personal level, what it means on a business level, and what it means on a governmental level.

Nobody else has done that. You can read that report and get a very sober, straightforward view about what it means to the country in terms of potential business, potential taxation, and potential societal impact. I've got to credit my boss, Meredith Stark, because she's the one who kick-started that.