Michael Rosenblum, a leader in transforming TV news, writes on his new blog about newspapers vs. TV stations adapting to online video:
The magazines and newspapers have far less problem adapting to video; at least in the VJ model - that is where the reporter carries their own small camera and laptop, and produces their own stories. The magazines and newspapers ‘get it’ right away because this is they way they have always worked. Newspaper journalists have never worked with a crew. They have never had to wait in a reporting situation for ‘the pencil to arrive’.
In most local newsrooms in this country, we field an average of 8 camera crews in any given day. That means 8 cameras to cover a city like Tampa or Houston or Nashville. Can you imagine what would happen if a newspaper were suddenly reduced to covering Tampa with 8 pencils?
A reporter might arrive on a location to do an interview. The subject would sit there, waiting anxiously. “Can we start?†the subject says.
“Not yet†says the reporter. There is a pause. “I have to wait for the pencil to arriveâ€.
Finally, after a seemingly interminable wait, a blue van pulls up. The name of the newspaper is emblazoned on the exterior of the van, and from inside emerge two men carrying a large metal case. Inside the case, is the pencil.
They come into the office and very professionally start to set up their gear. Tom has been a pencilman for the past 20 years. He’s very good at what he does. Joe is the paperman. He feeds Tom sheets of paper. Its a tough job, (and dangerous. Papercuts can kill if you don’t know what you are doing). There used to be a third person on the crew - the eraserlady, but a round of cutbacks have now only served to dimish the quality.
As soon as Tom and Joe get set up, they indicate to the reporter they are ready.
“We have lead†they say, and the reporting can begin. . . .
For conventional TV news, the shift is far more traumatic. They have to adapt to a whole new model of journalism; one that newspapers and magazines have been using for years.
Read the rest and see three earlier stories about newspapers actually having an advantage in the video future.
Well, one way to look at the networks playing hardball and leaving YouTube is that there’s that much attention left for the rest of us who are making small TV.
When the UK’s online political talk show, 18 Doughty St., started, I lamented the technology, for it kept me from watching. Well, they have their technical act together and they have a very impressive rundown of shows on news, politics, culture, blogs, and more. The BBC’s Richard Sambrook stopped by for a visit today and I hope to when I’m in London in early March.
Viacom just signed a deal with Joost to air lots of its shows and movies and the Wall Street Journal tries to draw a contrast between that and the company’s demand that YouTube pull its clips offline. But they’re completely different deals. Joost is the new cable MSO, airing full shows at full size. YouTube is the viral promotional and marketing engine of today — the, pardon me, buzzmachine of TV. Audience recommending clips via YouTube is what will drive viewers to Joost. Note that, apart from possibly supplying bandwidth, cable is cut out of this. See my post below. Good riddance.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blog — note how that rolls off the keyboard — has been putting up video of representatives floor speeches against the war. That’s fascinating enough but get how they are posting the video: via YouTube. Here is Pelosi’s own YouTube user page.
C-SPAN has been the place to get source information on video: watch and judge for yourself. Now YouTube can take over that role and not just for limited official events but for source video anywhere. [crossposted at PrezVid]
Here’s my latest Guardian column (nonregistration page here). It’s about Viacom pulling its clips off YouTube but what it’s really about is the end of control as a media business strategy:
The days of doing business by telling customers what they cannot do are nearing an end. If your customers want to watch your shows, listen to your songs, read your news, or play your games, can you still get away with telling them they cannot unless they come to you and use your devices, pay your fees, and follow your rules? That could work in a scarcity economy in which you owned all the stuff and the means to get it. But no more. Business isn’t about control any more.
The wise company today will go with the flow of the public’s desires and try to figure out how to make money by helping them do what they want to do. That may sound obvious, but it’s not how media work. In the age of consumption, control was what media were about. In the age of creation, they should be about enabling.
Take Viacom. The American media giant - owner of MTV, Comedy Central, iFilm, Paramount, and much more - followed the old rules this month when it demanded that YouTube take down 100,000 clips that viewers had put up there. Mind you, Viacom was quite within its rights, for it controls the copyright to that content. And as a content creator myself, I’m no foe of copyright. It’s also clear that this is a negotiating move on Viacom’s part.
Still, it wasn’t a smart move. And here’s why: the evening before Viacom’s announcement, my teenage son and webmaster brought his laptop to the dinner table - yes, that is what life is like in the home of bloggers - and showed me a YouTube clip of his hero, Bill Gates, being interviewed by my hero, comic Jon Stewart, on Comedy Central’s faux news, The Daily Show. My son had never watched Stewart. Nor does he ever channel-surf the TV. The only - only - way he is going to discover a new show is via the internet, and the best way for him to do that is via YouTube. Yet the next day, that clip disappeared from YouTube and thus Viacom cut itself off from its future audience.
Comedy Central has put clips on its own site and even allows them to be embedded, like YouTube players, on blogs. Fine. But the first problem with that is that the network is speaking to the audience it already has. To attract a new audience - to make up for the free YouTube promotion it has now cut off - Viacom will have to invest marketing money. Control can be expensive. The second problem is that the network, not the audience, is picking the good stuff now. If your audience wants to praise and recommend and pass around your best stuff, why wouldn’t you let them, encourage them, enable them?
At the recent McGraw Hill Media Summit in New York, online mogul and conference keynote star Barry Diller said that “the issue is availability”. The music industry, he said, “stuck its head in the dumb sand for way too long”, but that won’t happen to the video industry because “everybody’s going to make everything available”. The question is where and how. Diller said that producers won’t want to find themselves at the mercy of a single powerful distributor, as they were in the early days of cable TV in the US. Fair enough, but they don’t have to. Their videos can be on their sites and on YouTube; they should be everywhere. Diller argued that Viacom will make money from its clips with advertising, subscription fees and micropayments (the last long-promised and prayed-for but still not materialising). I say he left out the other business model: free promotion of their core business, their network shows.
Rather than cutting off new distributors and promoters, I say that producers should be finding the ways to take full advantage of the opportunities they present. How can you build new audience for free and grow larger than you ever could when you were limited by your own distribution and marketing? How can you enable that growing audience to recommend and share your best stuff? How can you find yourself in a larger conversation - not just in comments on your site, but in the response videos people make on YouTube and elsewhere? How can you use this new medium to find new talent and new ways to make content for less? And, yes, how can you make advertising revenue on the clips that are on YouTube and then on the countless blogs that embed its videos? If, in its negotiation with YouTube, Viacom manages to crack that nut - getting revenue plus promotion plus branding plus content while helping the audience do what it wants to do - then that would be wise, indeed. We’ll see. My advice is simple: find the flow. Then go with it.
Presidential candidates should take a lesson from Al Franken and his YouTube video announcing his run for the Senate. (Well, that radio thing didn’t work out so well so it’s time to get a job.) The video is a bit long but it has the right tone as Franken talks about his and his wife’s poor families and how the government helped them get their starts in life; it is a fine illustration of his liberal progressive outlook. Franken is not cracking jokes; he’s not talking to a big audience on a big camera; he’s talking to one person: whoever clicks below.
Welcome to the debut of Idol Critic, the show that gives you the water-cooler buzz about America’s favorite show. Liza Persky, child of television, gives you a review of the show the morning day after.
I created the show with my partner, Peter Hauck. And to make it, we brought in Mary C. Matthews and Liza Persky, the producer and star behind one of my favorite internet series, 39SecondSingle. I’m rooting for Liza to stay single so she has nothing better to do midweek that sit on the couch and watch Idol.
We rushed this up so be nice about the temporary design at our site. It’s my fault. We’ll have more features coming soon.
What would make us most happy is if you make your own reviews of the reviews of Idol. Put them up on Blip or YouTube and tag them “idolcritic” and we’ll find them.
Andy Plesser of Beet TV made the mistake of handing me a microphone at Always On, but I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Whitaker, former editor of Newsweek and new the overseer of the future at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, and my friend David Weinberger, author of the soon-to-be-released Everything is Miscellaneous. Whitaker, part I:
I’m delighted to see this small TV getting attention on big TV. For this is a great example of how talent can emerge in our new world. Mary C. Matthews produces the show; Liza Persky is the star. I feel like I discovered them because I happened upon their show one day on Blip. But that’s the beauty of the internet: We can all discover such talent. The world is our casting couch.
What’s brilliant about 39 Second Single is that it creates a show appropriate for the medium — small, fast, intimate — and manages to hook you in two minutes and make you want to keep coming back each week. I showed it to my class at CUNY and they loved it (Mary came to speak to the class and they loved her, too). The only sad thing is that we need to keep rooting for Liza, the star, to continue her rotten luck at dating because we don’t want the fun to end.
So watch their show. Then watch the show about their show. And first, watch this show about the show about their show:
: LATER: Just as I posted this, I got email from Mary with word that Blip is holding a screening of some of the best series TV on the service this Sunday night. Details here.
: UPDATE: Mary emails that the date on Weekend Today just changed to the 17th. That’s TV.
