Breaking News

About 10 years ago, when The New York Times was first starting NYTimes.com, most of the newspaper’s senior staff were nervous about the web. They did not feel anything should appear on the website until it had already been published in the paper. Of course, the paper only comes out once a day, and that is directly antithetical to the notion of ‘immediacy’ for an online site. It took the newspaper years to come to accept that the web came first, the paper followed.

Why TV News Sucks

For the past twenty years, I have spent the majority of my time on an airplane. London, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tel Aviv. Its all in the course of a day’s work.

I live in hotels.

And the first thing I do when I come into a hotel room is turn on the TV set. And the first thing I watch is the local news.

Speak of the Devil

This, from the excellent lostremote.com

For those who think that newspapers are not going to compete with television news in the realm of video. A Washington Post with 50 cameras in DC also makes it potentially the biggest local TV news station in DC.

Behind the scenes of Washington Post’s video efforts

How To Make A Living Online – Lessons From a Swedish Billionaire

In 1990, I was introduced to Jan Stenbeck, the third wealthiest man in Scandinavia. He was a self-made media billionaire, a Swedish Ted Turner – brilliant, mercurial, iconoclastic.

I had spent two years travelling around the world with my small video camera, selling pieces to Nightline or MacNeil/Lehrer. Stenbeck immediately understood the economic implications of the VJ model. He capitalized a company for me, gave me 30% equity and moved me to Stockholm to start building VJ-driven stations. (As you can see from the comment in the article below from Norway, the model works quite well there).

But this is not about VJ… for a change. It’s about how one person leveraged off a technological shift and made (another) billion dollars. Why does it matter? Because, I think, what Stenbeck did with television in Scandinavia in the ’90s, someone will do with video online in the (what do we call them, the ’00s?)

A Tale of One City

In 1942, the economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the terms creative destruction. He was describing what happens when inovation radically changes the groundrules of how an industry works. Those who thought they had a monopoly, or a lock on an industry suddenly find themselves in a completely new world due to the introduction of a new technology.

The ‘creative’ part we all get… it’s the ‘destructive’ part no one wants to pay attention to.

The web is such a technology. It brings content into everyone’s home, 24 hours a day, pretty much for free. Compare that to cutting down trees, printing a newspaper, putting them in trucks and delivering them door to door every morning. That’s a pretty good competitive advantage. (And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Just ask papers who used to dine off the classifieds how they feel about Craig’s list). Or compare iTunes to Tower Records…. (or what used to be Tower Records).

New York Times Television

This morning I am listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition. It’s a good way to spend a Sunday morning. In 1990, I was doing the same thing, when it occured to me that NPR could make some pretty good television, if you could get the NPR radio reporters to carry video cameras instead of Nagra tape recorders.

Sometimes when you get an idea, you just can’t let go of it. So I went out to see if I could make that happen. I was fortunate that I was able to raise a few million dollars on Wall Street, based on that idea. Nick Nicholas, former CEO of Time/Warner was one of my anchor investors. I went into his office and explained my idea, and before I was done, he took out his checkbook and wrote me a check for $100,000.

Most NPR radio reporters, some of the best journalists in the world, are stringers. They live in the countries from which they report, they know the languages, they have the contacts, and as radio journalists, they were used to carrying their own recording gear and editing their own work. Within 18 months I had equipped and trained more than 100 of them. And their work was good. Very good.

I took this treasure trove of reporting potential to the major networks. I met with the Presidents of ABC News, NBC, News, CBS News and the newly formed Fox News. “For a mere $3 million, I will lease you exclusive access to 100 of the best journalists in the world.” (This at a time when Dan Rather was getting $7.5 million a year for reading the Evening News). “In a stroke you will have global coverage better and deeper than CNN or The BBC. Doesn’t that seem like a good deal to you?”

The Ice Story

There is an old expression that says, “necessity is the mother of invention”.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Necessity does not drive invention. Rather, new inventions come along and mess up everyone’s life. They would, for the most part, prefer that they went away entirely.

This is true not only in broadcasting, but in everything.

Take ice.

Ice was once a fantastic business.

If you are old enough to remember, your grandmother or great grandmother had an ice box. This stood in the kitchen, and once a week the ice man came and delivered a block of ice. That was what kept the food cold and fresh.

Ice was harvested in gigantic ice ponds that were scattered across New England. In the wintertime, ice was harvested from those ponds and stored in heavily insulated ice houses. A good ice house could keep its ice in tact through the summer.

Ice was such a good business, and the science of insulation so sophisticated, that by the middle of the 19th Century, clipper ships delivered ice from New England all the way to India. One can imagine how the crowds swarmed the docks in Calcutta when an ice ship arrived.

If your father had an ice delivery route in Manhattan, you were almost certainly set for life. The ice business was a secure trade. Ice, after all, had been around since the Roman Emperors brought fresh snow down from the Appenines into Rome in the summertime to cool them. And by the mid 19th Century, the ice industry was massive. There were delivery routes, ice tongs, ice ponds for harvesting, ice houses for storage, technologies to cut the ice… it was massive.

Then, in 1876, Jacob Perkins, an American living in London, invented refrigeration.

In a moment, in a stroke, the ice industry was over.

The much sought after delivery routes, the seemingly invaluable ice ponds, the chain of delivery… all over, in a flash.

A new technology had rendered the entire industry… an entire world, obsolete. And all the crying and complaining and whimpering did not a bit of good. It was over. Ice was dead.

Technology is merciless.

When a new technology comes along, one either adapts or dies. And death is both swift and certain.

Darwin wrote that the neither strength nor intelligence are the best traits for survival, it is the ability to adapt to change.

Kodak was once the industry leader in photography. Say Kodak and you as much as said photography. But when digital cameras came along, Kodak was arrogant. “We are film” they said in Rochester.

Kodak could have owned digital photography. They were there first, had the market position and had they moved quickly could easily have adapted early. But they did not. They were too comfortable to see what a new technology was about to do to them. It destroyed them. Tell someone you have just bought a Kodak camera and watch their eyes.

The web, and in particular, video on the web are about to do to a whole range of industries what digital images did to Kodak.

The arrival of the Internet, and particularly video over the Interent is the equivalent of Jacob Perkins’ invention of refrigeration: a fantastic new technology that in a stroke wipes out whole businesses, some of them seemingly rock solid. They are not.

What is the value of a local TV station or a transmitter when infinite amounts of video can be delivered online direct to homes for almost no cost?

What is the value of a printed newspaper when the same information can be delievered to every home in the world instantaly online at no cost?

Once that newspaper is online, what differentiates it, if anything, from a television station? If online can carry video, how can your former ‘newspaper’ only be in text when the medium can do so much more? (Do you see a lot of text-only TV channels?)

The entire world of media is about to change due to a new and very destructive technology. Those who adapt will survive, but they will evolve into something very different from what they are now. Those who fail to adapt will die. Like the invention of refrigeration, the Interent means the end of what was once a very old and established business.

And what you have seen until now is only the tip of the iceberg… so to speak.

Electronic Colonialism

OK.

Let’s say for a minute you’re Bangladesh.

Like anyone else, you’ve got your good points, but you’ve also got your problems. (Look, who doesn’t?).

Your biggest problem, however, is that the only time you get on TV is when CNN decides to come around. And CNN only decides to come around when there is a flood, or a Civil War or maybe an outbreak of a plague. Other than that, you can’t find ‘em.

The reason, of course, that CNN only rolls into town for disasters is that it costs CNN a fortune to get their reporters and producers and camera crews to Bangladesh. As a result, they’re only coming when, as they might say in Atlanta, the story warrants it.

So, despite the fact that CNN and The BBC and MSNBC and a dozen other news outlets around the world had yawning, massive newsholes to fill every day (like 24-hours), poor Bangladesh only gets on TV when something terrible happens.

Well, what happens to Bangladesh’s image in the global media footprint?

It looks like crap!

Seriously.

Close your eyes and think Bangladesh. What do you see? Flooding. Starving people in straw huts with water up to their ….. You bet you do. And you’re an educated person.

And its not Bangladesh’s fault!

The global image of Bangladesh, seared into everyone’s brain is one that was cast by a handful of people in Atlanta; the majority of whom have surely never been to Bangla Desh, and most of whom probably could not even find it on a map. That is electronic colonialism

And does this cost Bangladesh?

Well, lemme ask you, do you wanna go there on a vacation? Do you wanna invest there? It costs them a fortune!

And it’s not just Bangladesh.

Look at the Palestinians.

When they strap explosives on themsleves and walk into Israeli cafes to blow themsevles and anyone in a 30 foot radius to Kingdom Come, do you think they’re doing it to protest Israeli coffee cakes? They’re doing it so the cameras from CNN will come to Gaza. It’s to focus the world’s attention, if only for 1:20. What a crazy world, but you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s a media circus out there.

The reason that Electronic Colonialism exists is because there is an inherent imballance of power. All the cameras are in the hands of CNN (or The BBC or Deutsche Welle – pick your colonial power). The cameras are not in the hands of Bangladesh or Hamas or the Tamil Tigers…. but they could be!

They could also be in the hands of every kid in Harlem who is also a victim of electronic colonialism.

If Bangladesh suffers because CNN only deigns to come when there is a flood or famine, Harlem suffers the same fate, but on local news. The local news crew only deigns to come uptown for fires (no floods), and shootings. The kid growing up in Harlem, watching TV News gets a pretty warped view of what his or her community is like; and so do the neighbors downtown.

Several years ago, I worked with an organization called Harlem Live www.harlemlive.org, and we gave cameras and editing software to kids in Harlem, and taught them to shoot and edit, and sent them out into their own communities. They did a lot of interesting work, but most of it had nothing to do with crime stories.

What do you think the world would seem like if everyone in Hamas or Iraq or Bangladesh had a video camera? What would they show us?

Public Broadcasting in Boston

This morning, I gave the keynote speech to 800 or so broadcasters from both PBS and NPR stations across the country as they kicked off their Media 2007 Conference in Boston.

It might seem odd to have both PBS television and NPR radio people in the same room. They exist in completely different worlds.  But this is no longer the case. They share a common goal, to reinvent themselves for the world of the Internet. This is not so strange, it is the same goal that Mark Thompson, the Director General for The BBC has announced, as has pretty much ever other medium with whom we have met, from newspapers to magazines. The web is now paramount.

And for good reason: It reaches everyone in the world for almost no cost. Where it once took a massive investment in buildings, desks, equipment and transmitters; not to mention the oppressive legal costs of dealing with a myriad of FCC licenses; now all it takes to get ‘on the air’ is a server and a connection to the web. Not too expensive. As Mike Sechrist, GM for WKRN in Nashville noted to me this morning, ‘I bought a server for $16,000, put it online, and in a matter of minutes I had another 24 hour TV station at my disposal”.

This, of course, completely rewrites the basic economics of television stations around the world. No one in their right mind would today construct the massive kind of infrastructure that a conventional local (or network) TV station required only a few years ago. You don’t even need the building. And you can see this collapse in value in the prices that companies like The New York Times are selling their convential local tv stations for – a mere fraction of their valuation only a few years go. The better video online gets, the less those assets are worth.

But let’s get back to PBS and NPR. What do those two have in common (besides umbrellas and tote bags… and a very intelligent listener/viewership?).

The move to the web for any broadcaster or publisher is absolutely inescapable. The economics of it are simply too attractive. Next to no cost to get on, you get an instant global audience.

But once you move to the web, the architecture of the web itself suddenly dictates a radical change in how you work and what your product looks like. Up until now, we have been living in a world of a broadcasting model. One signal to many people. Whether we were publishing newspapers, magazines, radio shows or TV, the model remained pretty much the same.

But the Internet is different. The Internet is about connecting communities. Ebay, one of the most successful sites on the web, is about connecting a community of sellers with a community of buyers, one strand at a time. Amazon, another success story, is also about connecting a community of sellers – bookstores, warehouses or small shops, with a community of buyers, all over the world. Google if you think about it, is also about connecting a massive ‘community’ of content with a community of users.

In a broadcasting model, you want to be at the pinnacle, delivering the message to the masses below. The CBS Evening News. But in the Internet Model, you want to be in the middle, connecting the vast army of suppliers above with the vast army of users below.

We have figured out how to do this with books and junk from the attic. The challenge for PBS and NPR and everyone else will be to figure out how to do this with news and information.

One thing is clear however: there are now vast armies of news and information ‘providers’ as there are of people with junk in their attic or bookstores. How many Iraqis do you think have video cameras? 10,000? 100,000? In the four years since the US went into Iraq, how much of their work have you ever seen? How many US soldiers going into combat have video cameras with them in the field? In the past four years, how much of their work have you ever seen?

Finally there is the medium itself. Once newspapers, magazines, radio and TV all move to a web that supports video, which of them will not be, in some degree, in video?  Take a look at NYTimes.com or Washingtonpost.com. Increasing amounts of video share the space with text and photos.  Can NPR.org afford not to have some video capacity when it tells stories on the web?  Can Time Magazine obviate video when it tells stories on the web? In truth, we have moved from a world of discrete print, radio and television journalism to an increasingly integrated world of digital online journalism.  The distinctions go away.  We are all in the same business now.

The material is there – we just have to figure out an architecture to ‘connect’ it up.

Watching Your Favorite Magazine

Yesterday we spent the day with one of our corporate clients. I don’t want to get into any names here, but suffice it to say they are a major publisher and you would recognize their magazine titles anywhere.

It’s  no secret that print publications are moving to the web in vast numbers and record time. Just last week, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the mother-of-all print publications, The New York Times said he was not sure if there would even be a paper – a physical paper – in five years time.

They are moving to the web because it is a vastly easier, more efficient and far cheaper way of moving their information than printing on paper and physical distribution.

And as they move to the web, and as the web concurrently moves to video, these publications realize that they are going to have to produce a certain percentage of their material in video.  (This, of course, is where we come in).

The irony, at least from my own perspective, is the comparison between news organizations that have traditionally worked in print and those that have traditionally worked in video – that is, local TV news stations.  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 arrive”.

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.

The advantage of working with a crew is so that the journalist can concentrate on the story and not have to worry about all those technical things like spelling, or punctuation, or broken pencil points. Tom and Joe take care of all that stuff. And, as the journalist does not have to balance the pad in his lap… and take notes – he can keep good eye contact with the subject and not be distracted from his work.

There are some, (so I am told), newspapers and magazines that are asking (forcing!) their print reporters to carry their own pad and pencil and take their own notes and even write their own stories!  By themselves!  The trend is called PJ, or Printjournalism.  But we all know this is just a way to save money and cut staffing.  We also know that the quality of the reporting really suffers when just one print reporter has to go out and cover a story on their own (not to mention the safety issue… or who will gurantee the integrity of the reporting without a crew present)?

No, we better stick to what we know. How else can we deliver quality?

Well, there is a reason that print publications, as they adapt to video (and they are moving fast), are going to bury their former television competitors.  They understand the model of how to do good journalism already.  It is far easier for them to replace their pencils and laptops with cameras and laptops. The process of reporting goes on pretty much as before.

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.