Rosenblumtv

I found out the other day that we are finalists for a Knight Foundation Grant for a Citizen Journalism project we have proposed.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

The notion of ‘Citizen Journalism’ sends conventional television news people into fits of hysteria. Youtube! they scream. Look what happens when you give just anyone a camera! Quality will vanish!

The new technologies of digital cameras and laptops married to a web that now carries video mean that anyone indeed can pick up a camera and make TV, or more to the point, make TV news. And we are not talking about ‘accidental video’ here - you happen to be in the trailer park when the tornado hits. We are talking about using video to communicate an idea - not capture a tragedy.

This is, of course, disturbing. We have all lived in a world where television news (and television in general) was left to the hands of the ‘professionals’. That is, we effectively ceeded control of the most powerful and influential medium the world has ever seen to Katie Couric and Matt Lauer.

Well, that makes sense.

Television, it was thoughts, was far too complicated and far too powerful to be left to ‘regular people’. What would happen if they tried to produce television? A mess, to be sure.

But what if we had organized the world of print the way we have, until now at least, organized the world of television?

JK Rowling, at the age of 38, wakes up one day and decides she wants write a book. As they ‘write books’ down at Random House, JK gets herself, after much work, an interview with the head of HR at the book publisher.

“I don’t know about this JK” says the head of HR, looking over her glasses; holding JK Rowling’s resume in her hands. “You are a 38-year old single mother. You are unemployed. You are living on welfare. You have never written anything before in your life. And you want a job at Random House writing books? Do I get this right?”

“Right” says the ever eager JK. “I have this idea about a kid who is a wizard…”

“Sounds…. thrilling” says the head of HR, rolling her eyes.

“So when can I start?” asks JK.

The head of HR puts the resume on the desk, adjusts her glasses and in her most patronizing tone says, “look Miss Rowling, let me be blunt with you, if I may. You have never written a thing in your life. You are unemployed, living on welfare. Frankly, you are just not the kind of person we hire here at Random House….”

“But… but… I have this idea….”

The head of HR smiles. “We ALL have ideas….”

“Please….” cries JK. And the heart of the HR woman begins to soften.

“OK… OK… I don’t normally do this, but in your case, I am going to make an exception”. She thumbs through a stack of index cards. “I do have an opening…..”

JK is delighted!

“An opening as a receptionist”.

“But I want to write my novel”! says JK.

The head of HR smiles. Such an idiot! “This is a very good entry level job. There are hundreds of people who want to break into the writing world who would give their eye teeth for this job.”

“Well, what do I do?” asks JK.

“You’ll answer the phone, photocopy documents and make the coffee… But, if you are very good, in a few years you could become a researcher.”

“Then do I get to write my novel?” asks JK.

“Oh no”, says the head of HR. “You’ll get to research some of the books we are writing, but in a few years, if you’re good, you’ll get to be an associate writer.”

“Then do I get to write my novel?” asks JK

“Oh no” says the head of HR. “But you’ll get to work with some of our famous writers… like Katie Couric or Matt Lauer. Those names really sell”.

“But when do I get to write my novel?” asks JK.

The head of HR looks down at JK Rowling. “You don’t”, she says. “If you are very very lucky, you will get to write what audience research has determined the audience wants to read about. And right now, our numbers indicate that a bio of Anna Nicole Smith would sell very well, particularly if it were authored by Katie Couric.

And if JK Rowling has any brains, she gets up and goes back on welfare.

Harry Potter only gets written because all JK Rowling has to do is pick up a pencil and start to write. When a video camera is as simple to operate as a pencil (and we are pretty much there); when the barrier to access to ‘try’ to make video is as low as the barrier to access to ‘try’ writing a novel, we can look forward to an explosion of content and creativity.

Citizen Journalists are not to be feared. They are to be embraced. Quickly. Les Moonves take note: it is the fastest way to improve the quality of the Evening News.

We spent most of yesterday screening submissions to a new television series we are producing for Discovery called ‘Show Us Your World’.

The concept is derivative of Current.tv, which I did with Al Gore a few years ago. But even in that small amount of time, the world has changed enormously.

The driving force behind Show Us Your World is that it is entirely composed of User Generated Content (UGC). That is, we invite the viewers to shoot, script, edit and produce their own content and upload it to our website. We then take the best of those submissions (or allow the web to simply aggregate the most popular) and create a weekly television program with that content.

When we started Current, not so many years ago, the content that viewers shot and submitted was pretty raggedy. You might get the odd ‘great’ piece, but for the most part it was pretty much Youtube. (Youtube is now as adjectival as Google is a verb). In other words, it was a mess.

How the world has changed.

On the first go-round, before the website was even up; before the show even airs, we recieved almost five hundred submissions. At first glance, I was hoping that of the 500, we might find enough to generate a pilot and one follow up show just so we could ‘prime the pump’. ie, “Look, here’s a few good pieces. This is what we are looking for”.

Instead, we were totally blown away by the pure professional quality of what ‘average’ people had submitted! Music, graphics, stunning photography, clever scripts. One woman submitted two complete animated shorts! And they were very very clever. It was a great watch all day long.

The world has indeed changed in just a few short years.

The technology for making very high quality video is now in everyone’s hands (at least everyone who wants it). HD cameras cost nothing. FCP does HD and you can start editing from day 1. But more than that, people are no longer emulating conventional TV in the stuff that they make. Sure, there are a few pieces that look like weak immitations of Today, or a GMA spot, or worse, local news complete with standup and mic in hand. But they are thankfully in the minority. Instead, there is a whole new grammar that is starting to emerge.

You can see it first in the fluidity with which people have taken to this, but you can also see it in the way that people are starting to blend music, content, text and graphics into their videos. They are far ahead of the rest of television. And I am sure this is only the beginning.

After a day of watching this virtual explosion of craft and creativity, we tuned in to The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Leaving all comments about the anchor aside, we were just numbed by the incredible predictability and banality of the packages. In a medium that is capable of doing so very much - music, graphics, editing, storytelling, video, narrative - they do so little, and it is always the same thing over and over and over. Thank God the “people” have finally gotten their hands on the medium. The world is about to change a lot. Stand by….

Technology dictates architecture.

That is, a specific technology demands a specific architecture. Not the architecture of a building, but rather the architecture for the implementation of that technology.  As lazy humans, however, we get the technology first; the architecture takes us time.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

People understood right away what this thing did.  It allowed one person to talk to another over long distances. This was a radical new technology. Until Bell, the fastest anyone could deliver a message to another person was by putting a person on a horse with a piece of paper. It had been ever thus since the days of the Roman Empire.  Now, for the first time, a message could be delivered at the speed of electrons racing down a wire.

The telephone require a complete rethinking of the architecture of technology, and also, incidentally, a complete rethinking of the architecture of value.

Prior to the telephone, value had been determined by scarcity.  If you were the only person in the world with a diamond, then that diamond was worth a great deal. If, on the other hand, everyone in the world also had a diamond, then your diamond was worth nothing.  The telephone turned that kind of thinking on its head.  If you have the only telephone in the world, it is in fact worth nothing.  There is on one to call. If, on the other hand, five other people have phones, then your personal phone is worth that much more. If five million other people have phones, then your personal phone is worth a great deal more. It was the birth of networks.  (remember this, because it will become really important when we talk about the Internet).

The problem in 1876 was, that there were not only no other phones, but there were not wires to connect them.  So those who sought to profit from the phone realized that they would have to ‘wire the world’ to make the phone network of any value.

This was an enormously expensive undertaking.  It was probably one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. Whole new technologies had to be developed on the fly, from mining copper and making twisted cables to switching devices to electrification. But it was done.

Between 1876 and 1898 most of the western world was wired; and at considerable expense.  Massive amounts of money were borrowed; stocks were issued; bonds were purchased. But it seemed a good investment, because surely, for the next hundred years if not more, people would pay to use those wires so that they could talk to one another.

Just as the work was drawing to a conclusion, a terrible thing happened.

A young Italian man came to England with a small black box.

“Let me show you something” he said, and turning on his black box demonstrated how he could talk to someone else without wires.

“I call this… wireless” he announced.

His name was Marconi.

Needless to say, this caused great consternation around the world.  It was another one of those technologies that no one wants to see - a disruptive new technology that was suddenly going to make all the work and cost of wiring worthless.

So ATT bought the patents for ‘wireless’ and for twenty odd years repressed its development.  The only place ‘wireless’ was allowed to flourish was on ships. Because you can’t run phone lines to ships, at least not while they are at sea. And The Marconi Company remained a small venture, selling, (or trying to sell) to navies and shipping companies.

Then, in 1912, the Titanic, one of Marconi’s clients, hit an iceberg.  They sent out a radio signal telling what had happened. They sent lots of them, as it took so long for the ship to sink.

In New York, David Sarnoff, a 16 year old Russian immigrant, and an employee of the Marconi Company was receiveing radio traffic when he got the Titanic’s call. For 36 hours, he sat by the radio (which was in the window of the Woolworth Building in NY) and took in radio messages from the sinking ship.  A massive crowd gathered to hear the news, not in front of The Times building at Times Square, but rather in front of the Woolworth Building, as Sarnoff passed the latest bit of news to the crowd.

This was a seminal moment.  The sinking of the Titanic was the first global event that was covered in real time.

And in that moment, Sarnoff, at the age of 16 had a revelation:  Radio was not a competitor to telephones. I was not for sending one message between two people. Rather, it was something entirely new - it was for sending the same message to many people, millions of people, at the same time.

It was thus, in this moment, that the architecture of radio was understood, long after the technology had arrived.  It was in this moment that the broadcasting industry, as we know it today, radio and television, was really invented.  One signal to many people.

Becasue people had lived with telephony, they looked at wireless and immediately sought to plug wireless into the world they understood and were comfortable with.  It took nearly thirty years for someone to understand the architecture that radio demanded.

Why is this significant now?

All too often, we also take new technologies and plug them into an architecture that we already understand.  All too often we take the Interent and see it as an alternative platform for broadcasting.  Take a look at NYTimes.com. What do you see?  A newspaper. A newspaper put on the web.  That is because that is what newspapers understand. That is the architecture they understand.

As video comes to the web, broadcasters will also see it as a way to do what they do now - one signal to many people, but online.

This will be a classic mistake.

But they are in very good company.

In the late 90’s, I became the President of New York Times Television. It was a new company, one that was founded when Punch Sulzberger bought my company, Video News International. I had told Mr. Sulzberger that I would create the video analog of the newspaper; some of the best journalists in the world reporting in video.

New York Times TV was housed in the Hippodrome, on 6th Avenue, a few blocks from The Times’ building on 42nd Street. We shared a floor with Martin Niesenholtz, who was just starting up NYTimes.com, the Times’ website.

Right after moving into my new office, I got a call from Joe Lellyveld, the Managin Editor of the paper.  He invited me to lunch in the executive dining room. White linen tablecloths, white gloved stewards and steamed salmon.  Lellyveld was extremely gracious.

“Congratulations on your new job” he said, and poured the white wine.

I acknowledged his thanks.

“There is just one thing I want to tell you”, he said.

I tasted the salmon. “Fantastic”,  I said.  He smiled.  I waited.

“I don’t want you coming anywhere near my newsroom…. more salad?”

He was, I think, equally difficult with Niesenholtz and the NY Times’ embryonic website.  They (the newspaper) would not allow anything on the website that had not already been published in the paper.

This, of course, is completely anithetical to the very way in which the web works; particularly a website for news. One cannot wait for the news to be published in the paper paper (so to speak) and then appear on the web. The Interent is all about immediacy.

It took the newspaper some time before they would allow stories to lead on the website and then be followed up in print.

I am reminded of this whenever I deal with local TV news stations (or conventional TV production of any kind for that matter).  Television, because it has since its inception been the dominant medium of our time, believes that it leads.  Local TV news stations (and cable channels that producer and air programming with websites) believe that the website is at best a repository for leftover video, or a place for viewers to see stories or programs over and over again, after they have aired.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of how the web works.

The Internet is, if anything, about immediacy.

In the world of local news, we are endlessly fixated on ‘breaking news’. This is true for networks as well.  We flash ‘breaking news’ all the time.  But by the time a television news program is assembled, edited, scripted and airs, almost all of the ‘breaking news’ is old news.

The web is the logical place to put ‘breaking news’, because it runs and is updated live 24 hours a day.  News should lead on the website and the ’show’ should follow.  The web is the place where breaking news takes place; the show is the place where there is analysis and followup of what everyone already knows.

This might seem logical, but it is very very difficult to instill because it requires a completely different way of thinking about what the web is and what the program that airs is. It is very very difficult for people who have spent their lives believing that their ’show’ is the dominant event in the evening rundown to realize that they must now play support role to the web.  But that is indeed the case.

This is not just the case for local news. It is also the case for weekly magazines that find themselves online in order to survive.  The magazine comes out once a week. For publications like Time or Newsweek, by the time the publication has come out, everyone already knows all the news in the mag. That is why if you pick up a copy of Time, (literally), it will fold across the staples.

That does not mean that Time or Newsweek have no place in the world of online immediacy. But it means that reporters like Teddy White (in the glory days of Time) would be filing from China online, to give a sense of immediacy. The printed version would be more of an analysis, based on what the viewser (viewer+user, if I may coin the word) already knows.

The same even applies for TV shows. Most of them have companion websites. But those websites are reserved for leftover video, if there is any, and ‘more information’.  Websites for weekly shows, (for HGTV or TLC for example) should also lead, then the show follows.  It makes sense. It is more congruous with what the web does best.

If publishers or producers trying to move to a ‘multi platform’ format listened to what the web was telling them, they would indeed create a new kind of programming that would leverage off of what print, television and web all do best, and in concert.

There is an old expression that says ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not necessities that precipitate invention; rather inventions come along unbidden and most people run away from them as fast as they can. Barring that, they accept them grudgingly, trying to shoehorn them into ways of working that were designed around earlier technologies.

This is surely the case in trying to ‘re-engineer’ some existing local tv newsrooms in the US into a faster, more online oriented, digital newsroom for the 21st Century. One might as well try to make the Motor Vehicles Bureau into Dreamworks. It is not that they don’t recognize that they have to change, or even that they don’t want to change, it is just that they can’t. They cannot bring themselves to do what is necessary to reinvent themselves. They prefer a more ‘incremental’ approach. This does not work.

I was reminded of this lasts night when I was reading The History Of The English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill. Churchill is a great writer, and in four volumes he pretty well lays out the breadth and scope of English history. Last night’s chapter was on Edward III and the Battle of Crecy. But in reading it, it reminded me nothing so much as trying to deal with local TV news stations in the US.

Edward was a real revolutionary and a seminal figure in British history. Crecy, as Churchill says, was among the 4 great moments that shaped both British and Western history. Until I read about Crecy, I did not imagine that it would have any relationship to local TV stations 600 years later… but it does.

Before Crecy, medieval battles were fought by heavily armored knights. Dressed in their suits of armor, they were expensive to field, expensive to maintain and they weighed a ton. Their skills were learned in long and hard lifetimes of training and practice. They were the ultimate killing machines, and invincible.

Edward landed in France with a mere 12,000 soldiers to face Philip’s army of 30,000 to 40,000 knights. But Edward didn’t bring English knights. He brought long bowmen. The long bow was an entirely new piece of military technology. Lightweight, cheap and easy to use. It was also deadly efficient. Edward’s long bowmen were not knights, they did not wear suits of armor, they didn’t even have horses. This was all unthinkable in 1346. Who would field an army like this? And it was not even an army! These were not the highly trained knights of nobility! These were commoners! The rabble! It was an outrage.

The French, in vastly superior numbers marched north to Crecy filled with over confidence. They looked out on the English forces and laughed. They would cut them to ribbons by lunchtime.

So the French army marched into battle with the English bowmen, on foot. The bowmen let loose their arrows - like rain.. and the French knights began to go down. The English were shooting the horses out from under the knights. This was against the rules! On the muddy ground, immobilized in their suits of armor, the knights were helpless as the English bowman set upon them and killed them on the spot. This was also considered unsporting behaviour. One was supposed, at worst, to ransome the nobleman.

The French army was decimated at Crecy, and later Edward repeated the trick at Poitiers. It was, in a moment, the end of knights, armor, chivalry and medieval warfare. A thousand years of history vanished in an afternoon.

What brought down the French army was first and formemost the technology of the long bow. But more than that, it was the pure foresight and courage of Edward to completely embrace the new technology and understand how to implement it. He could have just added a few bowmen to his army of knights (just as newsrooms could add a few VJs to their conventional reporters and cameramen). Neither does the trick. Edward reinvented warfare from the ground up based on the light, simple and portable technology of the long bow. It was an incredibly brave thing to do.

One can imagine the feeling amongst the English Yeoman as they stood in the field at Crecy, facing the vastly superior, clanking and mounted armies of France. Standing on their own, horseless, armorless, they must have wondered, ‘what the hell have I gotten myself into’. But Edward saw the future and embraced it.

Sending out an army of VJs, equipped with small, lightweight cameras, without cameramen, soundment, livetrucks can also be scary. But it is the same. You cannot embrace this revolution in a halfhearted manner. You have to completely rethink how a newsroom is made based on what the new technology can do; just as Edward completely rethought how a battle should be fought… and won.

We can all agree that new technologies have the potential to change the world, but only if they are recognized and implemented by someone who has the courage to make the changes. All too often, new technologies come along and people are fearful of them.