More required viewing.

This is EPIC 2015, made by Robin Sloan, who is the CIO at Current.TV

Sloan made the film along with Matt Thompson in 2004, and it is remarkably prescient and still holds up well. The difficult part here is determining where historical fact drops off and fiction kicks in. Most of Sloan’s predictions (save Googlezon - so far at least) have come to pass.  Sloan did not anticipate either Youtube, nor the impact of video - but he still does pretty well.

Sloan says the impetus to make the film was hearing a lecture by Martin Niesenholz, founder and President of NYTimes. com, and one of the smartest guys in the business.

Take a look.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz………

Same old… same old…..

I travel all the time, and whenever I get to a new city, I go to the hotel and turn on the TV set.

No matter what country I am in, I always know when I am watching the news.  It all looks the same.

A guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder.

England, France, The US, Italy, China, Russia, Japan, Mongolia. A guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder.

And it does not matter what time it is.

8AM, 5PM, 11PM, 2AM.

A guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder.

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NRK, NHK, BBC, XYZ…

A guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder.

And it has been this way for years.

2008, 1998, 1988, 1968, 1958.

A guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder.

116 countries broadcasting 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on a hundred different news channels.  Millions of hours, quite literally, all exactly the same: a man at a desk with a box over his shoulder.

The morning news is equally recognizable: Three people sit around a coffee table and chit-chat about the news. They are, in any given order, blonde, fat and black (except in Japan).  Yet even here, when it is time to ‘go to the news desk’, what do we cut to? A guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder.

Is there something wrong here?

Television is a completely plastic medium.  That is, each day, when you walk into a studio, you can do anything you want with it; anything at all.

Yet for sixty years, every single person in every studio in every broadcasting operation in every country around the world has elected to do exactly the same thing – over and over and over and over again.

Why is that?

It is as though every painter in every atelier in every country in the world had decided to paint a cow and a lake, over and over and over and over again, ad nauseum.

Why is it that a medium that should encourage creativity, instead encourages repeatability?

As with so many other things in life, it comes down to cost.

Since its invention- and really only until yesterday, television was incredibly expensive to produce.

As a result, there was no room for risk.

When you put a few million dollars on the table to create a television program, everyone in the room wants it to be a success. No one can countenance failure.  Those people, the risk takers, were long ago eliminated in a kind of corporate Darwinism in television that richly rewards the risk-averse.

Since its inception, television has been remarkably risk averse because the cost of taking a risk was so high.

Novelists take a ‘risk’ all the time. Each time they put a piece of paper into a typewriter (or printer), and try to write a novel, they are taking a risk.  But each piece of paper costs next to nothing, so there is little to prevent them for tearing it up, 3 or 4 pages in, and starting again, and again, and again until they get it right.

If, however, each piece of paper cost $10,000, then they would type very very carefully, and every novel would begin: “It was a dark and stormy night”.
Creativity is directly tied to the cost of risk. The lower the cost of risk, the more one is willing to risk being creative.

Up to now, the cost of television was so astronomical, that there was no incentive to take a risk. In fact, the vast majority of risk-takers in the television business were eliminated early in their career for being attached to a ‘failure’.  Just as there can be no creativity without risk, there can be no risk without failure. Yet if a failure is the end of a career, then the only ones who will survive are those who refuse to take a risk.

Television is the child of the risk averse.

If there is one successful CSI show on TV, you can bet that in a spurt of creative imitative(ness), there will be half a dozen in a year or two.  If Law and Order is a hit, then you can bet that variants of Law and Order will be all over the networks.

The news business on television is the worst of these offenders (but networks and cable are not far behind).  In the news business, the risk is even higher, because although you have to pay for a news piece to be produced, you cannot re-run it (at least not for too long).  You don’t see a lot of CBS Evening News Best of 1988 running on cable.  Who would watch it? (In fact,  who watches it now?)

In the newspaper business, you can at least wrap fish in yesterday’s paper.  Old TV news is beyond worthless.

Thus the TV news business is the most conservative and least creative venue in television, an industry already known for its lack of creativity.

And that is too bad, because news is both important and compelling.

But when the packaging has not changed since 1952, it does not make for the most ‘watchable’ programming, which is why almost no one (certainly no one under the age of 35) watches TV News.

And its not that the money is not there.  It is.  The news divisions spend hundreds of millions of dollars (not to mention a breathtaking $16 million dollars to for an anchor to spend 22 minutes a night essentially reading what someone else has written for her).  This is their idea of a radical change – going from a guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder to a woman at a desk with a box over her shoulder.

]

Check out this video from Prof. Michael Wesch.

THE MOST ADDICTIVE DRUG

…what’s on Fox?
For the past 60 years, we have all been participating in a massive sociological experiment, the results of which are just now becoming clear.

Today, the average American watches 4.5 hours of television a day.

This is an activity that our grandparents could not have even comprehended. To devote four and a half hours a day, every day, for an entire lifetime to a single activity is an extraordinary event for an individual. For an entire culture to devote four and a half hours a day, every day, to the same activity, in unison, for a lifetime is nothing short of… well, perhaps incomprehensible is the best adjective, but here we are doing it.

All of us, every one of us, watching a glowing screen for four and a half hours a day, every day, for our entire lives has an impact on a culture. By the time we die, we will, each of us, have spent more time watching television or video than we will have spent working, eating, playing sports, going to school, exercising or certainly reading. In fact, you will spend more time watching video than anything else in your life, except sleep – and for some insomniacs, not even that.

What happens to a culture that make watching images on a glowing screen its primary activity?

If we had, 60 years ago, decided that we would all devote 4.5 hours a day, every day to playing tennis; we would, undoubtedly be the best tennis-playing nation in the world.

We would all be in fantastic shape.

We would wear tennis whites to formal affairs.

We would wax endlessly about forehands and backhands.

The E! channel would be the T! channel.

We would follow the personal lives of tennis pros minute by minute on the news.

Boris Becker would be the Governor of California.

Had we, sixty years ago, decided that we would all spend 4.5 hours a day, every day, practicing the piano instead of watching TV, we would be a most musical country.

There would be flat-backed pianos hanging off the walls of the most expensive homes.

We would plunk our 5-year olds in front of the piano when they got up in the morning and they would plonk out a sonata or two before school.

Our hospitals would have pianos on hinges that hung over the beds and the ill and dying could spend their last days playing away to kill the time.

Sonata Tonight would be the biggest selling magazine in the country.

We would have ‘special olympics’ for those who were unfortunate enough to be tone-deaf.

And Arturo Rubenstein would be the Governor of California.

Had we all elected, 60 years ago, to spend 4.5 hours a day reading books instead of watching television, George W. Bush would not be in the White House.

But we didn’t do any of those things.

Instead, for whatever reason, we all collectively decided that for the next 60 years we would, as a group, devote the lion’s share of our freetime (and a portion of our work time as well) to staring at a glowing screen.

If playing tennis 4.5 hours a day, every day, for your whole life gives you great reaction times; and if playing the piano 4.5 hours a day makes you incredibly musical, what does watching video 4.5 hours a day ‘teach’ us.

Good television watching is about sitting silently.

People who talk back to television sets, we send to mental institutions.

Thus, for 60 years, we have unwittingly educated our population to essentially be quiet and ‘take it’.

Television is by definition (so far at any rate) non-participatory. You are not SUPPOSED to take part. Your job is to watch.

This is a heavy message, and reinforced over and over and over for 60 years for four and half hours a day, it begins to take on a certain concreteness in our day to day lives.

We are, so television tells us, supposed to be passive observers.

The world of TV is not for us. It is for the Meredith Vieras, the Matt Lauers. Not for us. Oh, every once in a while one of ‘us’ might get a few moments with ‘them’ – the contestant on Deal or No Deal screaming over the briefcase. The folks on American Idol who become overnight celebrities because they have ‘crossed the great divide”. But for the most part, 60 years of television watching have taught us one thing: Passivity.

We have been slowly yet rigorously educated that our role in the universe is to be passive.

To be watchers. Observers.

And it has worked.

When Bush tells us, against all reason and against all facts that we are invading Iraq to search for Weapons of Mass Destruction that clearly do not exist, and we sit and nod and say “OK”, that is a function of our passivity.

Real life and television begin to merge into one.

Who can any longer differentiate between the two.

We are taught that there is really nothing we can do about the real world, and so our best course of action – indeed our only course of action, is simply to accept it, but our Nike Sneakers or Play Station or Lexus and wait for the next day’s Survivor.

Or….

You can pick up a camera and create the content that the medium displays.

You can.

Anouk Aimee

Watching Claude Lelouch’s A Man and A Woman (Un Homme et Une Femme) last night, I was taken at the utter simplicity yet power of the film.

Made in 1966, and winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture that year, A Man and a Woman is a clear departure from anything ‘Hollywood’. There are no chase scenes, no killing, no special effects, no investigations, no psycho killers, no terrorists, no nothing in fact.

The film was made on a shoestring. Lelouche wrote the script in 3 weeks, and shot it in another 3 weeks. It is entirely done with 1 hand held camera and no lights.

As you watch the film, you also see that it has extremely sparse dialogue. The story is really told in visuals. It is visual story telling at its best.

Yet it moves along, capturing you and taking you with it, 40 years or more after it was made.

The film was praised for its transitions from color to black & white, but as Lelouche later explained, he did not have enough money to shoot in color originally. He did this with no distributor, no studio, no backing at all. Just on the belief that he could make a good film. Then, as he started, he was aproached by a distributor for American television, who offered him $40,000 for the US rights, with the caveat that some of the film had to be in color. (Color TV was just getting started in America).

The film is a monument to what a creative person, driven by a vision, can achieve if you will just put a camera in their hands and give them the space to create something. I doubt if any Hollywood studio would sign off on such a film today, and in fact, if you want a look at the destructive nature of Hollywood execs, just take a look at A Man and A Woman 20 Years Later, the Hollywood financed and produced sequel.

As the French would say, merde.

Photography in the 1860s was expensive, complex and heavy

There is a direct correlation between technology and grammar - that is a direct relationship between the way something is made, and the way it looks.

This is particularly true in the world of visual arts.

Photography in the 1860s required big cameras, dragging chemicals around in the field and shooting on chemically coated glass plates.  The photo above is Matthew Brady’s set up to photograph the American Civil War.  It was not easy, but he got some stunning images.  The Civil War, in fact, is the first war that is actually photographed.  Brady is the forerunner of the ‘embedded journalists’ in Iraq today.

Brady’s cameras were big, heavy affairs. The ‘film’ plates were not so light sensitive and so exposure times were long. The cameras were placed atop tripods and the subjects were instructed to sit rigidly to have their photos taken.

General Lew Wallace, by Matthew Brady

Thus the technology of the time dictated the grammer, or the way the photographs looked.

Everyone sat bolt upright, stiff as a board; or the photographs were set up (in its infancy photography had yet to establish rules of staging - that would come later. The photographers of the Crimean War began serious staging as the actual battles were not place for big photo wagons!)

In the 1930s, two technological advances radically altered the grammar of photographer: The Leica company invented a small, hand held, high quality camera, and Agfa, the German film comany, replaced sheet film with a plastic 35mm roll film.  One can only imagine the professionals who until then had used large filed cameras and produced massive negatives with no grain complaining about the ‘toy cameras’ and the small 35mm negatives!

The result, however, was a shift in the grammar of photo journalism.  The formerly stiff, posed portraiture of Matthew Brady was supplanted by the ‘reality’ of the new photography.  Photographers like Cartier Bresson or Capa embraced the new technology to create a new visual grammar.

American landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day by Robert Capa

Until very recently, video cameras were also big, heavy things.  Professional photographers often went to work with vans, instead of wagons, to carry all the necessary gear.

The result was that the ‘grammar’ of video  was all too similar to the grammar of early photography. Big, heavy and complex cameras militate toward stiff figures sitting upright in front of the camera. It is almost unavoidable:

Brian Williams, NBC News. Note the similarity to Gen. Lew Wallace

The great opportunity before us, as the medium gravitates toward these small, hand held cameras, is not to use them to ape what has already been a well established grammar in video with large cameras; but rather to embrace them to create a new grammar for video; one that has not been seen before.

I believe we can now do for television what Leicas did for photojournalism - that is, to turn it from a craft to an art form - to a far more compelling and intimate medium.

We are now just at the beginning of this moment.  We can not know what this will become, and more than Matthew Brady might have contemplated what the work of Sebastao Salgado would have looked like. But we can try.

And as still photographers, particularly at newspapers, begin to pick up video cameras, there will be a tendency to imitate what television looks like now.  That would be a mistake - and a unique opportunity lost.

As photojournalists, follow your own instincts as you wander into video - and help create a new grammar at the same time.

We are in the third day of the Academy, our first one in Chicago.

Despite yesterday’s snowstorm, we’re having a great result:

In 1940, linotype operators were the highest paid union workers in the country.

A generation later, they were gone.

Technology rendered their once irreplaceable task utterly worthless.

Linotype, for those who are too young to remember, was a method of setting type for newspapers. Hot ingots were shaped into letters and placed in lines of text, ready for the printing press.  The newspaper was physically ‘made’.  Linotype was not easy, and to be a good, fast linotype operator took years of work. It was a craft.

In our world of word processors, where mistakes can be corrected by hitting a delete button, it is hard to comprehend that in the world of linotype if you hit the wrong key, it mean the entire text had to be removed, broken and melted back to lead.  Mistakes were costly, and linotype operators were all about speed and accuracy. No wonder the newspapers acceeded to their union’s demand.

In the 1970s, computers were good enough and fast enough to introduce a concept called ‘cold type’, as opposed to the ‘hot type’ of linotype.

Cold type meant that the text could be set electronically.

It was remarkably fast and mistakes could be easily corrected, and typesettings changed in an instant.  The text was no longer cast in lead - quite literally.

Cold type cold also be set by pretty much anyone after a few hours of instruction on the new machines.  There were even those radicals who claimed that one day, reporters would be able to ’set’ their own ‘type’ on somethind called a ‘word processors’.

“Impossible”, the union cried.

First, it was one person doing two jobs. Second, how could a journalist focus on their writing (then done on manual typewriters), if they also had to worry about text setting? Never happen.

The great newspaper strike of 1990 and Murdoch’s Wapping face off in England were the end of the power of the unions. In England, the newspaper unions were broken by Thatcher and by the realities of technology. Last month, I was taken on a tour of a major metropolitan newspaper  that we are taking into video. They showed us a room in the basement where the old linotype operators spent their days playing cards. The union deal guaranteed them employment for life - but there was no longer anything for them to do.  The linotype machines, once the beating heart of the newspaper, were broken up for scrap metal - rendered worthless by a new technology.

Television is now about to undergo the same kind of technological shift, and concurrent labor trauma, that newspapers suffered a generation ago. Those craftsmen, upon whose skill and experience the entire industry once rested, are about to be rendered as superfluous as were those noble linotype men.

Neither saw it coming, and both fought tooth and nail for their survival, but in the end, it is technology and pure economics that call the shots.

Our partnership with Verizon to build and run a VJ-driven hyperlocal tv station is now one year old, and The Wall Street Journal has written a very nice piece about us:

Kids, Thugs, Dogs, Cats
Drafted Into TV Battle

In the fight between phone and cable companies for TV subscribers, things are getting a bit more personal.

A scene from Comcast’s pet-adoption show

In the suburbs of northern Virginia, the everyday activities of a blind mechanic are central to an episode of “Push-Pause,” a show on Verizon Communications Inc.’s FiOS1 channel. In Washington, D.C., Duke, a 6-year-old Doberman mix, stars in an episode of a pet-adoption program aired by Comcast Corp. In a Los Angeles suburb, children and their families along the sidelines of a local league’s soccer match are featured in an episode of a new on-demand show on Time Warner Cable Inc.

The new shows mark a subtle, important shift in strategy by major telecommunications companies, who have fought for years over everything from price to high-definition-channel offerings to picture quality.

Verizon, which is planning to spend roughly $18 billion to roll out its fiber-optic network to deliver TV and fast Internet service to customers, is betting that its strategy of developing its own original, hyper-local, human-interest TV programming will help set it apart. The company, which offers FiOS TV in 13 states, started a 24-hour TV channel in the Washington, D.C., area called FiOS1 about a year ago.

“If you smell fire and don’t know where the fire engine is going, you can look at News 12 or NY1,” says Terry Denson, who oversees the local content effort for Verizon, referring to two of the pioneering local news channels started by cable companies. “What we accomplish is more positive, uplifting and community central.”

“Push-Pause” is produced by Michael Rosenblum, who about 15 years ago was part of a team that started Time Warner’s New York City news channel NY1. Mr. Rosenblum sends five videographers out each day with hand-held cameras and laptops to record and write episodes.

The shows have featured a blind mechanic, Gene Thompson, of Oak Hill, Va., whose adventures included skydiving and inventing ways to trim trees using a harness and his hands to feel his way around branches. The camera tracked him mowing his lawn using a rope that he tied to himself and a fixed object. Another episode focused on a local painter in the D.C. area and his creations.

“We’re not dealing with anything controversial,” said Mr. Rosenblum, president of Rosenblum Associates Inc., which is under contract with Verizon. He adds, “As one would expect, they are entering into this with a great deal of caution and care. But at least it’s a toe in the water.”

Verizon said it has received hundreds of emails from viewers who follow “Push-Pause” and other FiOS1 programs. “The community actually knows who we are,” said Mr. Rosenblum. “People call us up.”

The idea is to feature “super-local” stories on people who probably wouldn’t be seen on more-typical shows. After all, local content has long been used by cable companies to defend their turf from satellite-TV operators, whose ability to offer local programming is limited by their national reach and capacity on their satellites.

For years, Cablevision Systems Corp. and the other big cable companies have operated channels that serve up local news, weather, sports and traffic reports. Cablevision’s internal surveys show that many customers cite the company’s News 12 channels on Long Island, N.Y., where Verizon is aggressively marketing its FiOS TV service, as the reason they refuse to switch to FiOS. Cablevision touts it in TV ads with the tagline, “News 12 traffic and weather, not on phone company TV.”

Now, cable operators are also beefing up their focus on hyper-local features. This past spring Cablevision began airing the features as part of its “Local on Demand,” which offers an array of community parades, street fairs and high-school sports. One show, “Meet the Leaders,” features 30-minute interviews with local elected officials. “Neighborhood Journal” is similar to Verizon’s Push-Pause, with slice-of-life community features.

Comcast, the nation’s biggest cable operator by subscribers, has formed a “Get Local” team of six employees solely responsible for producing localized content. They have delivered a raft of new on-demand offerings in certain markets, including the pet-adoption show “Pets ON DEMAND” in the Washington and Baltimore markets, and a sort of localized version of “America’s Most Wanted” called “Police Blotter” in Delaware.

“Satellite can’t do this,” said Michael Doyle, who is president of Comcast Cable’s Eastern Division and the founder of CN8, Comcast’s regional cable network. “Verizon is just getting started. They’ll be working for a long time to even just catch up with us.”

Verizon declined to respond, specifically, but said it expects to have more high-definition channels than Comcast by the end of the year.

Write to Dionne Searcey at dionne.searcey@wsj.com

The Travel Channel Academy starts in Chicago today.

40 new Travel Channel Journalists met this morning at the Downtown Sheraton to start their intensive 4-day bootcamp. Travel Channel VP Sue Norton was here to meet them, and explain how the unique relationship will work.

In the meantime, we are busy finishing up What’s Your Trip, the broadcast show that is made up of the content the grads produce.