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Pulitzer Prize winning author Tony Horwitz sells his books online with video

About a million years ago (or just a hair over 5,000 years ago if you live near the Creation Museum in Kentucky), man learned to walk erect.

As he stood over the savanna grass of East Africa, life was dangerous - and short. Only those with quick reflexes survived to reproduce. As a result, we have buried in our genes a deep attraction to flashes of light. A flash of light quickly draws our attention because something inside says ‘this is about survival’. There is something coming at you.

It is no wonder that television, upon its invention, was more popular than heroin. As Ed Murrow said, it is flashing lights in a box. It is not surprising that people will forego paying for food or heat before they will stop paying their cable bill. It’s in the genes. Flashing lights. Survival.

As video migrates to the web, this deep seated survival instinct, this deep seated attraction to flashing lights means that in a kind of Gresham’s Law, the most dynamic media (video) will drive out the less dynamic media (text) and in fairly short order.

I received today in my email a very graphic demonstration of this. Two of my friends from Columbia University, Tony Horwitz and Geraldine Brooks, (married - and to each other), are among the literary powerhouses of the country. They each have won their own Pulitzer prizes, and they each have produced their own best-sellers.

Today, Geraldine sent a link to a website called Bookvideo.tv. Remarkably, it is a site that uses video to sell books. The video is pretty badly made. Were the books as badly written, they would win no Pulitzers, and the videos on bookvideo are not about to win any Emmys. They are about one step up from Youtube. But it is the very idea that in a generation that watches 4.5 hours of TV a day (and buys 1 book a year), video should become the driving force for book sales - or soon shall be.

As video migrates to to the web, and as the technology for producing video becomes cheaper, better and easier to use, there is going to be lots more video online. Lots more. In fact, we may reach the point where online is predominantly video. You might click on a picture to access the text behind it.

Bookvideo is an indication of what is surely coming.

In the meantime, buy the book. I have no doubt it is a good deal better than the video.

During the Vietnam War it was called Collateral Damage.

You called in air support and the next thing you knew, they were dropping explosives on your own position  Bombing was not a precise science in those days.  State of The Art Technology was a radio and an F4 Phantom with a payload.

Today, there is another kind of collateral damage going on in the media world.

While we might spend our time focusing on photographers becoming videographers or reporters carrying small cameras, they are on the cutting edge of the technological shift. There are lots of industries that are simply beginning to disappear - often unheralded - as the new digital technology carpet bombs old businesses.

An article in today’s New York Times highlights that in the era of internet video (which started sometime yesterday), it is now virtually impossible to find pirate DVDs on the streets of New York.

Of course, the City of New York and the movie industry all look at this as a good thing, but it is not the end of piracy. It has simply followed technology and migrated to the web.  Like pornography, technology criminals tend to be early adapters, and like water they follow the path of least resistance that new technologies carve for them.

Meanwhile, Yahoo News carries an equally interesting article about the people who make newspaper printing presses.  It seems that as publications migrate to the web, the demand for those giant printing presses, and their attendant technology has begun to decline.  Fewer and fewer newspapers are making the large capital investments in the machinery as they contemplate a long term move to online publishing.  It’s a bit like the horse and buggy whip manufacturers beginning to feel to rising demand of the automobile at the turn of 20th Century.

When the CBS O&Os lay off staffers, we can see the impact of new technologies and new market realities. These are easy to see - just look at NBC 2.0. But the real collateral damage today is happening in the tangential industries. They are the first to feel it, but it is very real.

You have to be careful when you call in the new technologies.  You never know who is gonna get hit.

OK. Well how about this one…..

Pitching a show to a network is a pain…

You get the meeting, and when you walk into the room, the VP for Programming sits behind his or her desk, hands clasped behind the head, leans back and says “OK. What have you got”.

If television has a limited attention span, VPs for Programming have even shorter ones. They have heard it all. About a dozen times a day. There isn’t much that is new.  And, it seems, no matter what you pitch, they always say:

“Naahhh”

“We’ve got that one in development already”

“We piloted that last year. Didn’t rate”

or

“VH1 is doing that already”.

It’s a tough business, but it’s tough for the VP of Programming too, because if they pick wrong, they are out of a job.  And its all done in a very old way.  The call. The meeting. The pitch.  Generally, its hard to even get a meeting unless you have a great track record and generally also an agent (who will not only set up the meeting but also take a percentage of the show for doing so).

The web has changed so many businesses - maybe it can also change the way shows are pitched.

Let’s try.

Here’s a link to a series I am currently pitching around town.

As you can see, I built a website/blog to pitch the show.

This has lots of advantages: I can rewrite and update it all the time. I can email the link to everyone. It has a viral aspect. I can embed videos. And best of all, I can track who has seen it and how often!

But, the best part of the web is the feedback - the ‘community’ aspect.

So here I open the pitch to anyone who has an opinion on this.

Todd Robbins, our host, is a great great talent.

His world would make a fantastic series.  And maybe if we build the pitch as an ‘open platform’, we can bypass the ‘focus group’ aspect of all of this and drill down to the heart of what people really would like to see.

And maybe, with the viral aspect, the link will wind up on the desk of, oh, the VP for Programming for Spike or TLC.  You never know.

Let’s see what the web can do.

It’s a different kind of ‘User Generated Content”. This time, it’s about your opinion.

Why should newspapers and local TV stations be the only ones who are going to change the way they do business?

A penny for your thoughts…

“Monetization” of the web is the holy grail.

Content is migrating to the web far more rapidly than advertising dollars. As well, newspapers, magazines and TV stations are finite, and the percentage of advertising dollars that these institutions were able to garner was considerable on a per spot basis.

But take 10 percent of the conventional old media spend and spread it over the millions of potential sites on the web, and any amount of money suddenly seems insignificant. Like water poured into the Sahara Desert, one is tempted to ask, ‘where did the revenue go’?

It might seem from first glance that the problem of monetizing the web is fundamentally insoluble. Websites for newspapers or local TV stations will never generate the kind of revenues that physical dailies or local tv stations once did.

That might be right. But it also might not matter.

The web offers not just another platform for distribution of product, but rather an entirely new calculus for how an online media company can be run. By its very nature, it changes the construct of most media businesses. Migrate your newspaper to the web completely and you suddenly lose the cost of ink, paper, presses, pressmen, delivery trucks, distribution and paperboys. Tell your writers to work from home and you can lose the building, the desks, the lights, the cleaning services and most of the management as well.

Cut all those costs, and suddenly your ad based web revenue can look pretty good in comparison.

Its the overhead that is killing you.

Lose it. You don’t need it.

For the past year in Washington, DC, we have been running a small local Television station, but at a tiny fraction of the cost of a conventional station. All reporters are self contained - they cut all their pieces on their own laptops and are free to work at home or in the field. The entire office is one conference room. On site management is almost non-existent. And it works.

The web allows you not only to distribute your product to 2 billion homes daily for free; it also allows you to cut overhead and management to the bone. And what is left behind can go to those who create the content - which seems only fair. The ad revenue might be pennies on the dollar, but after all, isn’t that the percentage of current income that writers or shooters are already taking home?

This is not going to happen overnight, but the seeds of the future are cast within the DNA of the Internet. The new New York Times Building might just prove to be a massive monument to anachronism.

still alive… but barely

There is no question but that we have ‘dumbed down’ TV news. But has TV news ‘dumbed down’ society, or is TV news simply chasing a dumber public?

For many years, I taught at New York University, and over those years I was increasingly astonished at how ill-educated my NYU students were. Not that they were stupid; just incredibly uneducated. Many could not differentiate between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. Most placed the American Civil War at anywhere from 1810 to 1920; the population of the US at anywhere from 2 million to a billion; the distance from NY to LA at anywhere from 800 miles to 25,000. And there was worse. The more shocking fact was, that when confronted with their appalling lack of basic knowledge, they simply did not care. “I can look it up if I want to know” was their most popular answer. And indeed, in a world of Google, this proves to be true.

In that same period, we have all watched TV news deteriorate at the same rate. Issues such as the Middle East or the economy are now simply far too complex to explain in depth, and so we are reduced to a simplistic ‘good guy, bad guy’ analysis which more often than not misses the point entirely. It leaves us with what Neil Postman used to call ‘the illusion of knowledge’, which can be far more dangerous than no knowledge at all. (ie, Saddam is Hitler… sort of). Why did this happen? Did TV news debase the intelligence of the Average American, or did TV news simply follow their audience into the abyss?

This question has been raised of late in an online discussion amongst members of my class at the J-School at Columbia. And here is an interesting theory that has arisen from this: When I was a child, most of my public school teachers were excellent. They were excellent because they had come of age in an era when women had two career choices: teacher or nurse. And because the options open to ‘career women’ were so limited, schools could get away with paying their female teachers next to nothing. In the 1970s and 80s, options for women (thankfully) opened. I am old enough to remember when a woman going to Harvard Law School still merited an article in our local newspaper.

Now, bright and aggressive women headed off to become lawyers, doctors and CEOs. At that point, schools should have vastly escalated their salaries. If we wanted to keep the best and the brightest teaching our children, it would have meant offering salaries commensurate with law firms (ie, $150K a year). And why not? But schools did not. Instead, they kept their salaries as low as they had always been. And so, with a few very dedicated individuals who were willing to forego incomes to fulfill their teaching ambition, the quality of teachers collapsed. As did, I think, the general quality of education.

Today’s students (based on my own anecdotal decade at NYU) have not been educated; and for the most part, don’t even seem to know what an education is. This is now the audience for TV news - limited attention span, limited background, limited education. TV news has always chased ratings, and so is it any surprise that in an effort to garner eyeballs on the screen, news has gravitated to Britney Spears? We will pay a price for this.

As the Roman Empire collapsed in upon itself (some say for lead in the drinking water), future historians may look to this debasement of education as the root cause of the end of the American Empire.

TV News is a kind of canary in the coal mine. It tells us what is happening in our culture. And TV news, like our culture, is not looking well.

And that’s the way it is….

CBS News apparently is about to outsource part of its newsgathering operation to CNN, or so says The New York Times.

This is hardly surprising. For far too long network news operations have been fat.

CBS News had a lot of time to restructure; to take advantage of what the new technologies offered. Beet-tv reported today that Reuters News is covering Iraq with 35 videojournalists. CBS News, apparently has opted for no coverage of Iraq.

The fate of CBS News is hardly surprising. Following in the ignoble footsteps of other American corporations like Kodak, who preferred to go down clinging to the past rather than embrace new and scary technologies. Their loss, and ours.

Perhaps the last gasp of a defunct and completely out of touch management was Katie Couric’s pornographic $15 million a year salary - to work 22 minutes a night reading what someone else had written. The sheer stupidity of this, the sheer short-sightedness of it now becomes obvious to everyone. For Couric’s reported $15 million, CBS could have (could have) hired and fielded an astonishing 150 Videojournalists worldwide, paying them a quite honorable $100,000 a year to report for CBS News. CBS News could have (could have) placed itself on the cutting edge of the digital news revolution.

Instead they opted to become the dinosaur poster child of the end of old media.

Goodbye Tiffany Network.

You blew it.

Last night, we held an open house herefor members of the Class of 1983, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. It was my class, and it’s our 25th Anniversary.

The class has done well. We have 5 Pulitzer Prize Winners out of a class of 180. And last night, nearly 100 people showed up.

Here are a few photos.

Congrats to all.

If there were an Emmy for dumbness, this one would win.

While newspapers embrace video and we debate whether the revolution that Leica brought to photojournalism can be translated to small video cameras, there is another revolution going on.

The advent of 500 or 1,000 video channels, and more to come for sure, means that there is a continuing race for dwindling audience share. More channels spread over the same population means fewer viewers per channel, no matter how you slice it.

As we are a business driven by ratings, there will be an unceasing competition for eyeballs, no matter what it takes.

Here’s a look at Fox Reality’s latest line thrown in the water in an attempt to garner a niche we shall call ’sexually repressed 14 year old male nerds in testosterone overdrive’.  (In the future, everyone has a channel).

Of course, they have buried the premier at 1am EST on the Fox Reality Channel.

Battle of the Bods. Women strip down to their skivvies and a panel of men rates their T&A. Literally. Best T. Best A. The women line up in the order of what they think is the best T… best to worst, and then we reveal(!!!!) what the men thought.

The tension is palpable….

Why don’t we just cut to the bottom line and drop the skivvies entirely? This is, after all, cable. And it is, after all, after 1am.

We often talk about the vast potential that video presents as a creative medium - the ability to tell a story in pictures, sound, writing, graphics, music, text…

Battle of the Bods tells a story too.

But it is not an encouraging one.

As Ed Murrow said, “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

tune in. Fox Reality Channel. 1AM - Lights in a Box.

This is a story of how fast technology changes things.

On a recent visit to The Newark Star Ledger, photo chief Pim Van Hemmen showed me their doorstop.

It’s a  Kodak/Nikon NC2000e that they bought in the mid to late 1990s.  They paid
something like $20,000 for it at the time. It was the first ‘digital’ camera.

“It’s broken and so obsolete, that it wasn’t worth repairing or selling to
anyone.” says Van Hemmen.  “We kept it out of nostalgia and one of our digital specialists,
Jeff Rhode, screwed a plate into the tripod hole so it could function as a
doorstop, which it has for quite some time.”

It’s a curiosity now, and a bit of an inside joke. More than anything, it’s
a reminder of how far digital photography has come in just a decade.

And no doubt, a decade from now, we’ll all be using those Z-1s as doorstops or paperweights as well.

David Hume Kennerly

In 1990, on the heels of NY1, I was approached by a Wall Street guy who suggested that I should raise some money and start my own company based on the VJ concept.

He took me to see Nick Nicholas, who was then Chairman and CEO of Time/Life, and upon hearing the concept, Nicholas reached into his desk, withdrew his personal checkbook and wrote out a check for $100,000 to found what would become VNI.

It was a moment I will never forget.

Nicholas then introduced me to David Hume Kennerly, a Time/Life photographer. “Photojournalists”, Nicholas said, “will become the backbone of this new VJ movement”. He was right.

Kennerly had a fantastic eye, and although he had never shot a frame of video before, he and I headed off to Cambodia, where he shot a piece for Nightline, under my instruction. It was the first VJ ‘bootcamp’, to to speak.

Kennerly introduced me to Dirck Halstead, and then Halstead to PF Bentley, Bill Gentile, Susan Meiseles and many other photographers after that. Halstead of course went on to found The Digital Journalist and Platypus, and PF shot many, many TV pieces after that. Gentile and Meiseles both won national Emmys for their video work with me at NY Times TV.

A few months ago, Jeff Jarvis took me to visit the Newark Star Ledger. They had also begun to move into video, and they had done so empowered by their photography staff shooting video pieces and both posting them on their website and packaging them as a pilot for a possible TV or web series.

The quality of the video work done by the Star Ledger staff immediately convinced me that the talent to move local newsgathering in video forward, yet maintain the quality of the print paper, was already on staff at the Star Ledger. Any good photog can pick up a video camera and bring back reasonable images. But a great photojournalist can translate their skill of capturing compelling images with an editorial bent that tell a story, and move that to video. Compound that with great writing and story structure and you really have something. The Star Ledger already really had something.

You can see the kind of work they are doing here.

Now, we’re going to take that initiative and translate it across the newsroom.

Dirck, are you reading this?

Time for you to come back to Newark, soon!