The Newly Liberated

The first tranche of the Travel Channel staff will complete their bootcamp today.

It has been a liberating experience for them. Liberating in that they have now been empowered with the tools and the skills to create content in the business in which they work.

It’s a funny business -television.  As the bootcamp has proven, the act of shooting video, editing it and uploading it is not the mysterious ‘dark art’ that a generation of ‘professional’ cameraman and production companies would have had them believe it is.  Now they know. And now they are free to start making content themselves.

People come to work for a TV network because they have a love for the medium and a creative bent. Otherwise they would work for a law firm.  There is a ton of creative potential in these walls, and now it’s going to be liberated.

The cost of producing has fallen through the floor, and so has the barrier to access.

All that remains now is to start making the content. Some of it will be good, some will be terrible, and perhaps there will be a whiff or two of genius along the way.  We can only hope so.  As Winston Churchill said, ‘it’s not the not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning’.

A Commitment to Literacy

Travel Channel President Pat Younge brings literacy to his staff

Television is a strange industry.

The New York Times is filled with people who aspire to be print journalists; to be writers.

As a result, when you walk into the New York Times, every single person in the building, from the receptionist to the publisher knows how to read and write. They also have a word processing machine on their desktop. If they get an idea, they are encouraged to write. Adam Liptak, corporate lawyer for the paper often also reports on legal matters for the paper. It is a hive of literacy and creativity.

If you walk into a TV network, however, it is more akin to walking into an insurance company.

Row after row of cubicles and flourescent lighting. Industrial carpeting.

And most remarkably, a staff that by and large are both illiterate in the medium in which they are working, and also denied access to the tools of creativity.

Walk around your network offices. How many people do you see? Now, how many cameras are around. These, by the way, are the tools that we make video with. How many edit systems on people’s desk top computers.

And now, the most critical question: how many people on staff are video literate? That is, how many people on staff are capable of shooting, editing and producing a video told story?

It’s a strange business that attracts people who want to work in this industry, and then keeps them both functionally illiterate and denies them access to the tools of creativity.

At The Travel Channel, President and CEO Pat Younge is making a difference.

He is committed to making every employee of the network, from secretaries to IT people to marketing to producers (shocking but true) completely literate in the making of video; in video story-telling.

That, after all, is their business.

This might seem common sense, but in the TV business, to my knowledge, he is the only person who has committed to empowering and educating his staff in this way.

Bravo!

Win A Trip To China

Today, we are running a very special Travel Channel Academy in Washington.

This one is only for employees of The Travel Channel.

President and GM Pat Younge as mandated that all employees of The Travel Channel, from producers to sales to marketing go through the ‘bootcamp’, and learn to shoot, edit and produce video.

As an added incentive, Younge has offered an all expense paid trip to China for 2 for the person who produces the best video.

I expect things will get pretty competitive.

Here’s what the first morning looked like.

This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us

I said draw….

It turns out that they’re both in the same business.

Newspapers and local TV news stations.

They both go out into the community, find stories, process them and then distribute them back to the community, charging for the ads that accompany them.

For a long time, their paths barely crossed.

I say barely because TV stations generally started their day by opening the local paper to find out what stories to cover. But beyond that, not much.

All that is over.

All that is over because of the web.

Both papers and local TV news are gravitating to the web as a platform of distribution. And why not? For papers it means getting rid of presses, ink, printers, paper and all the costs associated with distribution.  And it puts you in every home on the planet all the time pretty much for free. Kind of irresistable.

Ten years ago, it became clear that you could ‘publish’ a paper on the web.  Around the same time, sites like Craigslist began to strip out classifieds.  J-date began to strip out personals.  Later places like Huffington began to strip out editorials!  Papers were in the fight of their lives and they started to come to grips with it.

TV was smug. They never imagined that the web could one day carry TV shows and TV news.

Wrong.

Happened yesterday.

So papers have a lead, in a way, in terms of dealing with this. And one of the ways that they are learning to deal with this is to incorporate video in their reporting. And why not? It’s not hard to do. It’s pretty compelling.  And when the web carries video (as it does) any local newsgatherer would be remiss not carry video. So they’re moving there.

As they do, they suddenly find that they are fast becoming head-to-head competitors with local TV news.

Because now, local TV is just starting to come to grips with the web as a better platform for distribution as well. Infinite homes, 24.7, no cable, no transmission towers, VOD all the time. Non linear. It works.

And as both papers and TV move to the web, they begin to find themselves running into each other. In terms of stories. In terms of content. And in terms of advertisers.

In the end, probably only one will survive.

But which one?

Newspapers have some advantages: they are leaner and far better newsgathering machines.  They put more reporters on the streets every day.  They are better at making volume. Take a local TV newscast and print it out and you probably have a page and a half in the paper.  The web demands reams of content, updated all the time.

Newspapers have some disadvantages:  They are still married to the presses and the ink and the delivery vans.  And they have to learn video.

But TV stations also have their own mixed bag. They know how to make video, but they do it in a very expensive and cost-ineffective way. Can they change?  Unknown.  Also, TV stations, as they migrate to the web will have to put many more reporters on the streets to compete with the local papers. Can they do it? Unknown. Finally, as they move to the web, local TV stations will have to provide reams of text, as the web does both text and video. Do they have the writing skills?  Not yet.

It’s gonna be a hard fought battle. Newspapers are not about roll over and die so fast. They have a pretty long tradition in this country. And there is a lot at stake – local news is always a money maker, and the local stories and the local advertisers are aplenty, with money to spend.

I would not count the papers out yet. As Gary Cooper says:

‘You’ll never hang me. I’ll come back. I’ll kill you, Will Kane. I swear it, I’ll kill you.’

Newborns

Young colt VJ John O’Boyle and newborn colt.

photo courtesy Joe Epstein, Newark Star Ledger

Have a great holiday weekend.

Bootcamp

Wayne Woolley is a journalist’s journalist.

This Army vet spent years with the AP cutting his teeth as a journalist.

Now he’s a reporter for the Newark Star Ledger.

He’s done three tours in Iraq for the paper. And this isn’t Barbara Walters flying into the Green Zone for the afternoon. Each tour of duty in Iraq lasted 3 months. Now, he’s preparing to head off to Iraq for a fourth tour for the paper. But this one’s going to be different.

This time he’s taking a video camera.

But before he goes, vet Wayne Woolley has to go to bootcamp.

VJ bootcamp.

And he’s doing pretty well.

Of course, Newark isn’t Baghdad. But our 12 hour days and intense field work (not to mention the famous ‘public praise – public humiliation nightly screening sessions’ are as close as we can get. We want to make sure that Wayne is ready for combat. We think he’s getting close. After all, he isn’t going to be shooting some promotional videos for the Hilton Hotel in Florida. That’s not journalism. This is.

Newark Star Ledger – 30 mins to Deadline

You Push The Button

What happened?

There is a lesson for newspapers here.

Kodak once meant photography. You didn’t even have to ask. The red K in the yellow field was recognized and respected worldwide. Say Kodak and you said photography. Founded by George Eastman in 1892, the company pretty much invented the concept of commercial, professional and accessible amateur photography. “You press the button, we do the rest” was their motto.

But Kodak got into trouble.

They got into trouble because they forgot what business they were in.

Kodak was in the business of allowing people to go out, capture images and then get them for keeps.

That was it.

Kodak, however, began to believe that they were in the film business, instead of the ‘let people take pictures’ business. It was a big mistake. Because when digital cameras first came out, Kodak was such a powerhouse, that they could have owned the business. Instead, they pretty much ignored it. They were about film.

It was a mistake.

They ceded leadership in digital photography to the Japanese. They never got it back.

And today, even though Kodak is the largest film manufacturer in the world, the company is a mere shadow of what it once was, and it is hardly the world leader in photography it once was.

What does this have to do with newspapers?

Newspapers are in the business of going out into the community, gathering and processing news and information and putting it in people’s hands. That’s what their reporters and newsrooms do best.

The mechanism for the delivery of that information and news, the way it is processed, the way it is wrapped, the way it gets there is secondary.

Their power is not in the presses, but in their people.

And as the Internet takes them into every household (and every cell phone) in the world, it is critical that they don’t lose focus on their core business. You can’t stuff a piece of newsprint into a laptop or a cell phone, but you can jam tons of information, updated by the minute, there. And lots of that can be in video as well as text.

At The Newark Star Ledger we’re in the process of empowering the journalists, both print and still, with the remarkable power of video and laptop edits – digital journalism, and all that implies. The results so far are extremely encouraging. We’re not talking about 19 year olds with camcorders and Youtube here. We’re talking about working, experienced professional journalists with decades of experience morphing their considerable skills into a powerful new medium.

When it comes to acquiring up to date information about New Jersey in the near future, if we do this right….The Star Ledger will be able to say, ‘you push the button’, (on your laptop, cellphone or perhaps even TV), ‘we do the rest’.

More From The Star Ledger

The Shape of Things To Come

Franklin’s press

While I am working at the Star Ledger this week, I am also reading Eric Burns’ new book, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism.

It is a fascinating history of the beginnings not just of journalism in America, but of the newspaper business in general.

While Gutenberg is generally credited with inventing the printing press in 1452, the first newspapers only appear in America in 1690. Although Gutenberg had all the technology he needed in 1452 to, in fact publish The New York Times, it would take more than 200 years for that technology to resonate in newspapers.

Publick Occurrences bore little resemblance to a newspaper you might read today, except perhaps for The National Enquirer, but it was indeed one of the world’s first newspapers. Although it was only published for one edition, others would quickly follow on its heels, both in Britain and in the Colonies. Within 40 years, Benjamin Franklin would be publishing the far more successfulThe Courant on the press shown above. That piece of wooden technology in fact bore little difference from the machine that Gutenberg had pressed his first bibles upon.

It is not the technology that shifts culture, but rather the application.

All of this brings us to video and the web.

The technology of the web has now been with us for only 17 years, since Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web. And the implications of that technology are now only starting to be felt. But as with the printing press, the effects will be shattering.

This Sunday,The New York Times reported that every minute, 10 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube.

This is in itself an astonishing number. In the world of conventional television, the very act of merely manufacturing 10 hours of television could occupy a small production company for nearly a year. Now, the unleashed ‘citizenry’ is cranking out 10 hour of television every minute!

And we are really just at the very very beginning of the ‘video revolution’.

Youtube itself was only created 18 months ago.

TV Week reported yesterday that Youtube last month delivered an almost incomprehensible 4 billion streams of video to 74 million unique users – in one month.

There is a lesson in these numbers.

The Revolution has arrived,

People around the world are starting (and only just starting) to create videos in droves. This is not a trickle. This is a tsunami, and we are only at the very very beginning of the process.

This is almost the same phenomenon that followed the invention of the printing press. The world went from a mere handful of volumes to nearly 15 million books in print in only 40 years

By the same token, the new world is not only making videos, they are also sharing them and watching them. 74 Million unique users. Chris Matthews, nice guy though he is, gets 440,000 viewers. And he is one of the more watched one. That is .5% (that would be one half of one percent) of Youtube. And Youtube doesn’t cost anything!

What is going on here?

What is going on is a revolution on the order of Gutenberg’s, and it is happening very very fast.

What will the final product look like?

No one knows.

No one knows any more than one could have predicted The New York Times in 1452 looking at Gutenberg’s new invention. But over time, newspapers evolved and matured.

Now the confluence of video and the web are putting pressure on newspapers, but they are also creating an opportunity to create an entirely new grammar and an entirely new way of gathering, packaging and distributing stories.

This is the great opportunity afforded by projects like the one we are engaged in at The Newark Star Ledger.

And those who are participating in it, like those in our bootcamp, have the rather unique privilege of creating and crafting this new world. It is something Franklin would have appreciated.