TCA West Coast

Travel Channel Academy – Santa Barbara

This morning, after a very pleasant flight on Virgin America (!), we arrived in Santa Barbara to start the Travel Channel Academy in Santa Barbara.

Forty new students began the experience of a lifetime.  The new Mrs. Rosenblum leads them through their paces.

We’ll keep track of their progress over the next four days, so stay tuned.

Briefly….

Jeff Jarvis gave us each 5 minutes to explain our businesses.

5 minutes??!!

OK.

Talk fast….

Avon Calling

Back to basics…

Today’s NY Times ran a very interesting article about Joel Moss Levison, a 28-year old college drop out who has made more than $200,000 in prizes entering his own online digital commericals in contests.

As the Times headlines it “Finding a Gold Mine in Digital Ditties”

But I think it is far more than that.

TV commercials used to be created and produced by ad agencies.

The agencies charged millions to come up with the ideas and then to produce them.

It was a very expensive proposition, and on a per-minute basis, more expensive than most Hollywood films.

We all understand the application of the ‘digital revolution’ to the news business. Cheaper cameras, cheaper edits, cheaper content in greater volume.

But what happens when the new technology hits the ad side of the business?

This is something we should pay more attention to, because ad income is the engine that drives the content side. We have a million ideas on how to arrange the content but when it comes to the revenue side, we kind of lower our heads and mumble a few words and hope that God will provide.

Perhaps it is time to rething the income side along with the content side, and apply the same lessons.

For the past two years, we have been producing daily content for a major cable provider in Washington, DC. It’s a hyperlocal news channel, and it has been extremely cost effective.  Extremely.  The VJs all work from home, the overhead is next to nothing.  But the ad revenue side has been disappointing.  While we were very revolutionary with the content creation, we left the ad sales and fabrication to a conventional agency.

This was a mistake.

Now, we are engaging in an equally radical experiment both in ad sales and ad creation, and ironically, we are borrowing from the ‘Avon Calling’ or Mary Kay Cosmetics model. But in this case, instead of selling nail polish or lipstick, our door-to-door sales force is selling ad spots on cable.

How does it work?

We have been able to cut the cost of producing local television content do low, that our break-even for ad sales is in the double digits.  The very low double digits. Thus, we can afford to sell advertising commercial spots for local cable at $50 per spot. That’s pretty good for a local cable ad.

And because the rates are so low, we can attract a whole new class of potential advertisers – people who had never even considered buying TV commercials, because they thought it would be too expensive.

We’re commissioning a small army of ad maker/sellers (there is no term for this, because it never existed before). Their job is to go, quite literally, door to door, to the local pizzaria, the local shoe store, the local dentist and create a funny and clever 30-second spot (like Mr. Levison, using a camcorder and laptop), and then sell the spots.  The creator gets 25% of the income from the spot sale, no matter how long the ad runs, they get paid 25% every time.  The merchant gets a lot of face time on local cable for next to nothing. And we don’t need ad agencies or sales people. It’s all done door to door, and can be done by housewives (or househusbands), or students or retirees.  Extra income and some fun at the same time.

Will it work?

I think so.

And I think it’s a very scalable business model.

What Is A Newspaper?

All the news that’s fit to print…. or other stuff also?

In 1452 when Johannes Gutenberg first laid paper on inked movable type, he printed a bible.

He printed a bible because that was the only kind of book he, or anyone else for that matter, had ever experienced. Hence, it came to define ‘book’ for him.

The day after Gutenberg printed his first bible, he could have printed The New York Times.

I mean there is no reason why he could not have printed The New York Times. He had all the technology he needed to produce the paper down there in his basement in Mainz.  He could have gone out on the street with the Mainz Week in Review, or the Magazine Section, or Real Estate, or Style.

But he didn’t.

He didn’t, not because it was not possible. He didn’t because new technologies don’t come with instruction manuals on ‘best use’ of this tool.

That is the hard part. And that is left to us.

It would take 350 years to get from Gutenberg’s printing press to The New York Times.  The first newspapers don’t begin to appear until the late 18th Century.

Now we are faced with the Web – truly an invention as revolutionary and disruptive as Gutenberg’s press. And like Gutenberg, we stare at it, but can only see it is a tool for reproducing (perhaps less expensively) that with which we are already deeply familiar – newspapers.

‘Let us take away the paper entirely and distribute the paper on the web’ we say.

Perhaps so.

Or perhaps this is simply a case of printing bibles when the technology could allow for much more.

Take a look at any newspaper’s website online, and what do you see?  A newspaper, but transformed onto your computer screen.  Many still in black and white – and in text, with photos.

But the web is a far more agile machine. It can do so much more than simply replace trucks and printing presses.  Along with distribution, it brings people in … in real time.

and it does video, quite well.

Instead of jamming newspapers into the web, which is really not such a good fit, is there a way to look at what the web can do and grow a new concept of ‘newspaper’ out of the technology?

There will always be a need for information; for a process that can draw together communities.  Newspapers are machines that send people out into the community, gather information, and return it processed and comprehensible, and trustworthy.

Can we transform newsapers from paper and ink makers to digital information nodes? Processors of community based content – text, video, graphics, audio – that is curated (thank you Jeff Jarvis), processed, edited and returned? Not just in paper and text but in any medium (and in any way) that the needs of the community demand?

Examples?

Why don’t newspapers send videographers to weddings, charge for the service, deliver a dvd and post the content?

Instead of cutting the movie reviewer, why don’t newspapers become nodes where people in the community can ‘rate the movies’, like a Zagat, before someone else gets there?

Doug McCormick, who made both Lifetime and iVillage in major successes told me that most people buy newspapers for the ads as much as for the stories.  The ads tell them what is on sale at Bloomingdale’s, what’s playing at the local theater.

So charge Bloomingdales to send your video team over there to make a spread about this week’s sales. Then post it. We are in a non linear world, and a competitive one.  If Bloomingdale’s has video on your site about what’s on sale, then maybe Barney’s should do the same.

You’ve built the machine. Now put it to work.

The ‘newspaper’ of the future is about more than just covering the city council meeting.

And if you don’t do it, trust me, someone else will.

Just ask Craig Newmark.

My Day With Jeff Jarvis…

…and a lot of other people…

I am sure we can find some way to work together….

Yesterday, I spent the entire day with Jeff Jarvis and about 200 of his closest friends.

It was the second annual New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY. A gathering of some of the biggest names in the business, we spent the day hearing some very interesting ideas about where journalism and the digital revolution are heading.

You can see the videos at the link above, and I have to hand it to Jarvis and CUNY for transcending the usual pap that you get at these things.

First, Jarvis has just finished his new book, What Would Google Do?, (which he pimpled mercilessly, but why not?) I have already ordered my advance copy! The point of the book, and of the conference, was forward looking, (as opposed to the sturm und drang ‘the world is coming to an end’ speeches I normally hear (and give). This one was about solutions.

As a result, the cast of characters was new. (at least to me).

Among the standouts:

-Ed Roussel, Digital Director of The Telegraph (UK) who gave a stellar presentation on what the Telegraph is doing and why.

-Charlie Sennott – Former foreign correspondent for The Globe (Boston) who is striking out on his own to recover foreign journalism from a newspaper world that no longer cares.

-Tom Evslin – founder of ITXC, who is not a journalist but an engineer who developed, among other things, VoIP and apparently disconnected ATT from charging per minute rates for web use (remember that?). It was fascinating to get an engineer’s perspective on how to build networks and why they work or fail.

We spent the afternoon in Aspen-like groups, grappling with an assignment. I was in the “new structures for newsrooms” which was chaired by Andrew Heyward, former President of CBS News. He was remarkably insightful and plugged into the new media revolution. Sorry he is not running CBS now. It would help.

I hope we can get a few of these folks to make the trip to Brussels for DNA2009. March 4-5, Brussels, Belgium. sign up now (shameless self-promotion).

The One Percent Solution

Time is money….

Yesterday’s posting of the Star Ledger desert murder piece caused a lot of interest and a lot of discussion.

As I noted, I don’t think the piece is perfect. Far from it. I sent extensive notes over to the paper on ways in which they could have done it better. That having been said, the piece is very interesting because a New Jersey paper was willing to tackle a complex and difficult story some 3,000 miles away, and do a pretty good job of it, in video.

And this was not your standard 1-2 minute online video job.  It was a 13-minute investigative story.

Well done.

It was just the kind of story that 60-Minutes would tackle.

And in some ways, it was the way they would do the story – sans Mike Wallace, and admittedly better shot and cut.

However…..

60 Minutes would have spent, all in, about $250,000 to produce their own 8-minute version of the story.

That’s including salaries for their hightly over paid correspondents; their camera crews, their editors, their hotel bills, their meals, their researcher and so on.

The Star Ledger, (and here I am only guessing) probably spent about $2500 to make this piece.

One percent of the cost that CBS News would have spent.

One percent.

Now, some of our professional TV friends looked at this and said “weak”.

Fine.

I am sure Steven Spielberg looks at 60 Minutes stories and says “weak”.

Because for $25 million , Speilberg can make an 8 minute piece that puts 60 Minutes and their professionals to shame.

So we are on a spectrum. A cost/benefit scale.  Is the Star Ledger piece pretty good for $2500? I think so.

I think it’s a damned good start… and especially at those prices.  Will it eclipse 60 Minutes? I doubt it. Will it find an audience that appreciates it? I think so.

A Mystery in the Desert

The Star Ledger is very much alive.

Having resolved their union issues, the paper is back in business, and fortunately the video project is remaining a main focus.

Above, a 13-minute documentary on the disappearance of New Jersey woman in Nevada.

Produced by Star Ledger VJ John Munson working with reporter Kathleen O’Brien, it’s a very powerful piece of work.  Take a look. It’s not perfect… yet, but it is a great indicator of the enormous potential to be found in newspapers that have the courage and foresight to empower and unleash their staffs.

Great job all around!

The Wizard of Omaha

You have to invest…

I am reading The Snowball, the official Warren Buffett biography by Alice Schroeder.

Buffett is some smart and impressive guy.

Starting with nothing, in Omaha, Nebraska, he is now the wealthiest person in the US, if not in the world.  It was all done by good stock picking and intelligent investment.

Buffett had an article in The New York Times on Saturday, urging people to invest in the stock market now.

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors

Buffett-thinking is deep in my mind as I read Colvin Mulvany’s posting:

Last week was by far the hardest seven days I’ve spent in my twenty-three year journalism career. I was confused, disoriented, angry, depressed. Seven of the 21 people laid off last week were coworkers I had trained to shoot and edit video for our upcoming (now delayed) new website. They were young and talented. All understood that video was going to be an important part of our digital future. And now they will all be gone.

We are at a nexus in the news business. It is impacting newspapers first, because the web went to text about a decade before it went to video. Such are the lead times of technology. What is happening to newspapers today is going to happen to television in about ten years.  No one is safe.

This is probably the end of newspapers as we know them, but it is not the end of news as a business. And it is not the end of ‘newspapers’ either, if they have the courage and ability to re-invent themselves.  They already have a lot of the pieces in place: dedicated staffs, community based reporting, recognized brands.

What they may be lacking is the courage to move aggressively forward, as opposed to hunkering down and husbanding their few tins of sardines in the cave until the bad times ‘blow over’.

The bad times are not going to ‘blow over’, and the answer is not reducing the once area of the operation that could conceivably take them into the future.

It is a natural tendency, when things get bad, to hunker down. Anyone can buy 100 shares of Microsoft in 1992 and think themselves a genius.  This does not require any brains.  But it takes a lot of courage to invest a few million dollars in two Stanford University students whose search engine just got rejected by Yahoo as worthless. (This is the story of Michael Moritz and Google – but we’ll save that for another day).

Buffett is saying that now is the time to buy stocks, when the herd mentality is driving everyone else out of the market.  It is not that Buffett is a contrarian. He is not. Reading his book, one comes to understand that he is an extremely reasoned thinker.  He notes that great profits were made by those who had the courage to purchase stocks in 1933, as the market turned before the general economy.  His advice to purchase stocks now is predicated on the understanding that in the long run, the American economy will return.

Fine.

In the long run we all understand that the digital revolution is going to happen.

Newspapers and television will migrate to the web.

This, we all know, is inevitable.

So the smart investment here is to get there first and secure a position.

Retreating from the web and video, and hunkering down to eek out the last few moment of the newspaper world is terribly short sighted.

But… it would certainly be in keeping with how most businesses react to hard times.

Which is what makes the Warren Buffetts of the world so very rare… and worth listening to.

Here’s The Point

Listen!

Prior to the invention of the printing press in 1452 there was almost no punctuation in the English language.

There was no need for it.  The langauge was a spoken language, as were all languages, and when it was written down, it was written as a transcription of speaking.

A spoken language is filled with all kinds of clues as to what the intent of the speaker is.  When one’s voice goes up at the end of a sentence, it indicates a question. We take pauses for emphasis, or to separate ideas.

The written word prior to 1452 did not include these clues, even to the exclusion of periods.  The number of texts were few, and generally well known to the reader. The bible, for example. They were spoken words and the written part was often little more than a reminder of what the spoken words should be.

Prior to the printing press, one depended upon memory – rote memorization.  Education and memorization were considered as one in the same.  The Bible tells us that Solomon was a wise man because he had memorized 2,000 proverbs.  This was wisdom in antiquity.

Since antiquity, writing had been little more than a mnemonic.  A device for jogging the memory.

Neither written Hebrew nor Arabic have vowels.  There are vowling systems that can be appended to written Hebrew or Arabic, but generally with either of these ancient langauges, one must know the word they are reading in order to read it.

The invention of the printing press gave rise to a kind of mass production of writing, and in doing so, shifted the foundations of writing – indeed, the very definition of writing – from a transcription of spoken langauge to a grammar that was entirely graphocentric. It was a fundamental difference and it took a long time to get there.

Many years ago (many), I had an old girlfriend who had learnt English (her fifth language) not from a langauge school or courses, but by reading it. As a result, interestingly, she was often unable to differentiate between written English and spoken English.  There is a difference, as there is in all languages.  From time to time she would say strange sounding things.  She once commented that her father, upon learning he had  cancer,  was faced with ‘an ineluctable choice’.  One generally does not use the world ineluctable in spoken English, but she had learnt it by reading and could not differentiate between the two.

Now, what does this have to do with video? (you may ask).

Until now, video has been a bit like writing before the printing press.

Like pre-Gutenbergian text, it was in the hands of a very few ‘priests’ who used it sparingly, and when they did, it was largely representative of the more common written text.

When TV shows are crafted in an edit, the script is often ‘written’ apart from the video.  It is written on a piece of paper.  It is then ‘voiced’ in a recording booth, again far from the video.  A narrator or talent sits in a record booth and goes “3….2…1…. and then reads a line of text or a few lines”.

Later, those lines will be married to the pictures (which were generally shot by someone else), in an edit suite.

What appears on screen is stiled, and disconnected from any kind of passion or good story telling.

I watched 60 Minutes tonight and you can see how the ’script’ exists largely free of the video. It’s a waste of a powerful medium.

The printing press gave rise to punctuation because as the masses embraced story-telling through text alone, it became necessary to create a grammar that could really leverage off what writing and print were capable of – as opposed to being a vehicle to mimic speech.

Now, video is just entering the place where the printing press was 500 years ago. It is passing from the priesthood into the hands of the masses. And they are creating massive amounts of content.  Daily.

At the same time, we now begin to grapple with the need for a new kind of grammar which is purely video (as opposed to written and recorded tracks married to pictures somewhere else).  It took 150 years for commas to appear.  The use of periods or full stops is generally credited to Aldus Manutius in his Life of Plato published (and printed) in 1513.

Today, we see the use of the now ubiquitous @ as a punctuation marker that tells us that we are in cyberspace, (as opposed to when to take a pause).

For video, we have, like the earliest writers, simply used the medium to ape filmmaking and writing. But video can be much more powerful. To do so, it has to acquire its own grammar – its own punctuation.

We can start by removing the affectations of writing – beginnig with what we call ‘writing for broadcast’ – the pretentious, overblown, bloviated TV talk of the 1950s.  Watching 60 MInutes again, and listening to the vastly over-written scripts it occurs to me that no one, no one talks like this.  It is speechmaking married to pictures.

Our own video grammar should reflect what the medium does best – tell stories in pictures and sound, in  an immediate and intimate way.

Then we can progress further by removing the ’stand up’. We don’t need a movie about what a reporter does for a living.

Video can be a remarkably powerful medium – as print became, once it was freed to find its own voice. This is what we can now do for video.