A Most Demanding Job!

Let’s put the studio… here…

OK,

Sometimes in this profession there are jobs that you just have to do, no matter how much you want to resist.

Like this one.

We are currently in St. Kitts and Nevis, where we have been hired as media consultants to the government.

I know.

It’s tough.

But you gotta do what you gotta do.

And actually it is fairly interesting.

The government here wants to improve the ‘video literacy’ of the various ministries, as well as the Ministry of Information.  I mean, why not? Smal cameras, laptop edits, flip cams, online video, digital storage and retrieval. It all makes sense.  Move to replace paper with video for press relesases and inter-departmental communications.

Now, I know that the 85 degree temperatures, the azure blue waters, the gentle Carib breezes, the conch stew…..OK.  It’s tough.  But ironically, it’s also a kind of dress rehearsal.  Next month we have been invited to DC to present a very similar concept to the Obama administration.

Well, maybe the fact that he grew up in Hawaii, a similar island, lends to a similar kind of thinking.

One can only hope.

Meanwhile, speaking for myself and my new client, you must come down here as soon as possible.

It is paradise on earth.

(even for us working stiffs).

Busted!

Jay Russell used to be a South Carolina State Trooper.

Then he took the Travel Channel Academy video course, and it changed his life.

Now, we’re pitching him as a series for cable.

He’s Supernanny…. for kids on drugs.

It’s something he’s done all this life.

Does this remind you of “In The Heat Of The Night”.

When Jay was a State Trooper, he was the kind of guy who made you crap in your pants when he pulled you over.

Now, we’re betting he can pull in a big audience on cable.

Back To You, Joe

Ace VJ Joe Little

Well, naturally, the day after I post on TVspy that one of the prime differentiators between VJ and OMB is that we don’t do stand-ups, KGTV/10 VJ Joe Little sends me a link to a Youtube posting that proves me wrong.

OK.

For the most part, I don’t like stand-ups. For Joe, I am willing to make an exception.

The Hamas Show

Is the caller there?

The juxtaposition of two seemingly very disparate articles in the newspaper this morning provide a window into where the whole TV news business is headed.

First, there is a massive controversy building in the UK today over The BBC’s refusal to air a charity appeal to help the stricken people of Gaza.

The Corporation’s Director General was on BBC radio this morning (which we can get via the web), to defend his rather isolate position.  ITV and Channel4 are both carrying the appeal progrm, which is being produced jointly by 13 British charities.  The BBC feels that carrying the show will taint their ability to cover news in the region objectively.

It’s a difficult position for the BBC’s DG Mark Thompson to take, but an understandable one.  The charity appeal will doubtless contain endless heart rending scenes of children maimed for life by the Israeli incursion.  The Guardian itself carries such a heart-rending article on pages 8-9 titles ‘Among Gaza’s Craters Lie Those Who Need That Aid”.

Objective? Well, that’s certainlyl arguable.

Shocking, riveting and revolting, absolutely.  Gaza is a terrible place, particularly now.

The curious juxtaposition is an article in The New York Times today, explaining that Obama is going to circumvent conventional news outlets and TV networks to use video to go directly to the people.  Instead of the traditional weekly radio broadcast, used by US Presidents since Roosevelt, Obama is going to blog and upload his videos to Youtube, as well as whitehouse.gov.

His first vlog apparently was seen by more than 1 million people, which I will venture to guess is a far greater number than those who have heard Bush on his weekly radio broadcasts.

There are also now close to 250,000 people following Obama on Twitter!

What does Obama on Twitter and Youtube have to do with Gaza?

OK

The reason that The BBC, (and now SKY also, apparently, as of a few minutes ago) will not carry the Gaza Charity Appeal is that the images are just too disturbing. They will be a PR disaster for the Israelis, no matter how much the broadcast is couched in ‘charity’ clothing; no matter how valid that couching.

Obama has decided that he can now bypass the traditional media and use video and the web to go directly to the people.

Which he can.

And if Obama can bypass the traditional media, then so too can Hamas.

Or anyone else.

If the images from Gaza are so powerful that The BBC is afraid to show them, then good.

All the more reason that Hamas can and should bypass conventional media.

They have a powerful story to deliver, but they don’t need The BBC or Sky or CNN or anyone else to get it out to the world.

This is a sea-change in the relationship between subjects of stories and the old media.

For more than 20 years, to use Gaza as an example, the living conditions in Gaza have been just apalling. Terrible. Criminal.

Yet there has been virtually  no media coverage what day to day life is like in Gaza.

And having this terrible life inflicted on the inhabitants of Gaza makes them angry.  Very angry. So they strap explosives onto themselves and walk into Israeli cafes, or they lob rockets into Israel.

They don’t do this because they want to destroy Israelis cafes, nor do they do this because they believe that their rockets will bring Israel to its knees.

They don’t.

And they won’t.

But they do know that enough suicide bombers or lobbed rockets will bring in the crew from CNN or The BBC to do a news story.

They are ‘making’ the news.

But now, if they are smart, (and I have no indication that they are), Hamas can bypass the rockets and the suicide bombers and CNN and use video as a tool to make their case to the world. Directly.

Just like President Obama.

Gandhi didn’t organzie nonviolent resistance in India to protest the salt tax per se. He did it because he knew that the British police would beat the unarmed Indian protestors, and that the public knowledge of that unarmed beating would, in the end, shame the British into leaving.

Hamas, if they are smart (and again, I don’t think they are), could use video to shame the Israelis publicly.  But they won’t, even though Israel, like Britain, is a nation that is uniquely vulnerable to public shame.

Mao used to say that power flowed from the end of a rifle.

Today it flows from the end of a video camera.

If you know how to use it.

Obsolesence

Hello?

When I was 5 years old we had a phone like the one pictured above.

Like everyone else, we didn’t own it, we leased it from Bell Telephone.

By the time I left home at 18 to go to college, it was still the same phone.

And it worked in the same way.

Last month, I went down to the ATT store in chinatown (the best in NY), and traded in my old

Blackberry Edge 8800 for the new Blackberry Bold.

I opted against the Blackberry Storm, but I am still torn between Blackberry and the iPhone. Maybe I will trade in the Bold for the iPhone. I am not sure.

Now, there was nothing wrong with my Blackberry Edge. It is not as though the trackball fell off, or a few keys fell out (as often happens in my dreams).  No. I just felt it was time for an ‘upgrade’.

The 8800, of course, replaced a Treo 800, which in its course had replaced a Treo 750 which had replaced a Treo 650.  Prior to the Treo there had been a run of Nokias. And before those, in the dark realm of history, had been a run of those Motorola flip phones. God only knows what I did before that, but I have a vague recollection of a pager… but one you could text on.

This is the run of our technology today.

Faster and faster replacements.

I am writing this on the new Mac Book made out of one block of aluminum, so they tell me. That replaced a black mac book which was made out of something else, and that replaced a silver mac book, which replaced a titanium mac book, and so on, all the way back to that orange thing that was made out of plastic, which replaced the Sony which replaced the IBM, which leads all the way back to the TRS 100 I still have in my closet because it is the only computer that runs on D batteries, if you can find them, and who knows what could happen in the event of a global disaster.

Does this make sense?

Like the phones, the upgrades on the laptops keep coming faster and faster and faster.

This is all, I think, a function of Moore’s Law, which says that microprocessor speeds will double and costs halve every 18 months. This has held true since 1965 apparently, and seems to have no intention of going away. And as each doubling of so large a number results in so much larger a number – faster chips for half the price, the technologies that get swept into this continual recasting get larger and more complex.

HD cameras that sit int he palm of your hand and cost a pittance. Drives that hold terraflops and cost less than a donut.  Phones that do everything from email to video to GPS. In fact, I hardly ever use my phone for an honest to God phone call anymore.

We are riding a hockey stick of technology.

That is, we are in the sharp upward curve of transformation vs. time.  Faster and faster, steeper and steeper.

Where does it end?

Do we reach a point where the continual acceleration of technological change and the endless need to upgrade and replace no longer makes any sense?

Do we achieve a point where the day after I have bought the blackberry Bold there is a new blackberry released which obviates my old one?

And does it really obviate it?

I mean, the Treo, the Nokia, the Motorola… all of them still worked just fine.

And they still do.

If I could find the right charger to go with the right phone. I saved all those as well. You never know.

It is not as though the Treo stopped working.

And the Bold seems to work just fine.

And did I really need an iMac cast out one piece of aluminum?

Sometimes I feel like going back to the old dial up phone and just living with that for a while.

Except of course, I hardly ever call anyone any more.

All I do now is text.

Outside The Box

Do you have CNN?

Henri IV, King of France was one of the seminal figures in French history.

Born in 1553 and a Protestant Huguenot, he became King of France in 1589 and founded the Bourbon Dynasty.

Henri is perhaps best known for his famous quote “Paris is worth a Mass” for his conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism upon his coronation.

What he is also perhaps less well known for is his illiteracy.

Though King of France and a very accomplished and powerful and successful ruler, Henri was functionally illiterate.

This was nothing unusual in 1589.  Many rich and powerful people in government were illiterate. If they needed documents written or letters read to them or drafted, they simply dicated and an army of clerics and scribes were always on hand to do the ‘technical’ stuff, like writing.

In fact, it was more the exception rather than the rule that anyone, even the richest and most powerful, would be anything other than.

Today, Barack Obama argues for the right to keep his blackberry. We don’t find it at all strange that his predecessors were most likely computer illiterate.  Clinton, in fact, famously sent only two emails during his entire 8 years in office, and one of them was to test the email system.

Now we are embarking on the world of video literacy.

I have no doubt that in the not too distant future, (for things happen far more quickly these days), people of another generation will be equally astonished that famous television journalists like Katie Couric were, effectively, video illiterate. That they hired professional ’scribes’ to craft any video statements or pronouncements that they wanted to make, and that this was considered completely normal.

Next week we will make our first visit to a rather small but pleasant country that his hired us, not to make TV shows or even to do anything related to the news or television at all, but rather to make their entire government ‘video literate’.  Every ministry, every minister.

We think its a good idea.

In February, we will be going to Washington, invited to present the same concept to the new Obama administration.

We also think that this is a good idea.

Video is not TV anymore.

It’s a tool of basic communication of ideas.

It’s thinking outside the box.

Literally.

My Own TV Show

Off for a year …..

David Besemer was a student at the Travel Channel Academy in Santa Barbara last year.

He produced one of the better videos, a profile of a small marina ferry and its captain.

I had no idea when he took the course that it was a dry run, so to speak, for an around the world cruise on his own boat with this wife and daughter.

They left last week.

They took rations, life jackets, epirb and a  video camera and laptop.

It’s the digital age.

Now they are going to document their extraordinary trip with their own website. Complete with interactive maps and video updates.  A true online at sea family adventure.

Nice.

I am a great sailor and I have sailed all my life.

The notion of yachting itself is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Sailing across the oceans (or indeed across a bay for ‘fun’) was completely unknown until the very late 19th Century. Even in the early 20th Century, yachting was for the very very rich or the very very brave.

The first ‘yachtsman’ was Joshua Slocum, who started life as a sea captain and in 1895 set off on the world’s first circumnavigation by a yachtsman in his boat Spray.

This is little more than 100 years ago.

How times have changed.  Slocum’s life was always in danger.  It was hard, perilous work, with absolutely no certainty of success.

Three years later, Slocum returned to Newport, Rhode Island and a year after that published his book Sailing Alone Around the World.

Slocum’s achievement was considered so extraordinary that in 1900 he was invited to the Pan-American exhibition to speak alongside Mark Twain.  He became an American hero, along the lines of Charles Lindberg.

Today, technology has made circumnavigation as whole lot safer and more reliable.  It can still be pretty scary to be 1,000 miles offshore in bad weather, but at least you will know where you are, and you can be in constant contact with the rest of the world.

But now, we don’t have to wait years for the book to be written and published. We can follow the adventure in real time. And in video.

By What Right

What does it mean?

New technologies not only obviate old jobs and careers, they also challenge and often undermine old laws.

Like copyright.

When we run our video training bootcamps, we devote an enormous amount of time to rights and releases.  And, over the years, the constraints on rights and releases have become ever tighter, reflecting more than anything else, our litigious society.

Of course, the need for releases and the requirements vary from network to network, but at hear they are all the same. Secure the signed release of the participant, or the creator of the content.

In more and more cases, the release of created content can also carry a hefty fee for use.

The classic, of course, is “Happy Birthday”, which is owned by the Time/Warner Company.

The song was originally composed in 1893 by sisters Mildred and Patty Hill. They were kindergarten teachers.  The song first appeared in print in 1912.  In 1990, the rights to the song were purchased by Warner Chapel, a division of Time/Warner for $15 million and through many long and extensive ligitations, Time/Warner has established that they believe that their copyright will expire in 2030.

This is why in movies, when it is someone’s birthday, everyone sings “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow”, which is out of copyright.

If you ‘google’ Happy Birthday Rights, by the way, you get a breathtaking 11 million hits.

Copyright law was written as a reflection of an analog era, in which copying was limited by the technology itself.  You might make a copy of your favorite record on a casette, but try making a copy of the copy, and like photocopies, each one is inferior to the one before. There were built in limits to transfer of intellectual property.

But in the era of digital information, and as digitial information came to encompass text, then music and now video and just about anything else, copies are as simple as pushing a button. And so it global transmission, on Youtube.

Hence, technology and law are at a crossroads.

I have just read a fascinating book on this subject, called Remix, by Prof. Lawrence Lessig.

Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society, so let me direct you to his book, which is filled with fascinating ideas and stories.

One idea that struck me, however, was footnotes.

One of the overriding principles that we repeat all the time is that with digitialization, video has come to resemble text more and more. It is about a simple to produce, about as simple to edit and about as simple to upload and transmit.  We are becoming increasingly a video driven culture, and as more and more people get their hands on cameras and edits, video is going to migrate more and more deeply into our culture as the lingua franca of our society.

If that is the case, then perhaps we should treat ‘rights’ to video the way we treat rights to text.

That is, footnote.

If every person who was writing a book or an article or even a term paper was required to find the author of a work they were quoting, and get their personal and signed permission to use that quote (and perhaps even pay them for it), our entire culture (certainly any literary aspect of that culture) would have ground to a halt several hundred years ago.  Text and books would have been strangled in the crib.

But that strangulation is exactly what copyright and releases are doing to our nascent video culture.  Strangling it.

Instead of building on the work that others have done and expanding upon it, (which is the basis of most serious writing), each creative person is expected to start from scratch each time.

This is not how creative work happens. This is not how academic work happens.  This is now how thinking happens.

In text we accept footnoting as enough. We give credit where credit is due to the original creator -but we don’t need written permission and we certainly don’t pay to use their work.

I think the reason behind this is probably that text cost so little to produce, (not taking into account the intellectual value of the content), but simply the work of sitting down and writing.  It would have been almost unthinkable to charge for the ‘reuse’ of that content, something we do in video without thinking twice.

But as the nature of video changes, as all it takes to make video is take out the camera and the laptop, perhaps video rights should come to reflect text rights. It doesn’t mean that original creators can’t make a profit.  David Halberstam, an often quoted writer, made a very nice living.  But when someone else quotes from his books, they don’t have to do into 6-month contractual negotiations with his lawyer to quote a paragraph. They just footnote.

Perhaps we should begin to think about video footnotes as well.

Just to give credit where credit is due.

Or, if you don’t agree. Well, be sure to send in a check to Time/Warner next time you sing Happy Birthday to your wife and post it on Youtube.

When More is Less

On course to wreck the Spanish economy

In 1530, Francisco Pizarro, the illegitimate son of a Spanish Colonel crossed the Atlantic with a small force of just 180 men.

Two years later, he would overthrow the 500 year old Inca Empire, and rule a population in the millions.

How he did it is the subject of another discussion. This one is about what happened after that.

Pizarro had come to The New World, like Columbus, shamelessly seeking gold. What he found was silver.  More silver than he, or anyone else, could possibly have imagined even existed on earth.  In Upper Peru, at a place called Cerro Rico, he found what was literally a mountain of silver. One of the richest veins of exposed silver on the planet.

The Spanish set to work mining their find, using and killing locals and ultimately importing African slaves for the labor.  They built a city, Potosi there, which at its height had a population of 200,000 people, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

When they were done, they transported more than 45,000 tons of pure silver back to Spain.

The Spanish at first thought that they had struck it rich, really rich.  Silver and gold were the measures of wealth, and now silver by the ton was arriving in Seville every week.  It was as though they had won the biggest lottery in the world. And in the beginning, they had.

But as the years wore on, and as the silver supply continued to pour into Spain, the Spanish economy suffered a hitherto entirely unknown phenomenon.  Inflation.

As silver became more and more available, the value of an individual piece of silver began to deteriorate.  It was just less rare, and so of lesser value, because worth and value are to a great extent psychological.  What is the pure value of silver?  Any more than lead? Or brass?  Not really.  What is the value of a diamond?  It is just a stone. But because of rarity, and a kind of mutually agreed value, it has worth. But make it more common and the perceived value drops quickly.

The ironic result of the greatest silver mining adventure in the world was that it pretty much destroyed the Spanish economy – something no one at the time could have conceived of as possible.

All of which brings us to TV news.

In the 1950s and 1960s, television news was difficult to produce.

There were only 3 networks.  With limited air time. And shooting and editing and getting film from Europe or even Washington on the same day was an extremely difficult process.

So TV News was a rare item.

There was not a lot of it.  Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley and whomever ABC had at the moment.

And as a result, TV news had a very high perceived value.

The nation stopped at 7PM when the Nightly News came on.

When Walter Cronkite said he had turned against the War in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson said he knew he had lost the nation.

The value was not so much in the ‘quality’ of the news, but rather in its rarity, hence it’s pcrceived value. Like a diamond or silver, that which is rare is valued.

The advent of cable news, all news, all the time, 24-hours a day, began the process of devaluing the perceived value ofnews.  Now, suddenly, one did not have to wait until 7PM to see the news. One could see it at any time.  It was always there.  So the value of the news began to be debased. Not the quality, per se, but rather the perceived value.

So cable news began to pump the perception. “Breaking news” flashed across the screen with greater and greater frequency. And each time they did that, they also debased the value or the perceived quality of ‘breaking news’.  “This just in” became a punch line, in a kind of national joke.

And now comes video on the web, and a billion people around the world with cameras or blogs or vlogs and citizen journalists.

We are an information culture. We perceive value in being informed.

For us, to a great extent, information is what silver was to the Spanish.  A rare item of great value.

But when we pump our society full of information, all news all the time, we do to our information society what the Spanish did to their silver society – we flood it with the commodity that we consider the most valuable based on its rarity, and in so doing, we change the fundamental equation. We debase the currency itself.

Today, the three television network news shows get fewer viewers on any given night than Walter Cronkite got alone in the 1960s.  And the population is one-third greater.

It is all breaking news all the time, and so it has less perceived value.

It is not a question of ‘quality’, any more than the collapse of the Spanish ‘piece of eight’ or the German Thaler (hence dollar) was based on the quality of the coinage, though there were those who argued this point.  It was that that which is common has lesser perceived value.

Small cameras, the web and cable are our own personal Peru.  They flood our market with ‘news and information’.  There is no turning this off. There is no going back to the days of the rarity of news.

Instead we must decouple our information economy from the flood of content just as western Europe learned, over time, to decouple their economies from silver and gold.

This will not be easy to do, and it will not happen overnight or without a great deal of blood on the floor, or without the fall of a media empire or two.

See It Now

The google for the 21st Century?

If you want to know where the tech world is going, just ask a 9-year old.

The New York Times ran a fascinating article this morning about how 9-year olds, (and others) are starting to use Youtube as a search engine, even more than Google.

More than the tastes of 9-year olds, this reflects a fascinating transition of video and its place in our culture.

For most of us, we tend to think of video as primarily an instrument of entertainment, whether it’s movies or reality shows of music videos.  As a tangential application, we have always had TV News, but this has generally been little more than videoized radio – an anchor sitting at a desk reading copy with illustrative pictures behind.  Even the much vaunted 60-Minutes is often not much more than one extensive interview interspersed with b-roll.

Now, however, as very cheap and easy to use cameras and edits proliferate, a whole new use of video is beginning to emerge.  And it has little to do with entertainment (or television for that matter). It is increasingly about instruction and delivering useful information.  But instead of that information being delivered in text, it is now coming in video.

For a culture that reads less and less, and has spent the bulk of its life watching TV (on average, 4.2 hours a day, every day), it is understandable that video is the preferred medium of transmission of information. Easier to access, easier to absorb, easier to understand.

Until cameras and edits became cheap and easy to use, we were stuck with print, but that relationship has now become unhinged.

As The Times itself points out:

You can now find an online video on virtually any topic. Web videos teach how to grout a tub, offer reviews of the latest touch-screen phones and give you a feel for walking across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

The consumption of video has followed a similar trajectory. In November, 146 million Americans watched videos online, streaming a total of 12.6 billion video clips, or nearly double the number they streamed just 20 months ago.

This is a trend that is likely now only to continue. In fact, I think we are only at the beginning of the videoization of America.

As video migrates to cell phones, we can expect vmail to replace email, and short videos to become the new powerpoint.

Text is going to go the way of carving on stone, (once a pretty popular medium in its own right, but also extremely complex and expensive).

Where does it end? This, no one knows. But I can tell you where it begins – in each person becoming video literate.  That’s the first how-to video that will gain massive traction.