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.

When We Come Back….

Now this…

Usually, when we teach a class at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism you get a fairly wide range of students.

Yesterday, however, we got two students who were also on the faculty.

One of them, Barbara Raab, took a year’s sabbatical from her full-time job as Senior News Writer and Web Editor for NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

Now, NBC is a pretty progressive place to allow one of their Senior Writers on Nightly to take off for a year to teach at CUNY. But Raab took advantage of the space in her career to not only teach, but also to learn new skills – thus was she in our class.

We are great believers in get your hands on the tools and go. We have people shoot on their very first day and cut on their second. By the end of the second day, everyone in the class has shot and cut, scripted, tracked and produced a one-minute story.

All on their own.

As the VJ movement gains traction, many stations will be filling their ranks with 22 year olds who grew up with the technology.

That’s great, for the 22 year olds, but not so great for the viewers.

You can teach anyone the requisite skills to shoot and cut broadcast quality work in about a week. (Below you can see what Raab did on the very first day she ever touched a camera and a laptop edit.  It’s a little rough, but for first day, first time, not bad.  She will get better).

What you can’t teach is years of experience as a journalist.

The trick is to find the people with both the journalistic skills and experience, but also the desire to embrace a new way of working.

It’s a killer combination.  And it shows a pretty clear path to where the future lies.

Take a look at this. It’s a little raggedy, and it’s not exactly a breaking-news subject, but it also has many of the hallmarks of NBC Nightly News.  The potential is there.  And this is only after two days.

Pretty good.

Not yet good enough, but pretty good.

The G Spot

It’ s right down there….

We just got off the phone with the Minister for Information for a small but never-the-less important country.

We will be going there in a few weeks to start a project to make the country ‘video active’.

That is, we are going to train the ministry and others in other branches of government to be video literate, to be able to tell their own stories in video, shoot them, cut them and upload them and offer them to the world.

This country and its people and government will no longer be at the mercy of CNN or the BBC or anyone else.  They will be able to tell their own stories as they wish, when they want.

Since the creation of mass media, most of the world has lived in a state of Electronic Colonialism.

They have been the supplicants, ‘on bended knee’ before the greater powers of CNN or Fox News.

It was, after all, up to CNN as to when they sent the crew to, say, Bangla Desh.

And when would CNN decide to send a crew? Well, it would have to be a big enough story to warrant dispatching a crew and reporter half way around the world. A big story like, say, a war, or a famine or a monsoon flood.  Those would be big enough.

So for 50 years, the only time Bangla Desh got television coverage was during war, famine or flood.

So for the past 50 years everyone’s vision of Bangla Desh has been war, famine and flood.

This kind of global image carries a price.

Anyone here planning a vacation trip to Bangla Desh?

Anyone here care to invest in Bangla Desh?

Hands down… oops, there weren’t any.

This is the price of 50 years of electronic colonialism. We dispatched western journalists to countries where they did not speak the language, know the history, understand the culture or much of anything else.  Then they cobbled together as best they could their rather limited understanding of what was happening, and then broadcast this around the world.

In a world where only CNN or the BBC owned the bandwidth, the rest of the world had no choice but to ‘take it’, and live with the consequences.  Good stories about Bangla Desh (or anywhere else) simply never got any coverage.

But the world has changed.

There is a ring above the earth called the Clarke Ring, named for Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who first postulated satellite communications.

The Clarke Ring is the place directly above the equator where the orbit of a satellite and the earth’s orbit are in synch, all the time. The earth rotates at 17,000 mph, but so does the satellite. Hence, the satellite appears to hang in space, even though everything is really moving quite fast.

There are a limited number of these spaces, called G-Slots, for Geo Stationary Orbit.  And there is a great deal of debate about which countries should have these limited slots. Most of them have gone to the Americans and the Russians because they go there first.

It is, as you can imagine, very very expensive to place a satellite in a G-slot, even if there were one available, which there isn’t, at the moment.  So between the cost of crews, the cost of tranmission and the cost of the hardware, getting a global video image that was all their own was a bit out of the question for places like Bangla Desh.

But not anymore.

The internet, ironically, has blown away all those barriers to entry.

And taken with it the colonial power that western countries once had over information.

Which brings us to our new client.

A whole country.

And why not?

Let’s bypass the broadcaster entirely.