On Gore channel, the news will be where you find it
July 20, 2005
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Al Gore once won the popular vote for the presidency of the United States, but, you know, he didn't win-win. If fate had wrinkled its nose to the left, he could be tracking down terrorists at this very moment. Instead, he's starting up a TV news network that's associated with a Web site.
Not only that, but viewers -- yes, regular people -- will create a lot of the news segments and commercials for this TV network, named Current. Professional journalists will be on staff, but they're going to fall in the 18-to-34 age range, and they plan to tailor all their news to attract young viewers like them, not Grandpa Hatestaxes.
You might be thinking: That's gonna suck. You might be wrong. Think about it this way. The precursor to CNN was a satirical news program that played on an Atlanta TV station owned by Ted Turner in the 1970s. At the time, Turner was just a rich sailor who people called "The Mouth of the South." So you may want to reserve judgment.
Anyway, Gore is a major player, and there's a whole capitalistic infrastructure backing Current. It's in cahoots with Google. When it debuts Aug. 1, Current will reach 20 million people, or so Gore claimed on Monday in front of a gathering of quizzical TV critics.
Critics were given DVDs featuring stuff that will be shown on Current. Those segments look pretty good. There's a playful documentary-type thing that shows "jumpers" strapping on parachutes and diving off of cliffs and bridges. It's well-shot. It was created by an ordinary citizen who submitted it to Current.
There's also a snippet titled "HOOKING UP." In it, a young woman says, "I kind of regret now sleeping with Doug, especially now that he wants to end it. But I feel like since he's the one that wants to end this, it shouldn't stop me from hooking up with his friend now."
It seems a sure bet that conservative propagandists in the media will rip into Gore for helping to turn young, everyday citizens into titillating gatekeepers of the all-important news. I hope somebody asks these commentators which journalism schools they went to. Gore, by the way, started out as a newspaperman.
Current isn't all hotties and extreme athletes. Staffers and amateurs are putting together long segments on war victims who walk around on one leg, and suicidal people in Japan. When was the last time you turned on Fox News and saw a mini-documentary about Iranian kids who listen to loud music and get wasted at underground house parties?
The potential strength of Current's stories is they're long, colorful and different. They are narrative profiles, and they feel more real and less stilted than network news does.
The weird thing isn't Gore's participation as much as it is that viewers will vote on Google for the amateur-created stories they want to see on Current. It's finally easy for the news to be so populist. The Internet is a budding republic. And as Gore pointed out, any schmo with several hundred bucks can buy a digital camera and software to shoot and edit life stories.
The question some critics raised was logical: Aren't we, the vaunted journalists, supposed to tell regular people what news is, and not the other way around?
A gaggle of young journalists onstage with Gore said they can't stomach network news, because it doesn't feel genuine or connected to them. Gore added that network news has become focus-grouped to a fault.
He could have pointed out that news producers already live by overnight ratings, which are broken down minute-by-minute, and if viewers zone out for one minute during a piece on a foreign civil war, you can bet you won't see many foreign civil war stories on that show for a while.
So, you see, the news is already being led by the People, who harbor a regrettable taste for round-the-clock coverage of the latest runaway bride. What's the diff if young and amateur journalists stake out a small piece of real estate on TV?
I feel confident people at CNN, Fox and other traditional news holes will be watching them to steal story ideas, because it seems like they can barely think for themselves as it is.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.suntimes.com/output/elfman/cst-ftr-elf20.html