Gore's Vision for DIY Media
October 8, 2006
The US politician is breaking into British TV
By Paul Durman
“Guy walks into a school. Three dead, seven critically wounded — likely to die.
“Ooo — I wonder how it happened. I wonder what drove him to it. I wonder what pissed him off 20 years ago that made him so crazy.”
So begins a powerful video polemic, filmed last week by producer Allen McInnis, just hours after the shootings at an Amish school in Pennsylvania.
Lasting only three-and-a-half minutes, and shot with a hand-held camera as McInnis paces around a dimly lit, low-ceilinged house, the film is like nothing you see on conventional television. Over insistent thrash rock music playing in the background, McInnis makes his case.
“Who cares why he did it? Can we start to think about how he did it? Is the gun lobby that strong? “Explain to me why I am allowed to go and buy something that I can go kill people with, whenever I get round to it, whenever I feel like it, and somebody’s going to say that’s my right as a member of society. Isn’t anyone getting pissed off about this?” Welcome to Current TV, an American channel that uses the internet to attract submissions from young video-makers with a story to tell. Founded and chaired by former US vice-president Al Gore, Current has struck a deal with BSkyB that will bring a UK version of the channel to Sky viewers by next spring. (BSkyB is 38.3% owned by News Corporation, the ultimate parent company of the Sunday Times.)
Interviewed in London last week, Gore said: “My partner Joel Hyatt and I started Current TV almost five years ago with the idea of democratising television, by allowing individuals to join the conversation of democracy over the medium that is by far the most important.”
The former Democratic presidential candidate continued: “We have never felt that our mission was in any way partisan or ideological, but rather revolutionary in a larger sense — to open up this medium, so individuals can get back into conversation with whatever points of view they wish to bring to it.”
When Current launched in America in August last year, it was greeted with a wave of scepticism. The Wall Street Journal was particularly biting, describing the new channel’s output as “newsless, often clueless and usually dull”.
However, that was before traditional media had recognised, and started to understand, the huge popularity of YouTube, the video-sharing website that in 18 months has become one of the most visited destinations on the internet.
Many of the videos on YouTube are of poor quality and most are limited in their appeal. But that has not stopped it from attracting the tens of millions of users that make it the web’s 10th most popular site, according to information firm Alexa.
YouTube’s success has made it easier to appreciate that Current is also a pioneer of so-called user-generated content — a fascination for the media industry.
From one perspective, Current is like YouTube with better quality control. Through its website, Current gives advice and training on how to produce better documentaries. The film submissions it receives, known as pods, and usually between one and eight minutes long, are vetted in two ways. First, they are uploaded to the Current website and seen by other users, who vote on which should be given a “green light” for broadcast on television.
Current’s staff then make the final selection on what goes out on the channel, triggering a small payment (of $500 to $1,000) to those whose pods are selected.
Gore said: “YouTube is a very interesting and fun company. But there’s all the difference in the world between what they’re doing and what we’re doing. Our viewers are able to use the internet to review and help us select which of the programmes are the most fascinating to them. But then it’s displayed on televison proper by satellite and by cable.”
Gore added: “Ours is premium content. You don’t search though a million different videos to find a few that you might find interesting.”
The submission winning the most green lights last week came from Surfers against Sewage, a group from Cornwall seeking to clean up the ocean. Other popular pods included a documentary on the California Guitar Trio and a film about the new cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil, exploring concerns that America’s religious right will seek to ban its use for teenage girls.
Gore said there is another important difference between Current and YouTube: Current buys the rights to the material it broadcasts, thus nullifying the threat of litigation. Some YouTube’s users upload television and other footage which the company doesn’t own. “They are now beginning to encounter a lot of lawsuits,” said Gore.
Hyatt, Current’s chief executive, quipped: “YouTube is a phenomenon hoping to become a business; we are a business and expect to become a phenomenon.”
For James Murdoch, the chief executive of BSkyB, Current is “an extraordinary product” that addresses the fragmentation of the media universe. Twenty years ago, Britain had only four television channels; now there are more than 400 on Sky alone. This process has much, much further to go.
With the advent of the “viewer producer”, with his or her digital camcorder, broadband connection and camera phone, Murdoch envisages a world in which there are millions of amateur producers and “citizen journalists” producing “an ultimate diversity” of media choices.
Murdoch said: “What’s exciting about Current is that you are really creating, not so much a platform for sharing a lot of video, but a whole generation of semi-professional journalists and creative talents and storytellers, who are being trained for free by Current, and who are able to distribute their product online and then see it broadcast around the nation.”
Current TV will be part of the basic package of channels that is made available to all of Sky’s 8.2m subscribers. “We want to get it to as wide an audience as we can,” said Murdoch. In America, Current is now available in 30m homes, up from 17m at last year’s launch.
Current will establish a UK office, and recruit the editors and producers needed to create a domestic channel. Hyatt, originally a highly successful lawyer, said the firm would market the firm to encourage UK content creators to submit their work.
The first effects of this revolution that is turning consumers of content into producers have already been seen. The only pictures of last year’s bombings in London on July 7, and much of the coverage of the tsunami in southeast Asia, came from ordinary citizens rather than professional news organisations.
Hyatt said: “When journalists couldn’t get into New Orleans to find out what was happening in the first few hours and days after [Hurricane] Katrina, there were real citizens living through the experience who became citizen journalists and who took their video camera out on flat-bottom boats, rescuing people and submitting that footage to Current.
“Current was the only network in the United States, and indeed the world, that was actually present at the scene through the power of the format itself.”
Gore and Hyatt believe there will be deeper changes, as ordinary people ignore or break the conventions of professional journalism. “When you unleash the creativity of lots of people, thousands of people around the world, you inevitably get stories that would not otherwise be told,” said Hyatt.
He cited a recent example of “a young vanguard journalist” who allowed himself to undergo “waterboarding” — a form of torture that involves water being poured over the face and into the nose of the victim. The CIA allegedly used the technique against Al-Qaeda suspects who were involved in the September 11 plot.
“That’s a story that wouldn’t have come out of conventional journalism,” said Hyatt. “We broke it last week, and right now in the US everybody wants that story — NBC wants to use it, CNN wants to use it. They wouldn’t have done that story. It is just not how they approach the creation and construction of news.”
Murdoch said he expected Current to make a similar impact in the UK. “When you empower thousands and thousands of people to tell stories, I think you will see some surprising agenda-setting from a product like this. We are just excited to be a part of it.”
Source: The Sunday Times
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9071-2393528.html