Toward A New Architecture For Media

The experience of Current TV taught me two things:

• There were literally millions of people who were ready to contribute content of all kinds in video
• 99% of it was junk.

It was junk because no one had ever been taught how to make video.  It’s not their fault. When we went to school we were taught how to read and write – not with the idea that we would all have careers as novelists, but with the idea that the skill of reading and writing was essential to being able to function in a print based culture.

Literacy was not always a requirement of survival or success.

Charlemagne, perhaps one of the greatest kings in pre-Gutenberg Europe was functionally illiterate. This in fact was not all that unusual.

The rise of the printing press meant that literacy was now a requirement not just for Kings, but for everyone.

The idea of giving out video cameras to millions of people without training them and expecting to get great results is about the same as the idea of giving out millions of pencils to European peasants in 1452 and expecting them to start cranking out great novels.

It wasn’t going to happen.

So why would we have ever thought that to make great video content all you had to do was pick up a video camera, point it at a cat in a tree and hit the record button.

Current showed me that this was not the case. The will was there, but not the focus.

With Current TV and The Travel Channel Academy, we had tapped into a vast reservoir of potential talent.  And these two projects really only scratch the surface.  We have since launched The Guardian Media Academy, with The Guardian in the UK;  WEtv Film Academy in the US and there are more on the way. And even this, we think, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The reason behind this involves not just training people, which is valid in itself, but rather a complete reversal in the way that media and video in particular flow.

The way we have designed the media in America and the rest of the world so far is not the result of any grand design.  It is simply the result of what the technology was when that media was first unleashed.

In the case of newspapers, presses and ink and paper and distribution were very expensive.  So expensive that HL Mencken once joked, ‘freedom of the press is reserved for those who own a press’. And the number of people who could afford a press were few and far between. So few and far between that they were called Press Barons. And they were rich and powerful.

When Orson Welles produced his masterpiece, Citizen Kane, he made Charles Foster Kane a press baron – master of the universe for the 1930s. Charles Foster Kane or the Hearst family or the Sulzbergers in New York or the Meyers in Washington or the Northcliffes in the UK were indeed in total control of the world’s media.

And that control was maintained by the sheer cost of the infrastrcture of a newspaper.  You have to not only own the presses, you have to cut down the trees, buy the ink, employ the reporters, build the buildings, print the papers and then physically deliver them to every household in the country. Difficult? Next to impossible. You can’t start one in your garage.

When radio and later TV appeared, the model as very much the same. The limitations on the electromagnetic spectrum meant that there would only be a very few TV stations or radio stations. And the cost of putting up a transmitter to push sound or pictures and sound through the air was staggering.

So newspapers, radio and TV all were based on the same basic principle of constraint – it was an expensive business to get into.

As a result, the architecture of those businesses became one in the same: A small core of people provided a very refined and polished product in limited amounts to everyone – all at the same time.

Never have so few done so much for so many, Churchill might have said. And it was true – the content of the paper, the radio and the TV were indeed provided by the very few for the very many.

We might visualize the distributive mechanism of these media as a pyramid, with the owners and content creators at the top and everyone else on the bottom, receiving what they made:

This model worked quite well so long as the means of making and distributing the content remained expensive and difficult to do.

When the web came along, the basic technology upon which all media had been based changed fundamentally. Suddenly, anyone was able to get access to everyone on the planet for free, all the time.  This in itself was a pretty remarkable change in what had been the founding principle of media – distribution costs, which were now none.

But an even  more astonishing shift took place in the ability to create content. Now, with a laptop, anyone could become a blogger, and later with cheap video editing software, a video producer as well.

The conventional media companies proved unable to adjust to this new shift wrought by a new technology. Like Bell Telephone, and so many others before and since, they preferred to stick with their old architecture and simply plug it into the web with the hopes that nothing else would change.

This was a lost cause before it got started.

As a result, those businesses began to see their old business models, models that had served them so well for decades (or more, in the case of newspapers) disappear before their eyes.

At the same time, businesses that were pure children of the web; businesses that could not have existed before the web, had organically found an architecture that worked quite well for them, but was the complete reverse of the traditional media model.

In the new architecture, unlimited content, mostly provided by the users themselves, sought out unlimited users globally.  This is the model that eBay uses, and Amazon.com and Google. Everything in the world being offered all the time.  Everyone in the world gaining access.  The company placed itself at the nexus of this transaction.

This model works quite well for almost every successful web entity once you start to look at them.  Amazon – all the books in the world being offered, all the people who want to buy books coming to see whats available. eBay – all the stuff in the world being offered; all the people who might want to buy that stuff coming to see what’s offered. Jdate.com: all the people looking for dates meet all the people looking for dates. Even Google – all the information in the world being offered meets all the people looking for that information, all the time.

What the web creates here is a marketplace. A marketplace for books, a marketplace for dates. A marketplace for grilled cheese with the face of Jesus.

Why then not a marketplace for news, or media?

Instead of The New York Times of NBC News deciding what people ‘need’, or minions of marketing people parsing Nielsen ratings to try and divine what the ‘viewers want to see’, the eBay model allows people to make rational choices all the time, with respect to news, programming or anything else.

Why not fill the top box with all news, or all the media you can find and then fill the bottom box with all the people who are in search of news or media.

One would think that this is the most obvious of moves to make for NBC or The New York Times. But they can’t bring themselves to do it. They can’t bring themselves to do it for a number of reasons – any of which will ultimately prove their demise.

First, they have always lived in a world in which an elite group of executives have made the ‘important decisions’ for what people will get to see.

In the world of eBay, there are no executives who make those decisions. No one at eBay makes the decision that on Monday at 9AM we’re going to offer old radios and at 10AM we’re going to offer used Barbie dolls. This would be inherently insane –and in fact destroy what makes eBay or Amazon work.

But in newspapers and TV this is the very core of the business.  The first step for NBC or The New York Times in moving in this direction would then be to fire all their Executive Producers and Managing Editors. (Don’t hold your breath).

More significantly, the old media would have to let go of ‘control’ of the content. This also is not going to happen.

They would have to learn to ‘trust the people’ to produce the content.

Unlikely.

Here we are dealing with the priesthood of media. ‘Professional journalists’ who have spent their lives travelling to countries where they don’t speak the language, don’t know the history, don’t know the culture and are fundamentally outsiders – pontificating to the rest of us on ‘the truth’.

This clearly does not work (just look at anything from Vietnam to Iraq), but it is all they know how to do.

This arrogance married to ignorance has been a sure recipe for disaster, except that up until now there was no alternative.