Once hidden under the bed.. now a click away for free
A long time ago (before I married Lisa!), I had a meeting with Nick Guccione, the son of Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse Magazine.
For those of you younger than 45 or so, Penthouse was once the top competitor to Playboy.
Playboy was a magazine that published photos of nude women (and some great articles, which is the only reason I read it).
A magazine was a kind of print version of a website, on paper, that came out once a month. And you paid for it.
OK.
Nick had been given the job, by his father, of setting up a Penthouse website.
This was in the very early days of the Internet.
But Nick had a problem
“No matter what I put on the website, you can get better for free on the web”, he said.
“How can I make any money out of this?”
Alas, Penthouse Video Academy did not appeal to him. Too bad. I did have some interesting meetings at the Penthouse offices, however.
In any event…. (I said it was a long time ago).
In any event, what the Interent had done to pornography was, in effect, to destroy the ‘value’ of the product by flooding the marketplace with free content.
Admittedly, the content ran a range from excellent (so I am told) to pure garbage.
But it was all free, and there in almost incomprehensible numbers.
Now we come to journalism and online video (at last).
I got an email this week from Daniel Reimold, a journalism professor at The University of Tampa, in Florida.
Professor Reimold is writing a book about Videojournalism and asked my advice for students about to enter the working world of online video (news, in this case).
Nick Guccione, who grew up in the print world, could not believe what the web was doing to the ‘value’ of the content.
What we are seeing in the world of online journalism is no different.
Contributors to sites like Huffington Post are willingly contributing their content for free.
And the site is free.
Google news is free.
Hundreds of millions of bloggers contribute ‘free’ content, news or otherwise, to the ever growing content of the web daily, adding to the plethora of freely available information.
Who in their right mind today would buy a bound copy of Encyclopedia Britannica?
The quality of a video piece (or a written piece) is not at all diminished by this flood of content, and neither is its importance, but it’s perceived value certainly is.
So to the students at Tampa, I have this piece of advice:
become online video entrepreneurs.
become online journalism entrepreneurs.
As the conventional applecart of journalism is overturned, there are a lot of apples to be picked up off the floor.
The deck is being reshuffed.
Opportunities abound.
But they aren’t where they used to be.
So stop surfing those adults only sites and get to work.
It’s a competitive world and the clock is ticking.
