If you’re CNN, should you pay camera operators $55,000 a year (with benefits, make it about $80K), or should you encourage the crowd to become part of the I-Report team? Can’t my editors and my “house” staff make up for the shaky cameraphone videos because of the INSTANT feel of being there? What if I fired 30 percent of my field camera team? I could replace them with 3 or 4 editors and someone to field all the cameraphone videos I received. Right?
I’m concerned that lots of us are hunting on the wrong end of the value proposition by confusing HOW to make media with WHAT to do with it.
The Value Chain
With all respect to professional camera crew (of which, I count this guy a friend), sometimes you need a pro, and other times, you need the shot. Look at some of the most famous footage in the WORLD: Rodney King’s beating, JFK’s assassination, Saddam’s hanging. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t pro; it mattered that we were THERE, that we SAW. Wired talked about the value chain shift in their The Rise of Crowdsourcing article.
To that end, where’s the value? The value goes upstream to the editing, to the assembling of cohesive pieces, to the “home” team that puts together the news and distributes it out. The value goes in the relationships that professional journalists have built with their typical constituents so that they can preserve the professional conversations, the dance. (Nothing wrong with that dance. It’s how we currently have access to some of our news).
So if cost goes down on producing media, what are all us schmucks who videoblog going to do to create larger value?
The New Storytellers
Story, be it news or entertainment, is still the key. A bunch of choppy video is never just thrown up there. We put story around it. We tell the context. We build by connecting it to other things. Storytelling, not story-shooting, will be the key to the value. It’s how you say it, how you package it, how fast you get it to the world, how you share it, and how inclusive you make your product.
Go after the stories, not the cameras. Turn your audience into community, not numbers for an ad revenue deal. Empower your community to build your story, not watch.
Game Theory
There’s a reason the videogame industry is chewing deeply into other entertainment spending. It’s because people drive videogames. It’s a lean-forward experience, where you are the hero, and you are the story in motion. That’s not the camera operator. It’s the storyteller in action.
Want even more inclusion? Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and XBOX Live and all these new contenders are breaking open the experience for collaborative storytelling on a scale that just keeps growing in complexity and with a greater return-on-time-and-value than most any other experience.
Don’t Defend, Consider and Plan
Don’t reply with how your show is different, or how your show is inclusive. Instead, consider what you’re going to do in a year, where there’s a thousand Justin.tv shows, five hundred tech news video shows, 1,000 “all about me” videoblogs. How will you draw a relevant community to your message, and how will you be compensated for what you’re doing?
We’re in the Blue Shirt new media revolution, where the difference between the top videoblogs and podcasts and a Best Buy employee are the fact we’re trying something new and the Best Buy employee is making money for what he does.
How will you bring your passion for media to the next level? AND if you’re not someone with a media product (blog, Internet TV show, podcast, whatever), what do YOU need as an audience to stop watching Sopranos and Heroes and American Idol and start watching more Scriggity and Galacticast? What do you want out of your new media?
