Should CNN Pay it’s iReporters?

The major news suppliers have been making a lot of noise lately about how “people” should pay more for the news that they are supplying.  They argue that news is expense to report and if the “people” don’t pay for it than the “people” will simply now longer have any news.

That’s absurd, of course, but that hasn’t stopped the AP from threatening bloggers kind enough to link to their content or stopped a possibly illegal meeting of newspaper execs colluding over erecting paywalls.

Now comes the official uprising of the citizen journalist in Iran and one really has to begin to wonder just how much longer the traditional news model can last.  According to Beet.TV:

CNN’s iReport has been getting many uploads about the Iran crisis, about 4600 over the past week, including 1600 last weekend alone. While these user-generated videos go up on the site without filtering, CNN producers vet these videos for use on the air and on CNN.com

The network has pulled 150 user generated clips from iReport, we have been told by a CNN spokesperson.    LINK

That’s right, CNN is using over 150 clips of reporting they did not create OR pay anything to broadcast.  Yes, people voluntarily sent in their clips and I am sure they clicked on a box giving CNN the rights to do anything they wanted with that footage without providing any compensation but one has to wonder how much longer that concept will work.

There seems to be a great opportunity for a savvy team to start a competing citizen news web site that pays its “iReporters” for exclusive rights to their content.  CNN might currently have a bigger audience but we all know the potential audience online is impossible to rival.

If anyone is interested in joining forces to start just such a competing site, drop me a line.  Together we can take down CNN/FOX/MSNBC!

Ashton Hits 1,000,000 Twitter Followers. So, What?

This has clearly been Twitter’s biggest week ever. First Ashton Kutcher, one of the first celebs to take Twitter seriously, challenged CNN to a race to 1,000,000 followers and won.  Then, today, he joined Ev Williams (founder of Twitter) on Oprah, where the big O herself sent her first tweet (in unfortunate Kanye West-style all-caps).

There are plenty of notions to draw out of the rise of Twitter.  It’s still far too soon to know whether this is a massive boom/bust fad or something that is here to stay but I found Pete Cashmore’s comment on Mashable to be the most intriguing:

For now, Twitter needs mainstream media more than mainstream media needs Twitter. But Ashton has an audience of 1 million at his fingertips: how much longer will the talent need its mainstream middleman?

I’ve been wondering along these lines for a while, really pre-Twitter.  With the internet, the doors of distribution have been thrown wide and anyone with a connection can, in theory, reach a worldwide audience via words, sound and video.  Why does someone like Ashton Kutcher really need NBC or Time Warner Cable when they can reach their fans directly and deliver to them solid content?

LINK

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Ask.com TV Ad Crawls… What Took So Long

AdAge is reporting on a new advertising effort from search engine also-ran Ask.com:

In an effort certain to raise eyebrows, search engine Ask.com just started an ad campaign that relies mostly on “crawls” that show up in the lower part of the screen during selected cable programs. While the marketer will still run traditional commercials, it also hopes to capture attention by posing questions to viewers at the bottom of the screen about the very subject matter they are watching at the moment. To get the answer, those watching will need to surf to the company’s search site.

Considering that two of the more popular TV networks, ESPN and CNN, have had crawls forever, I am surprised that we haven’t seen much more of this type of advertising.  In the face of ad-skipping technology it makes perfect sense to embed the ad right into the programming.  The question will be whether or not it turns off viewers but I am willing to bet that it will not.  Viewers intrinsically get that someone has to pay for the programming and if it isn’t going to be them via subscription then it has to be advertisers and if we’re going to skip over traditional ads we will have to put up with an alternative.

Truth is, these ads don’t seem to be all that intrusive and no more distracting than a news or sports crawl.

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Mumbai Madness Captured By Digital Citizens While CNN Was Blocked

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Like many others, my Thanksgiving joys were tempered by the madness in Mumbai.  While the major news organizations struggled to get information out to the public it was the public themselves who were telling the world just what was going on.

Services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and even good old fashioned email, combined with the massive proliferation of “smart” phones capable of capturing photo and video and transmitting it nearly instantaneouasly meant that the flow of information out of Mumbai was simply not going to be limited to what CNN was able to access.

In fact, if it weren’t for the rise of what is being refered to as “citizen journalism” who knows what the world might have missed:

“At the end of the day on Friday, CNN’s license to transmit live video in India expired, forcing the network’s correspondents to report via telephone. CNN and other channels in the United States relied on live coverage and taped reports from Indian networks.

The cameras and phones carried by people swept up in the attacks were not subject to any such rules. Mr. Shanbhag photographed one of the fires at the Taj hotel and the wreckage outside a popular cafe that was attacked on Wednesday and posted them on his Flickr stream. Some people transmitted video from inside the Taj hotel to news networks via cellphones. And reporters used cellphones to send text messages to hotel guests who had set up barricades in their rooms.” (via)

While governments spend more time and money than ever trying to monitor their citizens it is at least a bit comforting to know that some citizens are doing some monitoring of their own.

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Can the Internet Beat the Sound Bite

For years now, we’ve watched as what passes for mainstream news is made into smaller and smaller sound bites that are easy to swallow and, more often than not, not even close to the whole story.

One prime example of this has been the treatment of Barack Obama’s Pastor Wright.  For weeks the big news networks have been bombarding the public with very select clips from decades of Wright’s sermons and, amazingly, they’ve chosen the most inflammatory bits.  Who cares if they’re taken out of context and aired with no sense of time or place.

Luckily, the internet is full of people who have the time and energy to dig a little deeper and bring out more of the story.  Thus, there are now numerous extended sermons from Pastor Wright all over the internet.  While it might not change your own personal feelings on the matter, it certainly makes the big news organizations look pretty skewed for ignoring the big picture.

Whether or not the multitude of individuals can counter the power of big media is not clear yet, but for younger people who have already almost completely abandonded the nightly news, these sorts of efforts can become very powerful.

Citizen Journalists Keep on Coming

There is a little bit of news, and a promise of more to come, over at Beet.TV about CNN’s latest UGC news effort: 

“Long providing an opportunity for viewers to send in videos, text messages, camera phone videos, comments and photos through an area called iReport, CNN.com has launched a true consumer generated news portal.  It has its own url as ireport.com” 

And PSFK has a cool post about a project run by the BBC to get young people into becoming reporters: 

“News School Report is the BBC’s initiative to encourage 11-14-year-olds to become interested in journalism and the news. The BBC offers children fromUK schools the chance to make their own video, audio or text-based news at school and to broadcast it for real, with the website becoming a live channel for one day. Launched last year with 120 schools and 3,000 students participating, the successful initiative streamed nine hours of school-based activities and pupils’ news reports, and this year has involved more than 10,000 students from over 250 schools across the country who are all readying themselves for their deadline- of 2pm GMT today, 13th March. ” 

This sort of stuff just gets me excited.  Just think about how many cameras are out there – and the number must be growing exponentially.  It is going to become very hard to hide from view.  While we all worry about whether “Big Brother” is watching, I have a feeling the real threat/reward will come from millions of “Little Brothers” all over the world.And the world will be watching.  

CNN Uses Camgirl Tech

Beet.TV has a neat little interview with Jon Klein, president of CNN USA about their usage of Skype Video in a live report:

“CNN, long an innovator in utilizing new technology to record and transmit video reports from remote and dangerous locations, made news gathering history last night when it used Skype to get a live transmission of CNN Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin who was in Hawaii with no access to a satellite upload location.”

What’s kind of funny about this, to me, is that kids all over the world are using this sort of tech every day.  All CNN really did was rebroadcast over TV.

The real story is that exposes another realm once controlled by big media due to the cost – live remote reporting.  You no longer need an expensive satellite uplink truck and millions of dollars in sundries to go live from Baghdad.  Really, all you need is a good cellphone and a few thousand dollars in sundries.

That’s going to be a serious challenge to the traditional media sources.  If they can no longer be first on the scene or first to air what are they going to have left to offer their viewers?

CNN or YouTube?

There is a pretty amazing post over at Neatorama that features a YouTube video of a group of young women looting a store during the riots earlier this week in Belgrade.

“It’s yet another peek into another world that we would be less likely to see before the age of internet and YouTube. How is society changing with the barrier to entry for broadcasting to millions of people around the world set so low?”

I’d say that is a pretty excellent question to consider.  I’m actually reminded of a book by Christopher Buckley called Little Green Men (it was made into a bad movie with Randy Quaid).  In the book, the Earth is invaded by little green men from Mars.  Instead of bringing horrible weapons or disease, they have the ability to teleport instantly to anywhere.  This allows them to spy on anyone they want to.  Once they’ve finished spying they immediately go and share what they’ve learned with the offended party.  The effect of all of this is that secrets become impossible and all the world powers are forced into a completely open position.

(Actually, I am not totally certain that is actually the plot of the book, but that’s how I remember it… )

I really wonder if this isn’t sort of what is happening with the combined proliferation of the internet along with mobile phones that capture video.  There are phones now that can capture and post the video simultaneously, making anyone capable of becoming a live, uncensored, on-the-scene reporter.

CNN can kiss my ass.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VWZoKWBYXE&rel=1]