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Current TV’s Crisis by Doniphan Blair
Vice President Albert Gore and his Current TV biz partner, Joel Hyatt, a lawyer who dabbled in politics (a losing run for the Senate), and switched cable news, while still teaching business at Stanford. photo: courtesy Current TV
Poor Al Gore. Not only did they not let him become president, now Current TV—part of his multi-pronged move from politics into culture, which went so well with his Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006)—is foundering on the shoals of ... what, it is hard to say.
Perhaps bad business and the dream of a television-Web hybrid, or the staff's data and tech obsession and Bay Area's liberalism. The last two can be deadly to drama.
The Vice President's recent drama-free divorce from Tipper and disagreeable rumors about minor indiscretions with a massage therapist are probably no help. Gore still serves as a senior advisor and I, for one, support him completely.
By the way, he's not literally poor—indeed, he's well on his way to becoming the first "green" billionaire. But he may be poor in terms of familiarity with the snake oil side of the media circus; and he may have gotten snookered along with rest of Currents employees.
"They have been lying to their staff, internally, about what was going on, while externally, they were trying to sell it since 2007," CineSource was informed by a former staffer who didn't want their name disclosed. "They kept trying to redefine the brand. The people they hired are all old MTV hands. It seems like a sinking ship.”
“They keep saying publicly they have things under control, but apparently not." Indeed, their president of programming, David Neuman, was released late last year, and they have yet to announce a replacement.
When Current TV launched, there were no green channels, a space they could have owned. Instead, they chose to tackle the brave new world of TV-Web hybrid—which sometimes feels like Frankenstein.
They've had some successes, with shows like with "SuperNews," a rambunctious cartoon about geeks and cools, and an actual news show, "Vanguard," which won a bunch of awards, including a Peabody in March and an Emmy nomination in June for "The Oxycontin Express," a look into Florida's pain prescription crisis. Sadly, "SuperNews" got cancelled.
Of course, Current, which started in August 2005, had the bad luck of being followed the next year by an outfit called YouTube, which did perfect the Web-TV interface. Go low rez and have viewers do all the programming—isn't that sweet!
Of course, YouTube's still losing a tasty half a billion a year—all those darn server farms! But it has sugar daddy Google (worth 50 to 100 billion: no one can count that high)—so who cares?
Regardless, everyone worships YouTube, literally—it delivers something like 40% of the nation's television. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the time, Americans are either Googling up something or threatening to do so (to win an argument). So it's a wash, a welfare program for the world to make or pirate, upload, and watch each other's videos—subsidized by Google.
The Current logo may have to come to earth. photo: courtesy Current TV
Current was not that into real news at first, preferring aggregation, a technical term for "pirate off Web" (admittedly, CineSource does some of that, too), and crowd sourcing. This is where you convince people it's cool to email clips of themselves talking about something of supposed interest, or grabbing ditto in run-and-gun street interviews.
"There was a constant pull between 'Are we a TV station or are we an online outlet?'—between the LA office and the San Francisco office, in other words," continued CineSource's informant (by the way, this is actual reporting, not aggregation). "You'd be sitting in a meeting with programmers, and they'd be telling you that 'TV is dead.' Meanwhile, they're supposed to be supporting your shows."
"They were going to democratize media and put it in the hands of viewers—a pie-in-the-sky idea. They were going to bring Internet onto TV, but that wasn't successful. TV is supposed to be for vegging out, but the Internet is interactive, so they are really two different activities. Plus YouTube came along at the same time."
Alas, YouTube fought under the Jolly Rogers' black flag, albeit protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (see Mis En Scene: Silicon Valley), which admits that copyright control is hard in a public media, but which obliges the hoster to rapidly honor removal requests. Meanwhile, Current would be rights cleared programming only. It was Al Gore's television station, for crying out loud!
Current would be "small-d" democratic: training viewers to do their programming—even commercials—and focusing on the young A.D.D. crowd with "pods" (Current-speak for sections) no longer than eight minutes. But that was unworkable, since the videos were low, both in quantity and quality. Current had to hire a small army of 200, far too many for a tiny network. As early as 2007, management realized the business model was unsupportable.
"YouTube passed them by a gazillion miles," continued CineSource's contact, warming to the roast. "They missed the boat. They can't sell it. They have distro deals, but whether they can get the programming they need—that's doubtful.”
“They need a hit. Maybe they have one squirrelled away, which they are about to reveal, who knows, I hope so. And San Francisco has become very straight."
Current TV has failed to produce a hit show, save for the Vanguard news series, which is pretty good. Reported by twenty-somethings, for twenty-somethings, often about twenty-somethings, Vanguard is a little high on the commercial quotient and repetitive intros—alas, that is due to the famously short, twenty-something attention span and the desperate need to monetize the Web.
Vanguard's quick cutting and irony, as well as its incisive views, have made it of interest to many generations. One notable program, "American Jihad," covered Omar Hammami, a Louisiana native with a Syrian father, who is now a commander in Somalia for al Shahab—Arabic for "the youth," coincidentally.
Vanguard extensively interviewed Hammami's best friend in Louisiana, who almost followed him to Somalia and also converted to Islam, as did the friend's mother. Reporter Christof Putzel flew into Mogadishu, hardly a safe journey (the airport had been closed for a decade). Though he didn't interview Hammami, they tracked down his jihadi videos (probably hiding in plain sight on a server farm in Phoenix).
Hammami was expelled from his father's home for refusing to be in a family photo—radical Islamists do not make human images for personal or romantic reasons, although they do for political or military ones. This is precisely why Islam and the West are at symbol system loggerheads.
While they are avoiding personal image making, we are obsessed with it and uploading for all the world to see—but, of course, the jihadis love YouTube, too. Indeed, Hammami's cackle, as he describes the kills he is about commit in an ambush—filmed by a fellow jihadi and uploaded to the World Wide Web—is worth a thousand words, at least.
The first time someone said Current was in trouble—openly—was when the Hollywood Reporter and Reuters broke The Current TV Story on June 24. While the normally attack-dog Variety had been quiet, "Joel Hyatt [Current's partner with Gore] spent much of 2009 shopping the network with a price tag that wildly overestimated the company's worth," The Reporter, well, reported.
Current used Gore's celebrity when they started but since the arrival of the new CEO, MTV's Marc Rosenthal, he has become a passive partner, a bit like Clinton in Gore's 2000 campaign with similar results. Now they are going the traditional television route, trying to acquire outside shows and do regular TV but the San Francisco staff is not cut out for that, compared to LA or NY, nor are they rising to the occasion.
Three years ago, Current began talks with Google, spearheaded by Gore, who had an in with management—he was the vice-president for god's sake! Insiders say the asking price was around $450 million, but those discussions came to naught.
Now Rosenthal is trying to rebuild the channel in a traditional mold—precisely what Gore vowed to avoid—perhaps into a liberal response to Fox News, most likely to sell it later.
To this end, Rosenthal parachuted in his homies from New York, notably master programmer Brian Graden, part of the genius behind "South Park," that crazed radical-centrist cartoon show by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who studied film at the University of Colorado with Stan Brakhage, arguably the greatest of the avant-garde filmmakers (see CS's article on Lawrence Jordan). If Graden can whip up some more of that tasty mass media avant-garde soup ...
WebTV seemed innovative at first. In 2009, Current's Italy outpost, its first in Europe, launched "Frammenti," or Fragments, a WebTV drama about a handsome reporter accused of a murder, the plot line of which was interactive. Audiences liked it. They were supposed to help rescue him and become participatory investigators. Interactivity aside, it was the first drama for Current TV anywhere.
Actually, Current is not doing that bad: it is profitable worldwide with a distro base of around 70 million households. But it is poised to loose some eyeballs if it doesn't cut a deal with Time Warner Cable, the critical conduit to Madison Avenue, according to Derek Baine, an industry analyst.
Advertisers will find out a lot about Current, if it finally reveals its Nielsen ratings, a mandatory move that could show some eyeballs are fluttering or closed. "They've got to become rated soon or advertisers will not go with them," Baine said.
Now Current is going beyond crowd sourcing and fast cutting—which commercial television learned from the likes of Stan Brakhage—and getting down to the thorny problem of creating better drama and news—either way, stronger content. When you're surfing the Internet from cats playing piano to porn and then an "I Love Lucy" show, you are creating your own narrative arc, with you as protagonist. But you also need to veg out sometimes, to become receptive, to view other narratives, notably those of greater storytellers, thus the Web-TV dilemma.
"Television is inherently passive," CineSource's, well, source said, "We want to tune out, relax, think about other things, see what's in the fridge. In Brazil, they like to run their screens 24/7, kind of like a digital window on their house. But the Internet is active, you go there to do something, to interact with people, often anonymously.
Perhaps the viewing public is no longer interested in talking to San Franciscans who have gone from hippies to sex radicals to geeks in the course of a generation. San Francisco used to be diverse but no longer is."
Our informant is dead-on here: the dotcom boom forced African Americans to flee San Francisco in droves, dropping their numbers to the lowest of any major American city, about 6%, as dramatized in Barry Jenkins' masterful freshman film "Medicine for Melancholy," (2008, see Jenkins' Local Feature Wows).
"It is run by dotcomers and is very homogenous. I don't think those people are open to outside ideas," CineSource's "deep throat" continued. Current's location across from the Pac Bell Baseball park looks like Europe, with its wide boulevards and center of the street tramway, and is unlike anywhere else in The City—least of all the impoverished Hunter's Point 'hood right down Third Street.
"The people are one track. They are very liberal, and very modern, yes. But when people become too liberal or politically correct that dampens down debate, making them conservative. They placed Current in The City specifically because they wanted it to be different, but they got caught up in their own homogeneity.”
“It was hard to work with people who don't understand the entertainment industry. We used to have a saying, 'A city that is run by nerds and the women who love them.' I found the people tiresome, with no sense of humor, you couldn't be honest. Oakland is a different story; life is very real over there."
And so we come to face-to-face with the perennial problem of how to get real in the digital age. Media is a business that needs both bricks and mortar—all those damn server farms—and ether: all those radio waves pulsing everywhere but also emotions, seduction and art.
Current can re-staff and right itself, certainly. The talent for it is right here, somewhere, if you know where to look (perhaps in Oakland). As all artists know, be they of the fine or entrepreneurial wing of the family, we must constantly create hotter stuff or die. It's Darwin's survival of the fittest but enacted through his second lesser known theorem, sexual selection, sometimes called "survival of the communicationist:" Those who invent the best narratives win.