The Next New Media

Stowe Boyd is having an interesting fit with some old PR flacks who are flacking for old PR. But 'Public Relations' is about stultified comments. PR is as old as the cliche of exonerated defendants being mobbed by the 5 O'Clock News on the steps of the courthouse.

What I believe is next in the new media is the purpose built news organization. Think of the economics of film production scaled down to the size of a television pilot. You get a very smart person or subject matter expert out into the field to do some findings of fact from some spot on the planet, and then you package the content for that. The difference is that it is prepaid.

You take the attitude of 'What do I have to pay to get a straight story out of Mosul (Somalia, Southern Lebanon, Wall Street), you assemble a team of experts at home, and then you send an adventure team to the field. They report realtime and get whatever scoop they get without worrying about editorial spin or what the sponsors might say, and then you have the kind of first person omnicient research vehicle that has no peer in the world. The trick is just assembling the right team. The difference is they don't have to be journalists, in fact they shouldn't be, they should be the experts that journalists call.

Take the book 'The Ends of the Earth' by Robert D. Kaplan. Somebody at Random House obviously had enough sense to know that Kaplan could come back from his jaunty junkets with some material worth publishing, but they did it in book time with book economics. How old is that? I just linked to a story by Michael J. Totten that is approximately five or six months too late. This is the time it has taken the blogosphere to get some eyewitness testimony by an expert to contradict the conventional wisdom about the nature of battle between Israel and Iranian Hezbollah. The trick is to go, Ross Perot - like, into the heat of battle, as the case may be, with someone hooked into a million minds.

How do you fund such a thing? OK this is going to be scary so hold your hats. Through Typekey. What if Six Apart charged me an extra dollar per month to contribute to a producer's pool of money that would pay for Michael J. Totten's trips to the Middle East? You damn well better bet that I'd pay. What if Wordpress charged a nickel to get Michelle Malkin to go count mosques in Iraq? I'd pay. The blogosphere will select the experts. All we need is the machinery to get them out into the field, and the talent to film-crew is a commodity, or it will be within 5 years when nobody in their right mind will want to be following Wolf Blitzer around.

Let's call this thing Open Source Documentary Production. It's all about short term, high visibility, realtime reporting on a hot subject. It's about getting somebody possesed of deep context into the field. It's about putting a different head on the body of television and film journalism. It's about a new source of funds for production. It disintermediates broadcast television editorial staff and academic funding committees. It's audience is the blogosphere and ultimately the world. It's about putting faster money into the hands of subject matter experts who can get first hand data, undedited and unfiltered, to the hive mind of the blogosphere, as much as we can be said to have a hive mind.

What this cannot replace is the cultivation of sources that traditionally financed media has the time to... well, buy. It cannot replace the daily beat of news provided by the MSM. What it can do is shift the balance out of the news rooms and editorial places. That job is already done by the 'sphere. We can already handle the truth and all the flavors of bias. What we want is our kind of focus.

Obviously, there will be some editorial and economic decisions made in terms of the choices between equiping one trip vs another, but I don't think that it is wishful thinking to believe that part of the structure of open source handles much of that. People, given a chance, will vote, and people will continue to bless their own votes. Give the blogosphere what it wants, legs and feet in addition to its minds, and it will get up and walk.

I'm sure that Gerard may have already considered the idea, but I'm going to send him an email all the same.