Today on the Scroll: A “participatory media company” — inspired by a CBC concept (ZeD) launched after Al Gore helped acquire the American spin-off of a CBC channel (Newsworld International) — was announced on Monday by its latest partner, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose Current Canada will evidently be a commercial venture. The next day, Current TV laid off 60 employees in San Francisco — whilst adding 30 jobs in Los Angeles, the memo hastened to add, even if it seems that few are paying any attention.
What is the story here, then? A “bloodbath” brought on by the decision to shelve plans for a $100-million IPO that involved Gore trumpeting the ability of the money-losing venture to engage young viewers in over 50 million homes? Or a concession that old-school cable news did an eclectic enough job of covering the election that Current’s gimmickry — Twitter-style updates and dispatches from the founder of Digg — was no match for holograms on CNN?
Maybe, just maybe, a rethink of Current TV is a preemptive measure that responds to what The Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen was prognosticating about: amidst an economic meltdown, enthusiasm for providing user-generated content will vanish and shrink.
Current TV, after its staff cuts, will continue to employ 410 people. CBC’s partnership announcement indicates that about one-third of Current Canada programming will be created by the viewers, based on the model pioneered on the American channel, and offshoots in the UK and Italy. The planned website and digital cable outlet — the latter pending regulatory approval — won’t surface until next autumn. But, based on the enthusiasm of CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg, they are banking on this becoming a big deal.
ZeD, based in Vancouver, surfaced online in November 2001 and aired in late-night CBC timeslots for about four years until its cancellation in May 2006. After it was mentioned by Gore & co. that ZeD was a seminal influence, executive producer McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves explained to Wired that filtering the submissions was a necessary part of giving the show appeal — at the time, in April 2005, the ZeD website received between 200 and 300 submissions a day with a staff of 45 helping make sense of it all, combining user-generated input with professional productions.
The curating supplied about eight minutes of user-generated content per 40-minute episode, a quality-control process Greaves staunchly defended given how the chosen contributors were being paid for their submissions. A similar incentive model was adopted by Current.
Nonetheless, the Current Canada project primarily relies on uncompensated active participation to give the brand momentum.
Greaves, who went on to create the hip-hop social network RapSpace.TV, is unimpressed with the CBC’s decision to commit to a full-time version of the very idea they decided a couple of years ago that they were better off without.
“When you’re an African-Canadian growing up in small-town BC during the ‘70s it’s easy to feel like an outsider,” he writes. “CBC was a strong reminder that the world was much bigger than the small-town mindset I was surrounded by. And I've always defended CBC as I've personally benefited from the Corp way more than the average Canadian, even during some of the internecine strikes and ridiculous business deals.
“But this deal is the last straw. It makes it absurdly clear that CBC English-language television has lost its way — and has no idea what its mandate is. I am now convinced that it must be overhauled before they can do even more damage to Canadian culture.”
Current would likely remain a bit of a mystery in the media landscape were it not for the participation of Al Gore and his CEO partner Joel Hyatt, who announced their idea for “democratization” of broadcasting in the summer of 2004. Getting their hands on lame-duck Newsworld International, formerly based on the CBC’s cable news network, helped Current get instantly into living rooms and dubiously claim to have turned a profit.
Still, there is possibly the framework of a legitimate business — while short-form videos were being taken out of the equation on music television channels, a playlist driven by real-life current events holds appeal to attention-deficit channel surfers, or at least the buyers of airtime between the clips. How better to feign engagement of the youth market than through invariably cynical user-generated advertising?
But this isn’t a situation like MTV or HBO — whose regulation-neutered Canadian equivalents took decades to import north. For one thing, beyond its basic existence — and speculation surrounding how rich it may or may not make prospective stockholders — when has Current ever made news in its own right? Yesterday, the channel got mentioned for the first substantive time ever on a site where it would presumably be serving a trainwreck to feast on every 15 seconds, Gawker:
“Have you ever tried watching the channel?” wrote Ryan Tate in reporting the restructuring layoffs. “We turned it on once, accidentally, and honest to God the news was being read by some kind of female cyborg. Even the shows with actual humans in them are rendered unwatchable by neon graphics and distracting MTV-style quick cuts and sound effects. It's like a late-1980s vision of what News From The Future would look like. Max Headroom would look perfectly at home.”
Canadians limited to checking out Current via its busy website — not filtered through CanCon geo-targeting, yet! — can try figuring out how it works, starting with the open-source newscast whose stories are voted on by viewers, and telecast at the top of each hour. But, for the sake of drawing visitors to the site to check out the video content, this filter needs a filter — and, after three-and-a-half years of trying, it doesn’t sound like Current TV aspires to be more than video roulette.
So, is this where it ends for the CBC? Maybe not, if something like Current Canada is seen as a way to improve what they’re doing now — as represented by Royal Canadian Air Farce, Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, or anything else held up as an example that the Corpse doesn’t have a clue about what is current. Haters will now be invited to fix the CBC themselves. Then, right-wing blogs will complain about the opportunity. A perfect storm.
The process would seem a lot more novel if they hadn’t tried it already with ZeD.
“CBC developed a unique, acclaimed, made-in-Canada TV format and gave away the idea to the Americans for free,” states Greaves. “Now, years later, it essentially becomes the branch plant of a US brand. Watching this happen is beyond brutal.”
scroll@eyeweekly.com