Gore's San Francisco based Current TV, looks like the perfect zeitgeist mash-up. It's almost as if 10 people and Joe Trippi sat in a room looked at current trends and tried to re-invent television.
Responding to an ADD nation, Current keeps it's format short. Allowing people to get lots of little fixes in a magazine like format.
Most revolutionary of all is the content creation, this Current intend to farm out to a community of citizen journalists and skilled amateurs. The community creates the content, not the network.
This move turns TV on its head; well kind of public access on cable has been around for years. Most of the time, it's been the fuel for comedic material, rather than being heralded for breaking boundaries. This could be Current's problem; access doesn't necessarily equal quality and compelling television. There's a reason network executives are paid the big bucks and that's to produce a quality product. Even the field of news, the area that Current intends to play in, has gone more showbiz in recent years.
Gore believes that the news networks have lost the youth vote and places like Daily Show and late night talk shows have been destinations for this audience. These shows make no claim to be real news, but they provide an entertaining framework for topical discussion.
Perhaps, it's not about TV for this audience, but instead the Internet has become the destination for real news. Increasingly, the web and bloggers are breaking stories in real-time making them a more relevant source for those looking for instant news fixes.
Current plays to a part of this with its short format, but real-time news might be tougher. In Current's favor is the documentary trend that seems to be continuing to grow as people seek to be informed and enlightened about a wide variety of subjects.
So it's simple, Current has a lot of things in its favor, but it needs good editors and a great mechanism to bring compelling content on the airwaves, without this, it could easily flounder, becoming a joke, like past public access efforts.
Current will launch on August 1st.
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