Planting Liberally

There have been a lot of interesting stories running across the wires in the world of progressive culture this week.  Unfortunately I don't have time to really analyze each of them in-depth, but I thought I'd point them out here:

 

• Michael Wolff profiles Roger Ailes, owner of Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal, in Vanity Fair.
• David Moberg has a great piece on Working America in The Nation.  Working America is the AFL-CIO's "community affiliate".  Essentially it's a large (2.5-million-member) list of non-union members who sympathize with the union's position on a number of bread-and-butter issues, and it gives the union the ability to extend its electoral might outside the boundaries of its membership.  What's more, Working America has also started enlisting its members in support of labor organzing drives, picket lines, and the like.
• Over at Build the Echo, Tracy van Slyke talks about digg moving to the left, and progressive new media activism inspired by The Young Turks. Progressive media creators, especially vloggers and podcasters: read this post!  Disclosure: van Slyke's organization, The Media Consortium, is a client of my company.
• Again at Build the Echo, Jessica Clark highlights this great video (another good example of progressive new media activism) about Obama's Challenge:
  
  That Amazon discount code, again, is: RGVTUIQY.  You can also buy the book at Powells.
• Global Labor Strategies has a challenging, thought-provoking post about the big-picture problems facing the labor movement, both in the US and abroad.  They argue that service sector organizing and EFCA won't cut it, given the ways corporations are reorganizing globally.  It's a fascinating piece, and well worth consideration.
• The UFT announces the opening of a labor-friendly charter school in New York City, by Green Dot Public Schools.  Given the way charter schools often pit public education advocates against teachers unions, and especially in light of all the hey made about the tiff between the DC city council and DC teachers' unions, I think this is an important development.  It's not a revolutionary one - Green Dot operates a number of schools in LA already - but something we should be keeping an eye on nonetheless.  Still, I think it is one more bit of evidence that these two progressive cultural institutions don't need to be at odds.

 

Earlier this week, MSNBC announced that Rachel Maddow would get her own show in the nightly line-up, replacing Dan Abrams. The announcement was a victory for progressives in a number of ways. First, Maddow's show will strengthen the toe-hold that progressive voices like Keith Olbermann have on cable TV. Second, Maddow represents perhaps the first progressive voice to bubble up through the nascent progressive media machine and into traditional media. Finally, Maddow is the first woman with her own show representing progressives on one of the three major cable news channels.

As important a victory as Maddow's show is, we should not bask too long in the glow of victory. Now that corporate media has acknowledged the importance of attracting a progressive audience, it's time for the movement to flex its muscle still further.

In the short term, this means doing some of what we're already doing, only more often and more emphatically. Certainly, we should make sure to tune in to Maddow's show, and to promote it by embedding and spreading video clips of the show through blogs and social networks. On top of that, we should work to voice our support for Maddow to MSNBC management and advertisers. And once the show gets going, we should play the role of constructive critics, in order to improve and perfect it over time. Maddow has already proven her mettle as a commenter and as a replacement for Olbermann; and the progressive grassroots has already proven its enthusiasm for supporting her work, so this part of the job should be pretty easy.

The more difficult work will be in extending our victory outside of Maddow's show. The combination of Maddow and Olbermann on MSNBC should mark the network as the unofficial liberal cable news channel, but the network still plays host to more than enough conservative viewpoints; replacing voices like Joe Scarborough with new progressive voices will help clear up any confusion viewers might have about who is and who isn't a progressive on the channel. The slow rightward drift of CNN needs to be halted and reversed. And perhaps most importantly, we need a genuine progressive cable news channel, not one like MSNBC. As Cable News Confidential vividly depicts, it's not wise to entrust progressive voices to large corporations with decidedly unprogressive interests, like GE, and management which doesn't understand niche programming, like MSNBC's.

Of course, it's one thing to lay these goals out, and quite another to achieve them. Fortunately, there is already some progress on these fronts. Without a major scandal, like the one which took Don Imus off of MSNBC and CBS, it's hard to remove a show from the air and make room for a new progressive show. On the other hand, it should be possible to push more progressives into positions as commentators, replacement hosts, or even co-hosts. A number of high-profile liberal bloggers have already made the leap into one-time commentator gigs. Perhaps it's time to cultivate more of those gigs, provide training to those bloggers, and assemble grassroots support for those individuals. In particular, the coalition that was assembled for Stephanie Miller as a potential replacement for Don Imus on MSNBC should be rekindled and prepared to support a bid for her to take any potential opportunities that might open up.

Establishing a genuinely progressive nationwide cable news channel will be even harder. Fortunately, there are a few fledgling efforts, like Link TV, The Real News and Free Speech TV. Currently programming from these channels is available in a limited number of markets and via satellite TV. We should work to expand the reach of these channels, perhaps starting with leasing time on existing, struggling channels, or by cross-promoting these channels with existing progressive radio shows. In addition, we should work to integrate the programming from these channels, as well as material from existing web-based progressive political shows like The Young Turks, into other progressive media, in order to build popular demand for the channels.

On top of the efforts we can make to drive popular demand for this kind of programming to be available on cable, we can also work to create a potential supply of sponsorship or advertising. Certainly, there are plenty of big- budget advertisers who should have at least latent interest in reaching a niche progressive audience on TV - think of Toyota advertising for the Prius, Miramax advertising a Michael Moore film, or Apple trying to reach a creative and largely progressive audience. Moreover, as Spot.us and similar TV advertising resellers have demonstrated, it's possible to aggregate large blocks of advertising spots in order to make localized, on-the-cheap advertising available to the kinds of mom-and-pop retailers that progressives love to frequent - bookstores, coffee shops, and independent movie theaters. It's not yet clear how this kind of latent advertising demand can be organized and leveraged into the kind of start-up funding needed to credibly build a nationwide progressive cable TV channel, but it is clear that many of the raw materials are in place.

None of this will be particularly easy, nor do I imagine that we'll be successful on all fronts. It took conservatives the better part of a decade to start making inroads with CNN, and quite a lot of money to establish Fox News. At the same time, I think we have reached an important moment to build momentum and to develop a strategy to permanently transform cable news.

It's about time: after months of speculation, it appears that Rachel Maddow will replace Dan Abrams in the MSNBC lineup. The move will shift the lineup emphatically to the left, and finally gives progressives a regularly-appearing female voice on one of the three major cable news channels.

Maddows' ascension comes after a somewhat convoluted path that began with a radio show on Air America, continued with her role as a frequent commentator during MSNBC election coverage, and, perhaps most significantly, her occasional stints as a replacement for Keith Olbermann on Countdown. In other words, this is perhaps the first example in recent memory of a progressive commentator "bubbling up" from the new progressie media machine into traditional corporate media, and as such it's an important milestone. It would be nice to see this kind of thing happen more frequently, and perhaps, if Maddow's show receives good ratings, CNN might take notice. Olbermann's diary on DailyKos suggested that both he and Maddow's grassroots supporters helped make the show a reality, but, unfortunately we don't have much of a roadmap for the next progressive cable TV coup.

Last year, when it appeared that Tucker Carlson's show was in jeopardy, I wrote that replacing Carlson with a second progressive voice in the MSNBC lineup should be a short-term goal for the progressive movement. Now that we've achieved that goal (or half of it), it's worth looking farther down the road. What should be the next milestone that the nascent progressive media machine strives for, when it comes to Cable TV? Here are a few that come to mind:

• Establishing more avowedly progressive talk shows on MSNBC or CNN
• Getting more progressive commentators to appear on MSNBC or CNN
• Expanding the racial and gender diversity on cable talk shows
• Establishing a fourth, and genuinely progressive, cable news channel
• Expanding the reach and programming of fledgling progressive networks like Link TV, Free Speech TV, or Real News Network
• Indirectly altering cable news through regulatory reform - e.g., a la carte retail cable

Any others? And more importantly - what can we do to reach these goals? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Jay Rosen posted a thought-provoking piece at Press Think this week, National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News. The post takes the case of an excellent piece of explanatory journalism - Ira Glass's The Giant Pool of Money, which is a one-hour tutorial on the mortgage crisis - and bemoans the shortage of good explanatory journalism, especially given the possibility that if more people understood a story, they would be prone to seek out more news about that story. Rosen even suggests that the primary audience for this kind of explanatory journalism would be other journalists, whose coverage would improve from better background understanding of a complex story.

Rosen has an excellent point, and he voices a frustration I've often felt with news stories, especially complex ones like subprime mortgages: there's often very few places to turn for good background information. Rosen goes into good detail on why traditional media frequently fail to explain a complex story properly. Wikipedia and the web in general can be helpful, but they can also be very hit-or-miss. Wikipedia, in particular, is just not well-geared to explanatory journalism; the best articles in Wikipedia are usually the ones which have had a lot of time to stew, or have been edited and revised again and again by a lot of eyeballs. Complex news stories, especially relatively recent ones like the war in Georgia, are unlikely to meet either criteria.

I'd love to see explanatory journalism take hold and become a more prominent feature of the news landscape; I think it would help turn the tide in journalism toward improved coverage of important stories. Fortunately, as Rosen points out, (perhaps unintentionally) explanatory journalism also has a built-in business model, both because it has several potential audiences and because it tends to boost news consumption. A high-quality, up-to-date, reliable repository of pieces dedicated to explaining the major stories of the day could be a very valuable asset, if properly organized and monetized.

In other words, I think there is an opportunity for the creation of a center of explanatory journalism, whose job is to regularly churn out explanatory pieces about stories of the day. Such a center could sustain itself by repurposing content for different audiences (people who want to listen to a piece on their iPods; local journalists who want to understand how their region is affected, or who might even want a "cheat sheet" of acronyms and important players in a story); selling reprinting rights to newspapers and magazines; and earning money by directing traffic to news organizations with more day-to-day coverage, whether through ads or otherwise.

Incidentally, if an explanatory journalism center was wise about crowdsourcing and sharing its profits with contributors, the center could even help bloggers sustain their own blogs. After all, bloggers are extremely well-suited to explanatory journalism - they are voracious news consumers, they tend to pick a very targeted "beat" and pursue it doggedly, they don't have the same kind of deadline and word limit restrictions that traditional journalists face, and they must, to some degree or another, explain the background of a story to their audience in order to provide a reasonably coherent opinion.

Given the neverending financial difficulties at most news organizations, I think that relying on traditional journalists to produce explanatory journalism on a regular basis is a nearly lost cause. Unfortunately, "The Giant Pool of Money" is almost certainly a special case, not the beginning of a revolution in the way news is done. If explanatory journalism is to take hold, I think it will need a new business model, located outside the world of traditional journalism, but hopefully interacting with that world and helping to improve it.

PS - I know that I haven't been the best about blogging regularly. In fact, I think it's been almost a full Friedman Unit since my last post! I do apologize that, but I'm glad to announce that we're finally turning that corner. More seriously, I'll try and get back into the game and not disappear entirely.

This week CNN launched iReport, a video sharing citizen journalism site where users have a chance to upload reports which might be picked up and used on-air at CNN. The launch builds on previous experiments by CNN to incorporate citizen journalism into its reporting. The site is technically in beta now, and is slated for launch in March. I should also mention that CNN is hardly the first network to stumble across the idea of citizen journalism: The Real News, a non-profit progressive TV news show, has been supporting citizen journalism through their community website The Real News Junkies for several months now, with a significantly lower budget.

iReport is, as might be expected, far from perfect. TechCrunch has already taken it to task for failing to compensate contributors and for relatively lackluster content. In many ways, iReport is really just a shadow of YouTube, with the main difference being that iReport submissions have the chance to be picked up by a large international TV network. CNN does provide a few helpful hints on the type of video that has a better chance at getting on air: stories about presidential candidate sitings, salutes to the troops, and severe weather. At least they're not setting the bar too high.

I'm curious to see whether this site could become an entrypoint for progressives to push news coverage on CNN further to the left. I'm under no illusions that Bill Bennett will have his racist keister ejected from election night coverage, nor that Lou Dobbs will join a mariachi band and issue a teary-eyed apology for his hate-mongering past. I'm fairly positive that CNN will start off by deciding which stories it wants to run, and occasionally turning to iReport for cheap footage that reinforces their predefined point of view. But eventually, I'd like to hope, a deluge of reports with a leftist bent - hearings on global warming, let's say, or personal testimonials that indict the health care system - will encourage story editors to adopt a more progressive slant. Such a deluge would be an incentive for the network to offer substantive, progressive news by lowering the cost of doing so.

Or, we could watch stories about ketchup.

Amy Gahran has a very interesting piece at Poynter Online about the importance of teaching journalism students to use content management systems (h/t joshb).  Her basic point is that Dreamweaver, which many schools teach their students, is utterly pointless in the modern journalistic office, since no one uses Dreamweaver to run a modern newspaper website anymore.  Moreover, she asserts, Dreamweaver teaches prospective journalists to think of their newspaper as an isolated island, while content management systems teach them to think of their newspaper as a hub of information, connected to a much broader web of interconnected information.

Those are both fair points, although I'm not sure I'm convinced that the latter is so crucial.  I imagine most journalism students understand the web by now, and have some idea that newspaper websites are frequently the hubs of interaction and discussion.  Then again, I could be wrong.

What I find most interesting, though, is Gahran's assertion that most journalism schools simply don't teach basic CMS skills.  That strikes me as odd, but entirely believable.  Moreover, it seems like a great opportunity for a liberal entrepreneur to make some money while reaching, and hopefully helping to shape, the minds of prospective or up-and-coming journalists.

Teaching users how to use a CMS is not very difficult.  It's a core practice of my company, in fact.  While we've only been doing it for about a year, we find that even our most technophobic clients generally "get it" pretty early on in the process.  I'd venture a guess that there are a lot of self-taught CMS users out there, judging from the size of the blogosphere.

So here's what I think a clever liberal entrepreneur could do to exploit this situation, and help push journalistic enterprises to the left.  Start up a one-day or two-day training course on popular content management systems, like Drupal or Wordpress, and target it at journalism students.  Then, use that opportunity to give journalism students a taste of the importance of democratic conversation in the world of journalism, and the ways that web-based technologies can help media outlets attract a good-sized audience without resorting to gossip-mongering.

Certainly, a one- or two-day course is not going to move mountains, and it won't change journalistic practice overnight.  On the other hand, providing a key set of professionals with valuable skills, and pointing out the ways that progressive journalistic practices can be supported by those skills, can be a money-making and, in some small way, profession-changing enterprise.

I had a lot of fun reading Alternet's report of trouble at Fox News today. As the main cheerleader for the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq, this channel has a lot of blood on its hands, and I'm glad to see they're having trouble keeping their dominance of the cable ratings wars. I also think the fact that the channel's bad fortunes are coinciding with a generally lackluster Republican presidential primary speaks to a deeper, more general distaste for conservatism as a whole, and that's great.

Then again, I don't think it's all over for the channel, or for the conservative movement. The movement is still incredibly well-funded and savvy at using new media, and is fully capable of launching some pretty nasty attacks. We have yet to see how Republicans will do at the congressional level, or at the local and statewide levels. In some ways under-the-radar electoral wins are more dangerous than big-enchilada wins, and a kinda sorta victory at the presidential level should not leave progressives the least bit complicit at other levels.

Moreover, the election is just the beginning of the story. Will a Democratic President and Congress be able to enact progressive laws, or will we have a reprise of the disastrous 1993-94 legislative session? I was just coming of political age back then, and I can easily remember how chillingly effective the vicious conservative media machine - which was still then in nascency - was at stopping progressive reform.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this piece serves as a warning for progressive TV programmers. Tying our fortunes up too tightly with our favored elected officials opens us up to the dangers of losing audience share if those officials ever lose favor. We shouldn't be the sycophantic cheerleaders Fox News has been. We want progressive TV to be progressive first, and partisan second.

 

Update: Fox won this year's State of the Union coverage, but the margin between Fox and CNN is shrinking.

My schedule is tight this morning so I'll make this quick. In looking at Chris Bowers's SC results thread on Open Left, I noticed the following tidbit:

 

Update 12: I'm looking at Google News headlines on the primary to try and see what sort of narrative comes out of South Carolina. There appear to be three types of headlines right now. First, the most common is the bland, "Obama wins South Carolina," that won't help him much. Second, there is the "Obama wins racially charged primary," that probably won't help him at all (and may hurt him). Third, there is the "Obama wins huge" headline, which he really needs and will help him. Since he needs a bounce, he also needs a lot of "Obama wins big" type headlines.

 

Now, here's the question: is there anyway to automate this type of analysis? It seems to me that most major events will follow a similar path - headlines for the relevant story will follow one of a small number of basic paths. Is it possible to write a program which will automaticlly track those headlines and reveal how the newspapers "voted" on the story, based on the headlines? That would be one sweet media analysis tool.

I haven't done theoretical CS in a long time, but it seems to me the answer would probably have half a foot in clustering (assuming you could isolate all the stories about a single event, you could use some kind of thesaurus metric combined with clustering to identify the major headline groups, as Chris did manually); and half a foot in crowdsourcing (you'd probably need humans to help you decide which headline groups are most advantageous for the candidate). You could overlay all that on a database of newspaper circulation and a neat little automated graphing program to get some really great charts.

Full disclosure: My company did a small technical/design project for Chris and OpenLeft last year.

Over the past couple of months, I've blogged quite a bit about the prospect of creating cable TV networks which feature progressive news and opinion.  These pieces range from an exploration of existing satellite progressive TV, to a proposed strategy for leveraging leased access into a progressive network, and thoughts about pushing MSNBC to the left in the near future.

There is another avenue slowly opening up for progressive TV: internet TV, which is taking baby steps toward broad adoption.  The past two years have seen an explosion in Internet TV technologies, from traditional-TV-on-your-PC Joost, to internet-video-made-easy Miro, to iTunes-to-TV solution AppleTV and video-on-demand-via-Tivo Amazon Unbox.  Of these technologies, I think we should be most interested in those which bring video from the public internet onto the living room TV sets.  This kind of technological innovation has the most potential to distribute progressive voices in a widespread way, since most people still like to watch video, especially video clips that are longer than 5-10 minutes, on their living room TV sets.

So it's exciting to see that AppleTV and Amazon Unbox (the latter of which garnered some well-deserved harsh criticism upon its initial launch in Sept. 2006) will soon be getting competition.  Netflix will be offering its video download service via set-top boxes later this year.  And StumbleUpon is latching onto the Wii to launch Stumble.TV for the Wii, which will give StumbleUpon users the chance to enjoy user-acclaimed video on their living room TVs.

At this point, the market for Internet television devices is still too cluttered with proprietary devices, awkward computer-to-TV interfaces, smarmy insider media deals, and similar cruft to make it ready for prime time.  But it's clear that the day that Internet TV is a widespread phenomenon, and has the maturity to take on cable TV as a mechanism for distributing niche content, might not be far off.  My belief is that widespread Internet TV will be a boon for the progressive movement, because it will enable us to more widely distribute our news and opinion, communicate with and grow our base, put an end to the ridiculous way politicians kow-tow to conservative print and TV news media, and more fairly compete with conservative news and opinion outlets.  If I'm right, then accelerating the Internet TV industry, and preparing for the day when Internet TV is widespread, should be important priorities for the progressive movement.  What can we do to meet those priorities?



The key to building a mature Internet television industry friendly to the progressive movement is an open, fast, cheap, and user-friendly pipe that goes directly from content producers to content consumers (and possibly in the reverse direction as well.)  In particular, that means building (or latching on to) a cheap set-top box that attaches easily to a living room TV, and works with a reasonably easy-to-use remote control.  It also means a set-top box that offers programming from an open network, and doesn't lock viewers into a closed network.

Perhaps the best model (and also, perhaps, a good partner) is Miro.  Distributed by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro which embraces open technology and democratic content.  (Indeed, it was formerly known as the Democracy Player.)  The software is open source, the platform is open, and the interface is slick and relatively easy-to-use.  The main trouble with the player is that it's limited to computer viewing.  What we need is a solution that brings the open technology spirit and user-friendly interface of Miro into a TV set-top box.  A good near-term solution would probably incorporate video game consoles, which are now complex enough to rival desktop computers for versatility, if not raw processing power.  A port of Miro to the Wii, PlayStation, and Xbox would bring us a long way towards an open-access, user-friendly Internet TV experience.  (I imagine that porting Miro's search interface, which assumes a keyboard, into the living room would be a fairly significant challenge.  It would also be the crux of the problem of making Long Tail content available in the living room.  But I'll leave that to the hardware entrepreneurs.)

Hardware is only half the problem, however.  If Internet TV ever gains enough market penetration to rival cable TV, we will still need to work on offering attractive, compelling content, and properly distributing that content.  There are some valiant efforts along those lines already, ranging from Democracy Now! to Free Speech TV, Link TV and The Real News.  While I do think we can get a lot of mileage out of simply marketing this kind of existing progressive TV programming to a wider audience, I think we will also need to develop more - much, much more.  After all, Internet TV is a Long Tail medium, and we will need a Long Tail of progressive content to match it.  In other words, we'll need progressive TV that matches a very broad array of diverse interests.  The progressive programming that's currently available is something akin to the limited content available at the dawn of the broadcast TV era - it's trying to be all things to all (progressive) people.  At the same time that we try to expand access to Internet TV, we are going to need to boost the amount and diversity of progressive TV programming.

Of course, the progressive movement has succeeded emphatically, at making a very diverse range of content available through one medium - the blogosphere.  The key to this success was the low barrier to entry in blogging, and the lack of daily updated progressive news and opinion in print media.  Our challenge is to extend that success into the sphere of video content, and in particular, into the arena of regularly updated video channels, through podcasting, vlogging, or other means.  There has been a bit of success along these lines, as evidenced by the mushrooming of green Internet TV, including Earth Focus (a production of Link TV), Green.TV, Tree Hugger TV, and others.

I'm hoping that barriers to progressive Internet TV will soon be lowered.  The fact that Democratic candidates readily adopted YouTube as a mechanism for distributing their message means that there's now a solid chunk of Democratic campaign staffers with significant know-how and experience in working with online video.  As the campaigns wind down over the next few months, some of these staffers will inevitable begin to look for work elsewhere.  Just as the demise of Howard Dean's campaign, and the dispersing of his Internet team, led to the creation of progressive web development shops like Blue State Digital, I'm hoping that the end of most of the Democratic presidential campaigns over the next two months will lead to a boom in progressive Internet TV stations.

The final challenge in making Internet TV work for the progressive movement is organic adoption.  We will have to ensure that once the hardware and content are readily available, consumers begin watching our content.  There are a number of ways to drive this kind of adoption.  First, by creating "progressive set-top boxes" which are pre-programmed with progressive TV channels.  Second, by spurring netroots activists to digg, stumble, and otherwise socially recommend progressive video using the social bookmarking venues available.  Third, by embedding progressive content within our blog posts.

Existing progressive Internet TV producers are already exploring these avenues for organic adoption.  The Real News, for example, has a volunteer "blog squad" whose goal is to evangelize Real News programming on blogs and social networks.  On the whole, unfortunately, I think we are not yet at the point where these efforts are very successful.  Outside of the three left-leaning shows on cable - Countdown, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - there are very few progressive video clips which regularly get embedded and virally spread online.

However, I believe that our present moment is a perfect opportunity for liberal entrepreneurs to create an Internet TV infrastructure for the progressive movement.  On the consumer side, we have widespread demand for a la carte cable TV, and we will soon see deep dissatisfaction over the lack of original programming caused by the studios' greed in the writers strike.  We also have incredibly expensive cable TV (PDF), and with Stumble.TV, we now have a model for leveraging existing hardware into set-top boxes for Internet TV.  The technology for creating an easy-to-use, cheap set-top box for Internet TV, and the demand for it, are readily available; what we really need is an entrepreneur capable of packaging and marketing the technology properly, and doing so while under-pricing existing cable TV offers.

On the production side, we will soon be awash in progressive professionals exiting Democratic campaigns and capable of creating Internet TV channels, and their availability coincides with the writers' strike.  (Indeed, some writers are already looking into the possibility of creating startups which will produce professional online video.)  So there is a lot of loose talent available, and there's an opportunity to create compelling, progressive Internet TV that's free of corporate control.

I'm curious to see what will happen to Internet TV in 2008.  My guess is that the industry will mature considerably in 2008.  The only question is, how will the progressive movement use this potentially powerful tool to communicate its message?

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Over the past few months, I've written a few pieces on the feasibility of establishing a progressive cable news channel. I've written about opportunities to push MSNBC in a leftward direction for the short-term, as well as a long-term strategy for piecing together a new national network using leased cable access in a number of major metropolitan areas. Today, I'll discuss the work of The Real News, an up-and-coming non-profit progressive news channel based in Canada, which has a fascinating long-term plan for establishing a national presence for progressive TV news. If you're unfamiliar with The Real News, this interview with CEO Paul Jay gives a great overview to the channel's understanding of how to deliver high-quality journalism in today's environment.

I recently spoke with Geraldine Cahill, the director of social media for The Real News, about the channel's plans for 2008 and beyond. The Real News has a lot of interesting plans for the future, and many of them are, I think, very much on the right track. This is an exciting example of a new up-and-coming progressive institution which "gets it" in many ways, and I think it deserves a lot of support from the blogosphere. Cahill and I spoke about the channel's plans for more content, more widespread distribution, better fundraising, and increased engagement of grassroots supporters and donors. Much more across the flip.

A key to proving the viability of a new channel is the amount of high quality, frequently-updated content the channel can produce on a regular basis. The Real News began steadily increasing the number of videos it produces since June of 2007, with a noticeable bump in August 2007. Within the next 2 - 3 months, The Real News believes it can create about 3 - 4 short pieces a day, 2 - 3 longer pieces every week, and a few occasional special feature-length pieces. Current staffing levels are sufficient to support that level of production.

The Real News hopes that the 2008 elections will boost interest in progressive news, and give the channel an opportunity to produce still more content. A key element to capturing this opportunity is the channel's plan to build a Washington, DC bureau and a New York studio. (Most production efforts are currently based in Toronto.) Fundraising is currently underway to support these projects. As someone who finds campaign coverage woefully vapid and horserace-focused, I find the prospect of a steady stream of progressive, policy-oriented, substantive campaign coverage extremely exciting. It'll be very interesting to see this coverage take shape.

If the Real News can manage to produce a one hour nightly news show, it will still need a distribution channel for its content. That means finding a cable provider that has space for such a show. Currently The Real News has a relationship with LinkTV for satellite distribution, and Vision TV for cable distribution in Canada. There are a few providers in other parts of the world, such as EUX TV in Europe and a few providers in India. The Real News is also looking into distribution as an on-demand video service with Comcast. In the US, there are efforts underway to place The Real News programming on public access TV, and RNN TV in New York. Currently, the Real News is primarily distributed online, and the hopes are to distribute the videos on cable and satellite by Summer 2008.

All of these plans, however, depend on the channel's financial viability. While the channel's initial funding came from a few foundational grants and large individual donors, and it plans to continue using those funding streams into the near future, The Real News is pursuing a long-term strategy for financial stability founded mostly on small individual donors. This plan, though, has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: small donors don't want to jump into something until it looks viable, but viability for a news channel (as I've mentioned above) requires regular production of fresh content, which requires a lot of up-front funding. The channel could be self-sustaining with a corps of 250,000 monthly subscribers, each contributing $10 / month. You can click here to subscribe today.

In a way, The Real News funding model is very similar to that of public television, but without corporate and government sponsorship. There's no space in The Real News funding formula for corporate advertising. That's an important distinction, and it will allow the channel to have a wide range of editorial freedom. Watching Paul Jay talk about the way that editorial freedom will lead to a higher quality of meaningful journalism is exciting, and it certainly makes me think that The Real News has a very good understanding of what's wrong in journalism today, especially in TV journalism.

At the same time, I am a bit worried about the no-advertising model, because I think it both isolates progressive news from a huge chunk of economic life, and places obstacles in the face of progressive candidates wishing to reach a progressive audience. I think that the progressive movement and the economy as a whole benefit greatly when companies target and solicit progressive customers. Such targeting can yield money for progressive causes at the same time that it creates actual change, by forcing companies to adopt socially responsible policies. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to progressive social change - think, for example, of consumers who buy organic because they believe it's healthier, and eventually become more environmentally and socially aware as a result. Turning down corporate advertising means closing doors in the face of companies who want to reach progressives. So I am a little worried about the opportunities lost because the Real World is not soliciting advertising. But I can certainly understand the channel's genuine concern for editorial freedom.

What is most exciting about the Real News, I think, is its deep and broad understanding of the social media landscape, and its open embrace of crowdsourcing. Grassroots engagement means a lot of different things to the Real News, and the channel offers its supporters a whole range of options for involvement, including:

• The ability to support the channel through monthly donations
• The opportunity to host house parties to spread the word about the Real News, and to support other local events sponsored by The Real News
• The opportunity to provide citizen eye-witness video footage, which might get included or used in news reports
• Occasional chances to translate video content into other languages
• The ability to comment on and share video clips, both on the Real News YouTube channel and on its own internal social network

You can, of course, join the Real News volunteer email list to learn about new opportunities as they arise.

Cahill, who directs social media efforts for The Real News, appears to have exactly the right understanding of social media: give people a lot of different opportunities to engage, and hope that over time, they will eventually become more and more involved with the channel. While The Real News certainly is not bashful about asking people to become monthly subscribers, it certainly offers people a number of other ways to help out and be involved.

On the whole, I think the Real News is a remarkable operation, and it appears to have a very good grasp of how to operate a progressive news show in today's user-focused, grassroots-supported, social media environment. I think the channel deserves much more support from the progressive blogosphere, and I'll be excited to see it take off during the 2008 elections.