Planting Liberally

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.

The recent launch of the staunchly pro-business, anti-reality Fox Business Channel serves as yet another reminder that conservatives have too strong a grip on the national media, hampering any change that we may have of real progressive social change. While FBN's first week was marked by technical glitches, low viewership numbers, and poor editorial choices, it's easy to imagine how the channel could soon skew business reporting even further to the right, thereby making it more difficult for progressive voices to sway investors and business owners to be socially responsible.
There are a variety of strategies for moving the tone of media discource back to the left, but today I want to focus on one which I think gets far too little attention: creating progressive traditional mass media. Progressives certainly do have some traditional media, including a large number of alternative weekly newspapers throughout the country and a small armada of prominent national magazines. We also have some mass media, by which I mean media whose viewership/readership numbers compare reasonably well with purportedly non-partisan/non-ideological, or obviously conservative national-distribution media of the same format. Unfortunately, almost all of our mass media is in new media: the progressive blogosphere is one of the few mass media institutions whose audience reach competes reasonably well with purportedly non-partisan or conservative political media of comparable format.
The lack of progressive traditional mass media is a big problem for both the political effectiveness of our movement, for obvious reasons. Taken as a whole, the traditional mass media still reaches far more people than progressive media, and therefore helps drive political discourse. Politicians gravitate to that incredibly large source of potential votes, and tend to eschew progressive arguments in order to garner traditional mass media coverage. In this kind of environment, it's incredibly difficult to establish progressive electoral and legislative narratives. True, the traditional mass media are slowing losing audience share to newer, more progressive media, but this shift is far too slow. With the average household still watching nearly seven hours of TV per day, it seems likely that traditional mass media will have an outsized influence on our political discourse for at least another decade, and possibly much longer.
There are four kinds of traditional media which progressives need to watch carefully, and in which progressives should try to establish a foothold. In order of priority, I think they are: cable news, national newspapers, local newspapers, and talk radio. With one exception, each of these mass media are currently under the influence of an outsized and outspokenly conservative mass media institution: Fox News Channel (cable), the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post (national newspapers), Clear Channel radio network (talk radio). I added local newspapers to the list because there appears to be a concerted effort on the part of conservative businessmen, ranging from Rupert Murdoch to Dean Singleton, to snap up local newspapers and turn them into right-wing rags. This effort is far from complete, but it appears to be the latest thrust in the conservative movement's longstanding effort to control traditional mass media.
More on what is being done to address this gap, and what more we need to do, over the flip...
The good news is that there are already a few efforts in flight to address the gap in traditional mass media. Democracy Now! is perhaps the best known and oldest progressive TV talk show, and is distrbuted by a small network of independent radio stations (Pacifica Radio). The 2004 elections spurred the creation of the Air America Radio network, and the Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller radio shows (distributed by Jones Radio Network, which isn't expressly progressive like AAR.) More recently, we've seen the creation of progressive TV channels Free Speech TV, Link TV, and The Real News. As far as I know, there is no effort to create a nationally respected newspaper with an emphatically progressive op-ed page, although the News Guild (a division of Communication Workers of America) has expressed interest in newspaper ownership in the past, making a bid to purchase several Knight-Ridder newspapers when they went on the block in late 2005. There was also a tantalizing post on Dailykos by Major Danby about creating a progressive USA Today many months ago, but I haven't seen much follow-up from Major Danby (possibly because, from the look of his diary archive, he spent the next few months fundraising for YearlyKos.)
I'll return to the problem of progressive newspaper establishment in a later post. Let's focus more sharply on progressive radio and TV, for now.
The bad news is that these nascent efforts are not, for the most part, large enough or integrated enough to drive progressive narratives into the national political discourse. Nor is the problem entirely due to small audience share. Despite the fact that Link TV can be accessed from one in four US households, it doesn't appear to have the same impact on national political discourse as, say, DailyKos or Huffington Post, whose monthly visitorship numbers are 1.8 million and 3.5 million, respectively.
There are, I believe, three big steps we need to take in order to address this problem:

• Expand the reach and power of progressive traditional mass media, by creating public campaigns to encourage broadcasters to distribute progressive shows like Democracy Now!. I plan to do a bit more research on this issue, but as far as I can tell, there are many markets which lack a progressive radio or TV show, despite having a rich density of potential progressive audience members. In some of these markets, I'm sure, conservative ownership of broadcast media makes it difficult to distribute these shows, but my guess is that there are a number of progressive-rich media markets where at least one or two non-conservative broadcast channels could become progressive media distributors. That potential creates an opening for a liberal entrepreneur, who could make good money hammering out deals to bring progressive traditional mass media into new markets.
• Insinuate items from the progressive traditional mass media into online conversation. If we want to insinuate progressive traditional mass media into online conversation, perhaps the first and most important step is broad distribution on YouTube. Despite its many idiosynchracies, YouTube is by far and away the most popular channel for distributing online video; YouTube videos regularly make their way into blog posts, Facebook profiles, and so on. While Link TV, The Real News, and Air America all have YouTube channels, it's important to expand adoption of YouTube to include progressive TV shows like Democracy Now!, Ed Schultz, and Stephanie Miller. Progressive traditional mass media institutions should establish presences on YouTube, if they haven't already, and team up with progressive activists to ensure that their shows are regularly excerpted and distributed on YouTube. Progressive bloggers, in turn, should subscribe to these channels and embed videos whenever possible.
• Encourage progressive traditional mass media (especially progressive TV) to cover more issues of interest to progressive new media, especially domestic issue coverage. A quick search over the past few weeks reveals not one single YouTube video about the S-CHIP story from Link TV, The Real News, or Air America. Now, I'm picking on a single issue, but it's fair to say that the lion's share of videos from LinkTV and The Real News have an international focus, while Air America's recent YouTube videos are more focused on domestic politics. There's nothing wrong with international coverage, and we could all use a better understanding of the world around us. But our experience in the progressive blogosphere clearly demonstrates that we simply can't impact domestic politics unless we cover it and comment on it. While it's important for the progressive blogosphere to pay more attention to coverage from progressive traditional mass media, and to embed videos from these sources in blog posts, it's equally important for progressive traditional mass media to harmonize their coverage - in some small way - with the topics covered by the progressive blogosphere.

These are three rather tall orders, for a variety of reasons. Achieving better market penetration for progressive traditional mass media will require a bit of alchemy, and will probably require overcoming some fairly entrenched, conservative interests. Insinuating YouTube videos from progressive traditional mass media into the progressive blogosphere will be a bit like herding cats. And moving the editorial policies of progressive traditional mass media will be incredibly difficult, or will require policy-by-grantmaking, which is both irritating and expensive. Nevertheless, I believe it's possible to make real progress on all of these fronts. We are now at a point where it will be possible, perhaps in the space of a year or two, to establish a beachhead for progressive viewpoints within the traditional mass media landscape. I'll be addressing each of these three efforts in more detail in future blog posts, but in the meantime, I certainly welcome your thoughts and feedback. Drop a line in the comments if you have other ideas about creating progressive traditional mass media with political impact.