Planting Liberally

Via CNN, it looks like the writer's strike may soon be over, with WGA leaders voting to recommend the contract negotiated last week with the AMTPA. In addition to support from the leadership, it appears that members who attended meetings in LA and New York yesterday generally approved the contract.

This contract includes provisions for royalties on Internet media, which was the major sticking point from day one. Unfortunately, contract clauses which would have allowed WGA to represent animation and reality TV workers were dropped. WGA will pursue these workers, but without guaranteed neutrality on the part of studios.

I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the industry to say whether the deal is a good one or a bad one, although it strikes me as very significant that the writers have won an agreement in principle to royalties for Internet distribution. That should lay the groundwork for the union to share in the prosperity of new media distribution. Moreover, I think the strike has been a very visible reminder to America's workers. First and most generally, that workers have power and that when they stick together, they can win. More specifically, that professional workers belong in unions and that union representation is highly relevant to them. There are, I hope, millions of professional writers, artists, designers, and software developers taking a look at what the WGA has accomplished, and the degree to which it has reshaped its industry, and thinking, "hey, I can do that."

Congratulations to the writers on a hard-fought victory!

Whenever I write about progressive TV, I inevitably get a healthy dose of criticism in the comments from folks who think that progressive TV should be dispassionate, non-partisan, objective, and truth-focused - essentially, a recreation of PBS. (In fact, the last post featured a commenter who asked why more progressives don't just support PBS.) I also get a reasonable amount of pushback every time I suggest some variant on the notion that progressives should develop a mirror image of Fox News - a hyper-partisan, foaming-at-the-mouth progressive channel.

For the record, I don't think that creating a mirror image of Fox News is a good idea, for several reasons. One, I don't think progressives react well to that style of news, and a progressive channel that can't do well within the progressive base is a non-starter. Two, I think Fox News isn't so much a conservative channel as a Republican Party establishment channel. As Eric Boehlert pointed out earlier this week, Fox's cozy relationship with the Republican Party is now putting its audience share at risk, and I'm not sure I want that kind of future for a progressive TV channel. Finally, I think the core tenet of progressivism - "we're all in this together" - simply doesn't have room for Fox's aggressive, divisive, insipid style.

On the other hand, I firmly disagree with the notion that progressives need to build their own PBS. Many progressives seem to think that it's possible to build a TV channel which trades in fully objective journalism, and that doing so would benefit the progressive movement as much as Fox has benefited the conservative movement. I think that it's both impossible and non-beneficial for the progressive movement besides. Follow me across the flip for details.

I think objective journalism is simply impossible, at every level of the journalistic enterprise. At the highest level, which stories does a journalistic enterprise pursue? On a given day, do we track the latest news about Britney Spears, or about the future of the wind power industry? For a more substantive question, do we follow the debate on Iraq among Democratic presidential hopefuls, or the debate on taxes among Republican presidential candidates? It's possible to build a truthful channel which focuses on any of those story lines, but the choice of story lines is certainly not objective, and does tend to promote certain value systems over others.

At a more granular level, there are questions regarding how a story is put together and packaged which make objectivity impossible. What headline should we use to describe the Democratic presidential debate, or the State of the Union address? Who should we call for comments on the bids in the FCC's 700 block auction? With limited resources and space, it's impossible to answer any of these questions in a trully objective way. Every choice along these lines introduces some bias into a story.

There is, I think, some nostalgia in progressive circles for the "golden age" of journalism, covering approximately the New Deal through the beginning of the Reagan years. The story line goes that journalism during that time was honest, unbiased, and objective, and that government during that time was regularly hounded by the press and forced to do the right thing. The pinnacle of this story line includes the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the unveiling of the Watergate conspiracy. Believers of this narrative argue that we need to somehow return to that golden age, and all will be right with our media.

I think this narrative is deeply flawed. This reading of history ignores the overwhelmingly white, male, and upper-middle-class nature of the power structure of those years, and the ways in which the news media often enforced that power structure. While it's true that journalistic enterprises may have lavished more money on reporters and supported more in-depth coverage of important stories, the impartiality which news media rigorously claimed was actually deeply deceptive, and may have served to undermine emerging progressive movements of those times. This is not unlike Pastor Dan's point on civil religion, namely, that it's really the establishment of the values of a certain segment of society (mainline Protestant denominations) as normative. (Full disclosure: my wife is a once-a-week front pager at Street Prophets.)

Moreover, I think that even if it were possibe to develop a modern objective news channel, it wouldn't be much help to progressives. Sure, such a channel could investigate the reality behind the talking points of each party, and could help viewers judge which politicians are lying and which aren't. Sure, such a channel could put today's arguments in proper context, reminding viewers that we've heard the "six more months" argument countless times. But what then?

This sort of journalism is obsessed with hunting down facts and reporting them, but not with examining social narratives and questioning or event overturning them. Journalism of this sort is more-or-less incapable of questioning the political environment. Instead, it accepts that environment, asks questions about the policy details, perhaps examines proposals for reform along the way, and doesn't do much more. The result of this model of journalism is is technocratic liberalism, the governing regime of the late 20th century. Technocratic liberalism is a regime primarily concerned with finding the best technical solutions to a variety of social problems, and tends to be remarkably wonky. It's a a fine way to go, I suppose, in that it produces a government which does a reasonably good job at solving problems. It's certainly a lot better than our current Shock Doctrine regime. The trouble with technocratic liberalism is that it's technocratic - it tends to elevate bureaucrats and technical experts while disempowering ordinary folks, and doesn't address problems underlying the political environment as a whole.

If our only choices in political and journalistic models were, on the one hand, fear-and-gossip journalism coupled with Shock Doctrine politics, and objective journalism coupled with technocratic liberalism on the other hand, then I'd choose the second, in a heartbeat. But it's not clear to me that, the second option is even possible. That's not just a philosophical point about the nature of journalism, but an economic point about the business of journalism. Now that Fox has unleashed dishonest, partisan, sensationalist journalism on our media landscape, it's not clear that the news media can return to the purported golden age of journalism without losing significant audience share to Fox.

Instead, I think that the solution is to take the model that we've developed and nurtured in the progressive blogosphere, and make it available in a more accessible format on TV. Whereas the conservative model of journalism is "fair and balance (and dishonest)", the progressive model of journalism should be "biased, active, and proud of it." Progressive TV should have a progressive bias, and should be proud of that bias. Our journalistic enterprises should make their viewpoint obvious, and, from time to time, should remind viewers why it's a valid and worthwhile point of view to hold. More than that, our journalistic enterprises should be action- and engagement-oriented, as the blogosphere is. There may be good reasons for progressive TV to avoid explicitly endorsing candidates, as bloggers do, but there is no reason that progressive TV can't explicitly encourage viewers to vote, contact their elected officials, start their own blogs, and run for office. Indeed, progressive TV makes a whole new kind of engagement possible, thanks to interactive TV formats like Current.

If "objective" journalism creates technocratic liberalism, and fear-and-gossip journalism creates Shock Doctrine politics, then biased-and-active journalism will create, I hope, a highly engaged, populist, and tolerant politics. After all, such a journalism is emphatic in its embrace of engagement, and encourages people to create and explore a diverse, Long Tail media landscape. It tends to disempower powerful media enterprises; it tends to make debate on a very wide range of subjects possible, via the massively parallel architecture of the web; and it can support discussions which fundamentally alter the terms of debate. This kind of journalism doesn't guarantee progressive victories in elections and policy per se, but it heavily rigs the rules of the game in our favor.

Naturally, such journalism still requires fact-finding, and all the resources necessary to do good investigation. I am not suggesting that we abandon our zeal for rigorously collecting and analyzing hard data. Instead, I'm suggesting that we do so with an explicit and transparent point of view, and that we attempt to reorient the structure of journalism and politics along those lines.

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 last few months, I've written a fair amount about progressive TV, especially about creating new progressive TV offerings. For the most part, I've focused on the delivery mechanism and, at a fairly high level, the business model for making it real. I've described an entrepreneurial strategy for creating a network of leased access progressive cable channels and I've reviewed the efforts of The Real News to distribute a progressive news show in as many different format as possible.

Today I want to zero in on the problem of creating content for progressive TV, since I think it's crucial to success. For a long time, I've been frustrated to see that the TV clips which generally get embedded in the progressive blogosphere are takes from Countdown, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report (well, that was the case before the writers' strike, anyway.) Democracy Now! and online progressive shows like GoLeft.TV, by comparison, don't tend to get much buzz. That's a problem for the progressive movement, because it means that some of our most partisan media outlets - the progressive blogs - are generating buzz for allegedly non-partisan shows controlled by media conglommerates like GE and Viacom, and anchored by white men. That's no way for us to build a diverse, independent progressive media enterprise.

If we want to succeed in building a traditional progressive media empire, especially a progressive TV empire, then we'll need to focus on the problem of producing content for progressive TV. In particular, progressive TV will need to produce content which is most likely to be readily adopted by grassroots progressive audiences and progressive bloggers. This kind of organic adoption is key to stealing audience share away from more conservative or middle-of-the-road traditional media, and building sufficient buzz for progressive TV to make it sustainable and even profitable.

Given the scarcity of dollars available for progressive TV, programmers should be judicious in planning and developing content. In particular, they should be planning content which is relevant to major topics of discourse within the progressive movement; readily embeddable in short clips; capable of being integrated with real world community events, ala Drinking Liberally nights or DFA meetups; relatively cheap to produce; and capable of driving new ideas into the national discourse outside the progressive movement.

At the "sweet spot" intersection of all of these success factors, I believe, is coverage of major political events, in particular election returns, televised debates, national party conventions, the State of the Union, and to a much lesser degree, some Supreme Court decision announcements and Congressional committee hearings. These kinds of events are predictably the source of a lot of buzz, both inside and outside the progressive movement. The conversation surrounding these events, especially the spur-of-the-moment analysis by TV pundits, can be tremendously important in shaping the political impact of the events in the weeks and months following.

Moreover, these sorts of headline events occur at predictable times, and therefore tend to create small, spotaneous offline communities which are capable of generating brief bursts of buzz. As a Drinking Liberally organizer, I can speak with certainty to this - our most popular events are TV watching nights, for things like the State of the Union and election results. In fact, when we don't schedule such events, we regularly get questions about whether there are other groups planning a TV watch night. Although these kinds of events are great opportunities for tuning in to a new progressive channel, and thereby generating buzz for the channel among our membership, we inevitably tune in to a drab, right-center corporate channel like CNN for these shows. The progressive alternative simply doesn't exist.

As a first pass at creating content for progressive TV, programmers could do much worse than plan night-of coverage and analysis for large political events like the State of the Union and election returns. Of course, this kind of analysis should be performed by a host of diverse pundits, specifically including women and minorities. (In fact, such diversity would probably be a competitive advantage vis-a-vis corporate TV; at times CNN's pundits sound like they're stuck in the 1950's, and are totally incapable of understanding a political environment where white men aren't completely dominant.)

There are some big challenges to providing this kind of coverage, but I think the most difficult challenge is gathering sufficient data to provide grist for compelling and informed conversation. Although Anderson Cooper's goofy moving pie chart was sort of a joke on the night of Iowa's caucus, CNN's exit poll data was extremely valuable and helped drive the post-election narrative. Progressive content providers need to be able to gather and analyze their own data, whether it be exit polls, or (for televised events like State of the Union or presidential debates) focus groups, snap polls, and the like.

That's a fairly expensive and difficult proposition, but there are some existing models for collecting that data. For example, The Media Consortium has been pooling resources from a variety of traditional progressive media outlets to provide in-depth coverage of selected Congressional committee hearings for about one year; the resulting coverage is available at http://www.themediaconsortium.com/reporting/. Another model, which long-time MyDD readers will be quite familiar with, is the 2006 MyDD/Courage Campaign polling project, essentially a donate-and-provide-input approach to polling. (Full disclosure: my company's done a small amount of technical work for Chris Bowers, who helped organize that project.) I think the 2006 project suffered a bit from the turnaround time required to fund, design, and implement the poll, but it nevertheless produced extremely valuable polling data.

Given that the events for which polling data is needed are highly predictable, and given the proliferation of low-cost polling options like robocalling (such as this outfit, run by MyDD reader IVR Polls), gathering data for progressive programming should not be too far out of reach. The costs could be bourne by some combination of progressive media outlets and grassroots activists, with some share of control of the polling questions provided to donors.

Regardless, the important point is that progressive TV programmers need to begin providing options for progressives who want to watch important political events and hear progressive follow-up analysis. This is hardly a revolutionary idea, and in fact, some progressive programmers are already working towards that goal. The Real News, for example, is working towards establishing desks in DC and New York to facilitate coverage of the presidential election. Once this kind of programming is in place and readily accessible in traditional formats like cable TV, we'll be able to begin transitioning away from center-right corporate TV.

FYI for the metadata afficionados out there: I've gone back through the archives today and have re-tagged my posts, so that everything I've written on progressive TV is tagged "progressive TV", and everything addressing cable is tagged "cable TV". Just doing my part for the semantic web, I guess. Enjoy!

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.

Yesterday I wrote about an important opportunity for making cable TV a bit more progressive - the possibility of replacing Tucker Carlson with a progressive on MSNBC. The comments on that post showed clearly that there are a lot of people thinking about how to make cable more progressive - ranging from a wide-ranging debate on who should represent progressives on cable TV, to a thoughtful post on how to schedule a progressive evening lineup, and more. I think this kind of energy is really valuable, and I hope that it's not wasted on MSNBC. While the channel does appear willing to experiment with progressive voices, it will never be a reliable progressive cable channel, and we shouldn't expect it to be. Instead, we should be planning to create our own progressive cable channel. Luckily, recent FCC rulings have just made that a little bit easier.

On Wednesday, the FCC slashed rates on leased cable access to 10 cents per subscriber per month. With leased access, independent programmers can pay to gain access to part of a cable carrier's lineup. Rates on leased access were about four times higher prior to Wednesday's decision.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've exchanged a few emails with Bob Fertik, President of Democrats.com, about the FCC's various efforts to regulate cable. We both agree that this decision opens a door for liberal entrepreneurs to begin laying the groundwork for a national progressive cable news channel. (And I should also give credit to a friend of Bob, who spoke to me about some of the broad outlines of a strategy for progressive cable, which I outline below.) The basic strategy is simple: line up prime time leased access on cable channels in a number of major media markets, and put progressive programming in that time. If that strategy can succeed with representation in many major markets, then we might be able to leverage it into a dedicated national channel. While the strategy is simple, it's certainly not easy. Over the flip, I'll have more on what we will need to pull together to get this idea to be successful, and opportunities for liberal entrepreneurs to make money while creating a national progressive cable network.

Costs and advertisers
As a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, let's consider a cable channel like the Ohio News Network, which clearly covers an important area from an electoral point of view.  The ONN has about 1.5 million subscribers, in markets that include Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.  Under the new FCC regulations, leasing 24 hours of access to the channel will now cost about $150,000 / month.  Leasing two hours of prime time will cost significantly less - obviously not 1/12th the cost, but perhaps 1/6th the cost of a full day's access; we'll call it $25,000 / month.  What that means is that a progressive cable news channel will have to earn at least $25,000 / month in advertising - and probably considerably more, to cover the costs of programming, equipment, facilities, personnel, and so on.

This is the first problem which liberal entrepreneurs hoping to create a progressive cable news channel have to solve: finding monthly advertising.  Fortunately, there's not a lot of competition.  There are only a handful of shows where an advertiser looking to reach a targeted progressive cable audience can go.  The existing progressive satellite TV channels (Link TV, Real News and Free Speech TV) are all non-profit and don't take advertising.  Progressive shows like Countdown are not particularly well-marketed to progressive audiences by their corporate parents, and I suspect that the marketing flubs are mirrored in a similar inability to attract advertisers who want to reach a progressive audience.  I believe that there is an opportunity to get considerable advertising from companies who are reaching a progressive audience.  What's more, as the 2008 election picks up steam, there will be more and more money available from Democratic candidates to advertise on progressive TV.  (Whether the candidates wise up and take advantage of the opportunity to reach a geographically and politically segmented audience is another matter.)

I think it'd be interesting to see a liberal entrepreneur create a cable television advertising representation company to sell prospective advertising spots on a progressive cable news channel.  Such a company would focus on market research, would identify the demographics of those likely to watch such a channel, would identify products and services which would likely be popular among those demographics, and would make a case to businesses that advertising on such a channel would be good for the bottom line.  Naturally, it would be difficult to sell advertising on a channel that doesn't yet exist, but if such a company could succeed in lining up potential advertisers, we could solve an important piece of the puzzle.

Programming and Marketing/Adoption
Lining up programming for progressive cable is a challenging but fun problem to solve.  Fortunately, there are already a few solutions on offer - in particular, the lineups for satellite networks Link TV, Real News, and Free Speech TV.  The comments on yesterday's blog post also brought to the surface a whole flurry of suggestions for potential progressive media figures who could become talk show hosts and cable pundits, and some pretty interesting thoughts about structuring the lineup to maximize audience flow.

Unfortunately, programming is only half of the problem.  The other half of the problem - and what appears to be the reason that Donahue floundered on MSNBC - is marketing the programming to a progressive audience, and/or organic adoption of the programming.  Back in 2003, Donahue didn't have executives willing to market his program to a targeted progressive audience; the progressive blogosphere was not yet strong enough to drive organic adoption; and YouTube was nowhere to be found.  He simply could not find an audience. (Update: An alert reader points me to an interview posted at Media Matters - conducted on Hannity and Colmes, of all places - which points out that Donahue's numbers were higher than anyone else's at MSNBC in early 2003. Execs just didn't like the fact that he was so liberal. Yet another reason why we shouldn't trust MSNBC to be a progressive standard-bearer, and should form our own network.)

Nowadays, the progressive blogosphere and other elements of the netroots, like DFA and Drinking Liberally, are plenty strong enough to drive organic adoption of a cable lineup.  Indeed, we are already doing just that for Countdown, the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report.  What I find a bit surprising is that we are not really doing the same for the three progressive satellite TV channels which are already up and running.  I'm not entirely sure why that is, although I have some guesses.  For example, it's possible that the channels aren't widely enough distributed (they each reach about 20-30 million households); or that their programming does not really relate to the kinds of topics we tend to talk about in the progressive blogosphere; or that they don't do enough to post their shows to YouTube.

This question is important, because if a progressive cable channel will succeed, it will require either a hefty marketing budget, or broad organic adoption of its programming through YouTube and blogosphere embeds.  Since a hefty marketing budget for progressive cable isn't likely to appear out of thin air, we'll have to build the audience for progressive cable through cost-effective blogosphere advertising and word-of-mouth embeds.

Yesterday's comments, incidentally, provided an interesting idea which could both generate new programming, and help drive organic adoption: a YouTube-driven, American Idol-style competition for talk show hosts.  (Full disclosure, this idea was provided by my Drinking Liberally co-host.)  I could easily see this idea turning into a fantastic website, focused on building a fan base for a variety of progressive media personalities, who would eventually become hosts, guests and pundits for a progressive cable channel.  It would be easy enough to monetize a site like that with advertising or ticket sales and other merchandise related to real-world appearances by those media figures.  (My guess is that some of the next generation of TV pundits will come from progressive comedians.)

Regardless of whether such an idea would actually fly, I believe it's important to tie together programming development with marketing/adoption concerns.  We now have a whole movement capable of driving organic adoption of progressive cable, and we should design programming and outreach efforts which take advantage of that.

Getting a foot in the door, and tying it all together
So far, I've focused on problems in progressive cable development with liberal entrepreneurs can directly address in a way which is sustainable and feasible without a significant investment of capital - things gathering prospective advertisers, building a prospective audience online, etc.  However, the success of all of this clearly hinges on the possibility of actually putting together blocks of leased access cable time in a variety of major metropolitan areas.  That means finding a string of existing cable channels for which we could actually lease prime time hours.  To return to my earlier example, while ONN might be an attractive network on which to lease access from an electoral point of view, the network isn't required to lease access.  Particularly for prime time, finding leased access availability is very difficult, because many cable channels already make lucrative use of that time.

The trick will almost certainly revolve around finding channels which are struggling, and cannot currently successfully compete with other channels in their market.  It will also probably require at least a few individuals with good connections in the world of cable TV, who will be able to guide an application for leased access to successful completion.

In this case, I think there is some room for progressive activists to join in the effort.  For example, crowdsourcing can help identify struggling cable channels throughout the country - identifiable as those channels which are already struggling to field successful and stable programs during prime-time, or even during off-hours.  To consider a more elaborate example, progressive activists can work together, perhaps using wikis or similar tools, to develop a sort of pro-forma business plan for a progressive cable channel in a single major media market; such a plan could be adapted and tweaked for a string of channels throughout the country, and could help facilitate successful leased access applications.  (h/t to Bob Fertik for this idea.)

At the end of the day, I believe that creating a national progressive cable channel will be a huge and complex undertaking, which will require overlapping efforts from a number of overlapping entrepreneurial ventures, as well as a stable of well-connected cable executives who can help facilitate the process of obtaining prime time leased access.  Nevertheless, the FCC's decision this week made the effort much more attainable, and we should make use of this golden opportunity.

Tucker Carlson's low ratings at MSNBC have put his show on the chopping block. Not long ago, MSNBC almost inked a deal to replace Carlson with Rosie O'Donnell. O'Donnell, while not exactly a movement progressive, is certainly left-of-center in a non-establishment way, and a marked improvement over Carlson.

This is a great opportunity for the progressive movement. If Carlson is replaced by a progressive, the MSNBC line up really will start to look like a bona fide progressive alternative to Fox. I'm the last person to trust that MSNBC will stay dedicated to that kind of lineup, or that they will appropriately market the lineup and do a good job of getting businesses to advertise. Still, this is about the shortest path we have towards a progressive alternative to Fox, and we should not ignore it. (Incidentally, there was an important FCC ruling earlier this week which does create another path, though much longer and more arduous, towards progressive cable -
more on that soon.)

And yet, we are having difficulty converting this opportunity into reality. For starters, MSNBC doesn't appear to have a viable replacement for Carlson. I'm not sure why that is, exactly. Certainly there are good progressives capable of hosting a good news and opinion talk show, like Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, or Tavis Smiley. My last post on installing progressives at MSNBC offered up a few other interesting alternatives in the comments - including David Shuster, Rachel Maddow and Randi Rhodes. The problem could be a matter of availability, or it could be differences in editorial style (i.e., MSNBC might not be interested in giving Smiley a slot because they don't like his views/interview style/whatever.) Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be an organized progressive effort to get behind a replacement for Carlson, while conservatives are rallying to keep the show on the air (see savetucker.org).

What should we be doing to find a viable progressive alternative to Tucker Carlson, and to convince MSNBC management to choose that alternative? I'd love to hear thoughts on this.

The FCC decided yesterday to postpone a vote on whether or not cable penetration has reached 70% of US households, meaning that the agency can impose regulations on the cable industry. However, the FCC did decide to slash rates on leased cable access TV, down to 10 cents per month per subscriber for 24 hours of access. This new decision opens a huge opportunity for liberal entrepreneurs to begin developing a framework for a national progressive cable TV channel.

I don't have time to write up all of my thoughts just now; more will come on the weekend. However, I have three quick hits:

• A liberal entrepreneur could begin taking bids on potential advertising space on progressive prime-time cable TV in major metropolitan areas, in order to demonstrate feasibility of such a venture. The FCC's decision means that the amount of advertising needed to sustain this kind of venture is now much lower (perhaps 3 times lower) than it was recently.
• A liberal entrepreneur could undertake a data mining experiment to identify stations which might be most likely to grant leased access, and which have coverage of major metropolitan areas. For example, data mining could help uncover stations which are financially weak and struggling to find advertisers.
• Finally, an entrepreneur could try and solve one of the biggest problems in gaining leased access: finding connections with TV operators. This is a very tricky problem, an I'm not really sure how to solve it. But it occurs to me that some form of social networking activism would be helpful along these lines.

That's all I've got for now. More coming this weekend, here and at MyDD!