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Against the wind,
Current sails forth
Al Gore's network targeting America's young
By Dan Weil
There
are two ways to look at Al Gore’s new network, Current, which launched
yesterday.
One
is that it’s a dumb idea, and a lot of people think it is. Why launch a
news channel targeting the very people, adults 18-34, who are so little
inclined to watch the
news?
But
there’s another way to look at it. If Gore is right and Current catches
on, it stands to be hugely successful as a network of a new mold, unlike
any now airing, melding as it does the internet and television for a
generation at ease with both.
While people may ridicule Current, they also ridiculed MTV more than two decades
ago, a network that launched on a not dissimilar premise of appealing to
young viewers on their own terms.
After one day, it's already getting a range of reviews. Not
many were out-and-out positive.
Writes The Washington Post’s Chip Crews, “It's unfair to
draw conclusions based on a single day's offerings, but yesterday Current
TV played a little like ‘Today’ or ‘Good Morning America’ on a
slow news day. (Of course the people were younger and the hip-hip quotient
much higher.) Blandly uplifting segments – ‘pods,’ in Current
parlance -- on sex and dating in Iran, bridge-and-canyon skydivers and a
pompous toad of a graphic artist glided harmlessly by, neither giving
offense nor commanding full attention.”
Red Herring was already predicting some changes: "While
Current may not remain in its current format for long, the channel will be
an interesting one to watch develop, both on TV and the web, even as Mr.
Gore and his political career have undergone several evolutions of their
own."
Current is available to about 20 million households
through DirecTV
and some Time Warner and Comcast cable systems.
Viewers can voice
their views about potential segments on www.current.tv, and the most
popular segments will be shown most frequently on the air. To fit with
current lingo, these segments
are called pods.
Most
of the pods will run from 15 seconds to five minutes, which should fit
well with Generation Y’s short attention span. Topics include
entertainment, parenting, careers and global events.
The
channel runs stories about whatever is the most popular search topic on
Google, every half hour.
Current
arose out of the ruins of the old Newsworld International, inheriting
several of that channel’s distribution deals.
Gore
and attorney Joel Hyatt, the man behind Hyatt Legal Services commercials,
bought Newsworld International, a 24-hour cable channel, in 2004 for $70
million and turned it into Current. They put in some of their own money
along with about 20 other investors, including Robert Pittman, who created
MTV’s programming and was CEO of America Online, and Rob Glaser, chief
executive of RealNetworks.
David
Neuman, 44, a former executive at NBC, Channel One, Disney and CNN, is the
programming chief. He, Gore, 57, and Hyatt, 55, run the venture. Most of
the network’s 120-plus staffers are under 40.
Being famous or
good-looking doesn’t hurt if you want to work there. The
crew of on-air reporters and producers includes former Miss USA Shauntay
Hinton, who studied broadcast journalism at Howard University; Deepak
Chopra’s son Gotham, president of development for the largest comic book
studio in India; and Johnny Bell, a surfer with a degree from UCLA who has
no TV experience but worked on a banana farm in Central America.
In
keeping with the internet’s spirit, yesterday's launch of Current was delayed
five minutes due to a router failure. And users experienced significant
delays in loading the web site’s home page Monday, apparently because it
was inundated with traffic, according to site performance tracker Keynote
systems.
The
channel's early segments included a "Current Caring" feature “Don’t Step
on MY J’s,” which focused on a Virginia collector of Air Jordan
sneakers who spends every cent of his income on them. "Current Caring"
profiled a human rights activist for a Books Not Bars program who’s
trying to reform the system for juvenile offenders. And "Current Hottie"
followed Fatma D’Abo, a Gambian model for Joe’s Jeans, as she walked
along the Sunset Strip.
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Aug. 2, 2005
©
2005
Media Life
- Dan Weil is a
Florida writer.
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