The Art of the Long View
September 24th, 2009 by Jon Taplin
I’m playing Charlie Rose this morning in a live Webcast called Art of the Long View; The Media Company of 2020. I’m interviewing Peter Chernin, former President of News Corp and Gordon Crawford, the Managing Director of Capital Group, the most important media investor.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O93DFBH43BI]
awesome. please ask gordon about yahoo, what kind of unique stuff does it do in 2020.
Oh, this is good.
Jon, thanks so much for posting that link. I watched the entire webcast and it was excellent. I even took notes (heck, I only did that part of the time in school)!
I’ll wait to hear what some of the others have to say before posting any questions/comments other than saying I hope that the ‘next session’ that Mr. Chernin mentioned becomes a reality. Really, thanks. That was great.
Darn you Alex! I though I was gonna be first
.
Missed it. Someone publish notes, please.
1-2-3-NOTIT!
I hope USC-ASC provides a link for after the fact viewing somewhere. It was great in real time, but will be well worth revisiting I’m sure.
Len The same URL works for watching it.
Thanks Jon.
I apologize for the video buffering. We hired an outside house to host it and they screwed up because the server demand was much more than they expected. We’re trying to move it over to our own servers in the next hour.
Thanks. That is what is happening here; the buffering is torture. I saw about fifteen minutes. I’ll see the rest of it tomorrow. So far, fantastic but I haven’t seen the future yet, just the “It’s a comin’” sort of like a Brother Dave Gardner routine.
Seriously, thanks for organizing this. I think you have done a real service with this series.
OK- It is now up on You Tube and you can watch it straight through. The University was not prepared for the number of hits it got.
Does that mean there will be more to come? You’ve clearly got a good thing going here…
Yes. This is the first in a series.
Watched it all. There are some comments I will make when off the company dime, but initially, if one is an artist in this long view, one should learn the ways of Tony Soprano or commit suicide now.
Tribalism is ascending. Keep in mind, those tea baggers carrying those offensive signs are an example of crowd sourcing. The savvy content producers learn to tap those domains locally then promote them globally. Same as it was when Muscle Shoals was hot and Lynard Skynard and the Allman Brothers beat the Dead.
Here’s a review of the conversation from PaidContent.org.
It’s missing a few critical details (like proper credit for JT), but still, it’s interesting to see which messages tend to resonate among the ‘yes-but-how-do-we-make-money’ crowd.
Possibly because little Gordon and Peter said was news to people in the media market. It emphasized that the US artists and producers are on their own because the critical piece T-Bone emphasized, access to capital, will be shrinking.
The statement that this is an exciting time resonated because as we’ve noted here, in chaos there is opportunity but also opportunism. Talent committed to its own well being has to learn how to organize its own resources, how to pick the niche but also how to make a niche work globally.
Perhaps we should react to that. The money guys (what Gordon, Peter and to a large part, Jon are) aren’t telling the content community much. We’re slaves or intelligent bandits. Anyone notice how the latest Apple commercial soundtrack is a straight up rip off from Gary Lewis and the Playboys, something their target demographic would seldom notice?
My band of 15 years ago released an album that just got us a BMI check ($43) this week. Fun to know but intriguing in that we have no idea how or why those particular songs made their way to Malaysia and the Phillipines. OTOH, I take back some of the things I’ve said about BMI. The wheel grinds slow.
Small as they are I look at my YouTube download numbers and take note of which videos consistently are being downloaded globally and which themes are coming up repeatedly. Religious and mystical themes jump to the top every time. That is a clue where the zeitgeist is at the moment IMHO.
Len In my view, this is going to work out well for the artists. Not for all the people who make music but for the artists. Is the Mass Age over?
Meanwhile, another artist decides not to record any more music. And gets applause for it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1215725/Lily-Allen-declares-quitting-music-career-acting.html
Another mass age message to the angry mob.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/news/20090925_FAC.shtml
The reason so many people call themselves artists these days is because there is too much leisure time.
The Mass Age may be over. At least the recording artists are banding together to point out which responses are dumb and what might have some chance of working. I still maintain the best outcome will be artists having their own coalitions without all the front people. Maybe that doesn’t work because as you said, access to capital is a key to success on the A-list. I don’t have a clue about that.
I find myself unable to pick a place to stand and that might mean I don’t have a place or don’t want one or won’t do what it takes. I’m taking the wife to the Guthrie Center next weekend to watch Arlo launch his new tour from the little church and hang out for a few days not for any advantages or even an introduction. I just want to be where something warm is going on and be happy to be part of the crowd. I’m waking up from the months of therapy a little lost. As I told someone, I may understand more than a good song and a wailing guitar, but it is all I seem to want to consider right now.
T, if they took all your awards away, all the success and left you with only your songs and an axe and family, would it be enough? Maybe that’s a sappy question but I don’t know how to respond to what an artist is, I just know you are one and I take your opinions very seriously.
Frankly, what the young consider art and good music right now scares the hell out of me. I’ve never been that angry or dismissive without cause. Never learned the blues. White to my very shoes.
Jeremy Boob to the last.
If they took all the awards away, all the success and left me with only my songs and an axe and family, it would it be way more than enough. They could take the songs, too. My family and my guitar are enough.
I want to say that I could not be more grateful for everything that has happened. If I can find a way to be more grateful, I will. But I never look at the awards. I go watch my daughter play volley ball. And I get to play music with Willie Nelson.
I think we are doing a show in Nashville in November. If so, I’d like to invite you to that. (I’d like to invite you too, Hugo.) I’d also be happy to arrange an introduction to Arlo- my favorite Republican.
In the meantime, I’m here facing the Omega Point.
I finally got back to choir two weeks ago. I missed it.
Thank you, T. I’m deeply honored. I’d love to come see you play. Arlo? Cool. He has an axe I want to look at more closely, that composite 12.
The Omega Point? Everything I read says you’re at a peak and tomorrow is waiting.
The Omega Point. Teilhard de Chardin. I’d forgotten. It’s been decades since I read his work.
Given social networks, we may be at the point of acceleration or disintegration. This is where sensitivity to initial conditions, the thousands of hours poured into lists for almost decades may tip the balance.
“But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but
a star.
– Robert Browning,
Abt Vogler
A salute to wikipedia and the tribe.
Jon,
Having watched this thing in its entirety, I’d want to say first that you’re far more probitive than the sychophantic Charlie Rose. What I took from this discussion was mainly some informative inside-baseball about how to bet on who’ll make money in the media markets. The secondary lesson, for me, was Mr. Crawford’s crass misunderstanding of print journalism, of the Press as distinct from the media. He begins by reciting a pseudo-historical, pseudo-continuum of Gutenberg through Farnsworth and beyond. Then, ad midpoint in your interview, he disses print news altogether, and then at the end he throws roses on its grave. He seems not to contemplate either the special importance that the American framers attributed to what they quaintly called “the Press”, or to construe that the broadcast media from which he’s profited in the past are instruments of orality, whereas print journalism is a function of literacy. Why would your hosts have skirted the obvious question of whether the decline of print is owing to a decline of our commitment to literacy?
It made me sad for the students and colleagues, there in the room with you, who are proper journalists.
Oh thank you, T Bone! I’d love to go, just as I love what you said about your priorities. Count me in. November.
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara
Here are the official notes. http://annenberg.usc.edu/AboutUs/News/090925LongView.aspx
We actually made some news with this.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090926/bs_nm/us_timewarner_3
Wow! Wow! Wow!
I just watched this video twice. Once listening to it last night while doing my taxes.
And today, pausing and playing back certain bits while writing this here comment.
This has helped cement in my mind so many of the ideas that have been bounced here over the last two years.
Thank you for posting this, Jon.
I just love everything Peter Chernin had to say.
I love how he stresses the difference between physical piracy and internet filesharing. Jon still interjects and says “it’s the same issue” somehow.
As if someone selling hard-copy dvd’s for a profit is the same as some kid copying a file on the internet for no profit.
(News flash! dvd’s are gone. So is the guy selling them on the corner…)
I love how Chernin shoots down Jon’s “Google devalues everything/steals content” meme and says there is no reason to demonize Google. Google is offering a service the news sites are not and it’s rightfully monetizing that service.
The news sites can monetize their own services with their own ads – which they do.
There is no stealing involved. It’s not the same service. One has a future. The other doesn’t.
He also shoots down Jon’s “defense” of journalism, which Jon has conflated with an attack on Chris Anderson’s theories (around 35 minutes in).
Chernin sites the success of crowd-sourced projects like wikipedia and suggests that’s how the new editorial model will look.
In the process showing both how journalism will be saved and giving Anderson’s ideas the credence they deserve.
I also found myself chuckling when Jon tried to pass the ISP tax meme to people other than the readers of this forum (ISP tax: making the ISPs of the world read people’s internet traffic and “dolly out” money to the American media industry). Ha!
Gotta love the nonplussed look on Gordon Crawford’s face, trying to politely entertain this patently erroneous idea.
I also love how Jon thinks just because America isn’t producing any actual products anymore that that the rest of the world should have to be taxed for what America exports – “we do make pieces of desire…” Ho-ho-ho!
You want us to pay for “pieces of desire”, Jon?
Try making cars instead.
Maybe then Crawford, Chernin et al. will invest in the US and not Brazil.
Jon, if you really want a self-sustaining America 3.0 that produces things, you’d better give up on these pipe dreams of monetizing the un-monetizable. Taxing the internet of the world for the benefit of a dying American industry that sells ideas, is not going to fly.
You’ve claimed before that intellectual property is not ideas, yet that’s exactly what the American media industry is selling – ideas, “pieces of desire” – in your own words. That’s not property.
About a year back, you’ve said the rest of the world might decouple from the American economy.
If America persists with IP enforcement, the rest of the emerging world will decouple from Hollywood movies too. Then where will America be?
Hollywood is crap, by your own admission. You’d better give it up for free if you still want the world to consume Red, White and Blue ideas and ideals. You have no other choice. You’ve lost Hollywood’s monopoly on the culture of the world.
Here’s a little thought experiment:
Let’s assume America succeeds in enforcing IP laws on the rest of the world. Well, not on China and India obviously (they don’t pay for American drug patents as it is. They’re not going to pay for movies either) but everyone else who wants to trade with the US.
So now the rest of the world has to choose – do we obey American IP laws and do business with the US – or do we disobey so we can compete in the markets of China and India.
Guess where I’m putting my money?
What you’re suggesting (ISP tax, monetizing intellectual property etc) will lead to nothing less than an American IP mercantilism. Not a good place to start in this brave new world.
I read somewhere that the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative, is that a liberal wishes to see the world as it really is. A conservative wants the world to behave as he imagines it should.
It seems that on the subject of the internet and the future of media is concerned, you are a conservative…despite yourself.
You’re trying to defend what was. Not seeing what’s being born.
Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this video.
This really re-enforces what I’ve been trying to articulate for the past year or so here.
Post more!
Armand- You left out that Chernin thought the ISP license fee would be a good idea. All Crawford said was he had never heard of the idea before. As to your other rejoinders, my guess is that more than 50% of the revenues from such a license fee would flow to non US copyright holders and artists.
As to defending the role of professional editors, I note that most of the posters here, when trying to back up an argument, link to the work of professional writers and editors. I of course believe there is an important role for bloggers or I wouldn’t have this site.
Glad you liked the Long View. Pass it on.
Clay Shirky on noosepapers:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
Gutenberg’s Press was invented in the 1450′s, not in 1836 as Gordon Crawford says at minute 4 of this interview.
HAHA!
That’s not what he said at all!
He said it would be a good idea for the media companies. (emphasis his).
And, most importantly, he said it was “politically unfeasible”.
Unlike Crawford, Chernin had thought of it – and realized the inevitable ramifications of the whole deal.
Too bad you didn’t let Chernin expose the thinking process that lead him to his conclusions. I’m pretty certain the general lines of his thinking will not sound all that different from the rhetoric of what you’ve dubbed as “the copyleft crowd” here on this blog.
As for professional editors, Chernin did quite a good job of explaining how crowd-sourcing Dodgers’ fans would create an effective editorial process. I didn’t think I needed to add any links or arguments of my own.
But if it’s links that are missing from my post, here are two editorial processes for your consideration:
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://en.citizendium.org
The later employs professional editors.
The former is comprehensive.
Also my main jibe was not your defense of editors but your attack of Anderson under the guise of defending editors.
You assume that Anderson is wrong in order to reach the conclusion that professional editors still have a role in tomorrow’s journalism.
This is a prime example of wishful thinking and rationalization. You dislike the conclusion so you choose to see faults in the arguments leading up to it.
Chernin suggested that professional editors might not actually have a place in tomorrow’s news market and gave some very “Andersonian” examples to boot.
You should have probed him further on this too. I’m quite certain you’ll hear him echoing a lot of Anderson if you do.
Anyway, I hope to see more of this and wish to see you talking and even debating this Chernin guy again in the future. It sounds different when it’s not coming from the likes of me.
wow, really old school conversation of where the market is going. Big ent. and music industry will downsize substantially. Esp., if Hollywood thinks they have an edge with reality TV.