Last week, we dropped our first press release announcing us to the world. Yay! As of the end of February, our website is up, and our mobile app will hit the app stores in the next few weeks. Super exciting! Come and join us by getting on the waiting list. You can sign up at https://www.unpress.com/signup

I’m not going to reproduce the press release, but you can read it here: Introducing-UNPRESS

I do want to take some time to give a warm public welcome to the phenomenal individuals who have joined us to help move this forward. It’s a list of veritable titans. I won’t reproduce their bios here; you can read those in the press release linked above, but I have linked to their LinkedIn profiles if you want to investigate further.

• Thomas Evans

• Terence Burke

• Winnie Nelson

• Michael Rosenblum

• Gaby Darbyshire

• Michael Melling

• Amber Allen

• Samson Styles

• Dr. David Gyimah

• Dr. Henry Jenkins

• Dr. Sara Cobb

The Industry is Ripe for Disruption

This press release landed smack amid a challenging time in the news media industry. Thousands of incredibly talented people have lost their jobs in the last few months. It’s projected that this sector could lose up to 10,000 jobs this year, with major layoffs across the industry, from Sports Illustrated, NBC, Time magazine, to The Wall Street Journal and CNN. BuzzFeed shuttered its entire news division last year. Vice will stop publishing on their website and will lay off hundreds. The Messenger shut down entirely after burning through $50 million in investment.1

Sounds like the industry is headed for extinction. That’s certainly the sentiment in The New Yorker article titled “Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?” Honestly, it sounds horrific, but the article's subtitle reads, “The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience.”

That’s exactly what we have done at UNPRESS. We recognize that the core of this problem is fundamentally a titanic shift in people’s viewing habits and social values, particularly in younger generations.2

For a long time, media companies have assumed that millennials and Gen-Z would grow up, buy a big-screen TV, get a cable subscription, and adopt the viewing habits of their parents. It hasn’t happened. Even my 70-year-old neighbors have cut the cord. As Michael Rosenblum is fond of saying, “The ADs on the nightly news are for Depends and Cialis, that tells you all you need to know.”

I’ve heard adults 40+, time and time again, characterize younger generations as essentially vapid. That’s dangerous for many reasons, but mostly because it’s not true. Those who grew up with an iPhone in their pocket and an iPad under their arm have grown up with the ability to access staggering amounts of information on demand, on the go. Some of them have never known a world without Social Media. As a result, they are extremely media and tech-savvy, which has left many highly suspicious of traditional media. They know that the narrative is controlled and shaped by major corporate interests and partisan editorial boards. This flies in the face of one of their most fundamental values. Authenticity.

They can tell at a glance what is Authentic and what is not. As a result, they trust personalities, not organizations.

“Young people in particular are tuning in to influencers and peers for current affairs. Creators Dylan Page, aka News Daddy, and V Spehar, of UnderTheDeskNews, draw 10.4 million and 3 million followers on TikTok, respectively. The New York Times: 595,600.” - Bloomberg Businessweek “Social Media Platforms Are Done With News, But Gen Z Still Treats Them as a Go-To Source”3

This hits on a couple other interesting points about these generations. They prefer to watch vs read. They expect services and content to revolve around their schedule. They are highly mobile - requiring information to be easily available on their mobile device, and they want to engage with their interests in a participatory environment where they can engage, discuss, and explore.

That sums up the fundamentals of the UNPRESS platform. A video-centric, mobile, social media-style participatory environment that prioritizes authentic stories and interactions. In addition, we have built our platform to responsibly support non-fiction content without leading to the toxicity inherent in other platforms.

While it’s still early days for us, not only will UNPRESS help storytellers make a living, but we will also provide a clearly delineated path to success. Whether you’re a professional with a journalism degree or a passionate individual, UNPRESS will provide the tools and training you need.

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Traditional Media will continue to decline.

This will be true not just because of what I wrote above but because their business model has not adapted, and the industry seems intent on continuing to shoot itself in the foot.

Attempts, via lawsuits and legislation, to force companies like Meta (Facebook / Instagram), ByteDance (TikTok), and Google to pay them for news articles they link to was a boneheaded move, to say the least. Many digital news media organizations have long relied on siphoning traffic off of social media platforms to their own website advertisers.

They perhaps failed to realize that modern major tech platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Google (particularly YouTube) are highly tuned to keep users on their platforms and engaged. They are formidable advertising platforms. When their users click links that take them off the platform (like to a news website), that’s detrimental to their business. Yet, Australia and Canada4 passed legislation forcing them to pay media companies they host links to.

Deals were made, but it’s a pyrrhic victory, and they are now realizing it. Meta, who still has not come to an agreement in Canada, changed its algorithm globally to prioritize posts from friends and family over posts from publishers and brands.5 This visibility reduction has compounded, leading to deteriorating Google search engine rankings. And it will only worsen as AI fundamentally changes the nature of search altogether.

The changes at Meta have already resulted in significant revenue declines and the failure of news media organizations like BuzzFeed and Vice.6

Despite what the leadership at these traditional media organizations might believe, Facebook and Google don’t need them.

UNPRESS is the Future

UNPRESS sidesteps many of the issues noted above. Our revenue streams are not fundamentally based on advertising and the resulting negative social effects. We succeed when you succeed.

UNPRESS is the future of authentic news and information. Come build it with us.

What’s your Story?

Build the future with us!

Q: What do TV news and Netflix have in common?

A: They both appear on the same screen. They both tell stories.

Q: What is the difference?

A: TV News has critical information to deliver that is really important for people to know. Netflix doesn’t.

Oh yeah, one other difference. ABC News has 8.15 million viewers on any given night, the vast majority of whom are 65+. Netflix has 232.5 million subscribers, the median age of which is 35.

Why is that?

That’s because Netflix knows how to tell a story. TV news, as a rule, does not. Netflix crafts its stories around some basic rules of storytelling that have been around, tried, and tested for about 3,000 years. Character-driven story arc and resolution. These are the things that hold people’s attention, whether you are watching them on a screen or hearing them told around a campfire.

In a recent OpEd piece for The New York Times, Dr. Anna-Lisa Cohen, a professor of psychology at Yeshiva University, analyzed why we are glued to our TV screens for series like Succession, even if we already know the ending.

“The truth is, we are just as likely to get caught up in a story even when we know what is coming — perhaps because more significant factors determine our enjoyment of narratives rather than simply waiting to learn or guess their resolution. Humans are hard-wired not just to absorb facts but also to lose themselves in stories and attune themselves to the characters and plots unfolding on the screen.”

It is the last sentence here that is so very critical: “Humans are hard-wired not just to absorb facts but also to lose themselves in stories and attune themselves to the characters and plots unfolding on the screen.”

We are a species of storytellers. We have been since the first cavemen scribbled drawings of their hunts on the walls of the caves of Lascaux. We are addicted to stories. All of our major religions are basically stories we tell ourselves over and over: Moses parting the Red Sea; Muhammad rising to heaven from al-Aqsa; Jesus walking on water; Noah building his ark, and so on.

Storytelling is how we, as cultures, deliver important information — The Ten Commandments are the climax of the epic story of the Exodus from Egypt — so compelling that 3500 years later, we still remember it. Netflix gets how to tell great stories — Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Game of Thrones. You name it, you know it. These are stories that resonate with you because the attraction to stories is buried deep in our DNA.

What is news but stories? What is more reality TV than news? And yet, when it comes to telling news stories, we throw away all the lessons we have learned about how to tell a story, acquired over 3,000 years, and instead, we revert to a 70-year-old format that does not resonate with people at all.

Imagine the Exodus story as told by CNN:

“some are holding the Israelite leader, Mr. Moses, culpable for what seems to be the mass murder of every first- born child in Egypt. Joining us live from Cairo, Jack Perkins. Jack, what’s the mood over there at the Royal Palace?”

or Fox News:

“Mr. Moses says that these so-called 10 Commandments come from God, but how to do we know that? Joining us in the studio, a representive of the Pharoah’s government who claims that this Moses guy is not even Jewish; an expert on caligraphy and stone ingraving who says no way this is the finger of God, and a psychiatrist who says that Moses may simply be a schizophrenic who imagines he hears voices. We will also be taking your calls.”

Do you think that anyone would remember the story of Exodus after 35 days, let alone 3500 years? And how many news stories from 35 days ago do you even remember?

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When TV news was invented in the 1950s, it did not come with an instruction manual. God did not descend upon Rockefeller Center and say, “Thou shalt have a reporter do a stand up followed by man on the street soundbites.”

TV news in those days was both complicated and expensive to produce. Broadcast cameras cost a fortune and they weighed a ton, and most stations had only a few of them, so they cobbled stories as best they could under very constraining circumstances.

Technology has changed, particularly with the iPhone, where every reporter carries a broadcast-quality camera with them 24 hours a day, but the architecture of TV news stories has not. They are still made and still look the way they did in 1965. Audiences, however, have moved on.

The same people watching ABC World News Tonight are also watching Netflix, and they have an inherent expectation that the quality of the storytelling is going to be just as good — and, of course, it is not.

But what would happen if instead of doing the same old predictable reporter stand-up, b-roll, interview, and sound bites, you married Netflix or HBO storytelling to real news stories and great journalism. After all, most news stories carry the seeds of a great story — a character, a challenge, a response, and a resolution. Could you not then lock into what Dr. Cohen calls our hard-wired ability not just to absorb facts but also to be captured by a story?

For the past few years, we have been working with a number of local TV news stations in the US to try to do just that — to marry Netflix storytelling with great journalism and news. The results have been nothing but astonishing, and yet should not really be surprising. Almost every station that we have converted to this kind of news/storytelling has seen their audience engagement figures and ratings skyrocket. Many are now rated #1 in their markets, often coming from far behind.

As I say, the results should not be all that surprising. As Dr. Cohen will tell you, people are hard-wired to become deeply engaged in stories. We simply took news stories, which often have all the elements of a great movie — compelling characters, conflict, the arc of a story, and resolution and laid them out as, well, movies — not ‘packages’. No breathless reporter stand-ups, no man-on-the-street soundbites, no b-roll, and no sit-down interviews (have you ever seen a sit-down interview in Breaking Bad? I Didn’t think so). Also, no screaming font BREAKING NEWS! (Do you see that on Game of Thrones?)

Is this the future of TV news? We like to think so, and the numbers seem to bear us out. If anything was ready for disruption, it was TV news as it was formerly done. But this is not about AI or live streaming — this is just about the elements of great storytelling — and that has been true since the time of Homer and the Odyssey — a great news story in its own way, told in a most compelling manner.

“I’m standing here on the street corner in Ithaca asking locals how they feel about Penelope. Is she ever gonna finish weaving that tapestry? What do you think is going on? Hello, can I ask you a question…?”

My friend, the documentary filmmaker Mark Benjamin sent me a link to an article in IndieWire entitled “Martin Scorsese: ‘The Image on an iPhone Is the New Cinema Vérité’

At first, I thought the article was a reference to Scorsese using an iPhone to make a film, which is certainly something that would have been a) interesting, and b) inevitable, at least in my opinion. Sadly, it was simply a notice that Scorsese felt that in the future (which is today) people would be watching films on their phones, a rather passive use of an incredibly powerful tool.

The article did, however, motivate me to search to see if Scorsese ever did shoot a film with nothing but an iPhone, and it turns out that, in fact, he did. Reflection on Isolation.

In the article above, published on June 5, 2020, the writer notes:

“In his NEW short film Reflection on Isolation, which was shot on his entirely on his iPhone, legendary director Martin Scorsese discusses how “anxiety” set in during lockdown, after an initial “relief” that his heavy 2020 workload had been temporarily lifted.

Wow, I thought, I HAVE to see this. And here it is:

It is, in a word, shockingly terrible. For a man who has an Academy Award, 4 BAFTAs, 3 Emmys, 4 Golden Globes, 2 DGA Awards, and even a Grammy, you would think, here’s a guy who knows how to make a film. And he has made some amazing films, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, Raging Bull, and The Irishman, and even here we are but scratching the surface.

But give the guy an iPhone and what happens?

Many years ago, when I was working with The BBC in London, I was approached by Lord David Putnam, producer of some amazing films such as (but hardly limited to) Midnight Express, Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields… Like Scorsese, a genius.

He asked if I could come by his office in the House of Lords and teach him to shoot video on his own. Which, of course, I did.

We went to a bicycle repair shop, and despite my instructions, he took the small camera (this was before iPhones) and proceeded to make a really appalling piece of terrible home video — much like Scorsese. Much to Putnam’s credit, when we went back to his office to screen it, he agreed that it was crap, and then said, “let’s go do it again,” at wLet’spoint, it wasn’t bad at all.

For years now, many years, we have been transitioning mostly TV news channels and networks to work in a very different way. We teach the reporters and the camera operators, the editors, and the producers to shoot, edit and produce their own stories, which we like to think of as small movies as opposed to ‘packages’ on their own — entirely with iPhones now.

You take away the camera people, the directors, the editors, the producers and you say “here’s the camera — there’s the door — let’s see what you can do”, it can be frightening. But with a bit of instruction, the results can be astonishingly good.

Here’s a story done by Rick Villaroman, chief photog at KPIX, the CBS O&O in San Francisco — all done on an iPhone by Rick and no one else.

Better than Scorsese?

I think so.

It was not so very long ago that human beings believed that the earth was the center of a very small universe.

For some who spend their time on TikTok, that ‘not so very long ago’ was perhaps yesterday, and to them, the earth is flat.

For the rest of us, our knowledge of the size of the universe has, since Hubble and now James Webb telescopes, become almost incomprehensible. Based on Hubble Deep Field (2003), there are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe.

There are also an estimated 100 billion stars just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. You can do the math. The number of potentially habitable planets is, well, incomprehensible.

In the summer of 1950, while having lunch with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski, Nobel Prize laureate Enrico Ermi asked the seminal question “where is everybody?”

At that time, the known universe was limited to the Milky Way and not much more, but even in that very small corner of the known universe today, there should have been millions of habitable planets.

Some of those planets, one would have thought, would have developed not just life, but given birth to advanced civilizations. Some of those civilizations would, one could imagine, have developed the science of interstellar travel. And, as many of the billions of stars in the Milky Way alone are millions of years older than the Earth, it is not entirely unreasonable to assume that some of them might have gotten here to visit us.

Alas, aside from the evidence, also to be found on TikTok, of extra-terrestrial science buried in the Great Pyramids, there seems to be no sign of anyone at all.

Hence, Fermi’s question, “Where is everybody?”

Fermi, being a scientist and a physicist, ran the numbers. Based on the then-known number of stars, the projected number of planets, a series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the probability of life on those planets, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over.

This is referred to as The Fermi Paradox.

The evolutionary biologist Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (The Burgess Shale and the History of Nature) wrote that, in the end, it may prove to be true that intelligence is not the best trait for the survival of a species.

He may have been right.

If you look around at a world threatened with climate change, the disappearance of half the insects on the planet, the extinction of half the species on earth, all of this is the direct product of human activity and ‘intelligence’, you come to realize that Gould may have had a point.

Perhaps all species that get as far as we have reached a point at which their own inventions simply destroy them before they can get any further.

It’s possible.

And it is not as if we are not aware of what we are doing, nor the consequences of our activity. It is just that we seem incapable of taking any action to stop it, to preserve ourselves.

Why is that?

I have my own theory, for what it is worth, and it has to do with our never-ending addiction to the media and entertainment- yet another byproduct of our own intelligence.

We live in a world of self-created illusions — movies, TV, video, TikTok, social media — a never-ending universe of images on screens. The average person today spends 8 hours a day immersed in the screen world. The screen world, the stories we tell ourselves over and over, has several universal traits, but one of them is predominant. That is, that in the end, no matter what, everything is going to be fine.

No matter how great the disaster, from an asteroid heading to smash into the earth, stopped by a group of offshore oil well workers, to serial killers who are always in the end caught, to superheroes who miraculously appear to save the day — we are always fine in the end — generally thanks to someone else. No need to worry.

This idea of ‘well, someone is going to fix it before it gets really bad’ is deeply inculcated into our psyche. So really, no need to do much. It’s all going to be fine.

Well, maybe it is. but more likely, maybe the stories we tell ourselves are not the best way to address our problems.

There is a group of archaeologists who believe that the Roman Empire collapsed because the Romans brought drinking water into their homes in lead pipes, and perhaps, over time, the lead attacked their nervous systems, destroying their minds.

We don’t have lead pipes bringing water into our homes — we have fiber optic bringing an endless stream of entertainment.

Sheldon’s Aside

The end result could be the same. Much of the media piped into our eyeballs is served up on first gen social media platforms created to exploit human neural weaknesses like addiction, the dopamine cycle, fear of missing out (FOMO), social obligation, and others. They call these strategies “growth hacks” and they are ubiquitous. The effects, however, on our attention spans, happiness, self-image, ability to focus, anxiety, and even our IQs are just starting to be investigated.

If it seems to you that people are angry all the time, that they are angrier perhaps than they have ever been before, that you often find yourself angry, you are not alone and you are not wrong.

In a recent NPR/IBM-Watson poll, a rather astonishing 84% of Americans felt they were angrier than their parents were a generation ago.

You can see the signs of this innate anger everywhere you look. Our politics are poisoned with anger and hostility. Political parties no longer seek compromise to solve problems, but rather are dedicated to playing a winner take all game in which the goal is to destroy the opposition. But our anger is not limited to our politics, it infects us all on a daily and personal basis.

People are constantly seeking opportunities or excuses for being outraged, annoyed, angered, or abused. “You are a racist. You are a sexist. You are anti gay, anti trans, anti whatever you like, and I feel personally threatened.”

This never-ending anger is tied to a concurrent uptick in our general state of unhappiness.

A 2020 poll by NBC News found that only 14% of Americans considered themselves to be “very happy,” while 50% found themselves to be isolated.

“Research by the Social Market Foundation and the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) found that although in 1957 life expectancies were lower, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was lower, more hours were worked in a typical week and few households had central heating and less than half owned a television, levels of public happiness were at a height never reached again.”

What has happened to make us all so angry and unhappy?

I think the answer may be found in the last sentence from the study above: “less than half owned a television.”

In 1957, people were still not awash in media, at least not the way they are today. Television was just getting started. People then still lived, for the most part, in the real world.

A lot has changed since 1957, particularly in our exposure to media — to time spent watching films, TV, and video. Today, the average person spends an astonishing 8 hours a day, every day, watching media — on TV sets, on pads, and on phones.

And what are we watching? Netflix, TV shows, commercials, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, among other stuff. A lot of platforms, but they all have one thing in common — everyone, on all of these platforms, is living a great life.

You rarely, if ever, see people on social media or in TV commercials for that matter, living in small houses, wearing old shabby clothes, driving old beat-up cars, eating crap meals, or being unhappy. Ever.

Facebook and TikTok and Instagram are an endless reservoir of ‘friends’ on amazing vacations, eating remarkable meals, having lovely children and adorable pets, and living a dream life.

In fact, everyone seems to be living a dream life — except for you.

You know the truth of what your life is like, and it doesn't hold a candle to the people who populate your media-driven world. Something is clearly wrong. You have done something clearly wrong. You are inadequate. You are a failure — or someone has rigged the system to deny you your just due.

Of course, no one on social media ever posts that their life is crap. That would seem contrary to the whole point of the thing. Instead, we spend endless hours crafting stunning selfies of ourselves, using as many filters as necessary, and taking as many shots as necessary to get it right. The image that we project on social media is one of perfection — both physical and lifestyle. “Look world. I’m beautiful, I’m rich, I’m happy, I’m amazing.”

Well, why not? Because the commercial media world to which we are exposed and with which we spend never-ending hours, days, weeks, and years also communicates to us that pretty much everyone else is young, physically attractive, happy, and rich.

That it is fiction makes no difference. Every contestant on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette is beautiful, as is everyone on Love is Blind! Every character in every sitcom or drama or commercial for that matter, lives in a beautiful home, and drives a new car (which is always pristine — ever see a bag of potato chips or an empty coffee cup?). In Friends, which aired 25 years ago, how in the world did these people pay for their New York apartments, as none of them ever seemed to go to work? In the Meaghan/Harry docuseries on Netflix, no one seems to have a job there either.

Meanwhile, there you are slogging it away at some 9–5 job you can’t stand. According to a recent Gallup poll, 85% of people hate their jobs. Ever see someone on TV or on Facebook or on TikTok who just hates their job? In fact, ever seen anyone on TikTok who is actually at work?

So media, social media, and commercial media have created a false world where a) no one works. b) everyone is beautiful. c) everyone is happy. d) everyone is living an amazing life.

Except for you.

And me.

And the rest of us in the real world.

Through our media, we have created a massive disconnect between the real world as it actually is and the perceived world that we spend 8 hours a day in.

And that is why we are so unhappy. And angry.

And probably ready to vote for anyone who says they can fix it.

But that is nothing but mindless entertainment made of illusions and lies.

If you found this interesting, check out my new book, The Rise of the Mediaverse — How The Truth Died.

The advent of ChatGPT, the first iteration of AI for the general public has caused a great deal of anxiety over the possible impact of this new technology.

Most of that angst is around how quickly AI is likely to eviscerate once-stable careers and jobs. It might have seemed early on that perhaps self-driving trucks would replace long-haul truckers; self-driving cars would make the taxi driver obsolete. This did not raise too much concern, unless you were, of course, a long-haul truck driver.

But ChatGPT demonstrated that other jobs, such as lawyers, Wall Street traders, writers, and journalists, let alone students and teachers suddenly might find themselves unemployed, if not also unemployable.

Now there was angst amongst the elites.

But today, in an OpEd piece in The NY Times, Yuval Harari, author of the best-selling Sapiens, raises a far more interesting, and far more frightening prospect — that AI will ultimately (and not that far off, apparently,) come to replace and surpass human imagination and creativity.

“What would it mean for humans to live in a world where a large percentage of stories, melodies, images, laws, policies, and tools are shaped by nonhuman intelligence, which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases, and addictions of the human mind — while knowing how to form intimate relationships with human beings?”

There seems to be little question that AI is going to start producing novels, music, and even movies as the tech gets better and better and as microprocessors, following Moore’s Law (RIP Gordon Moore who died this week) get faster and cheaper.

Harari, Harris, and Raskin are worried about the implications of AI surpassing human capacity for arts, music, and every aspect of our entertainment and intellectual achievements. This is certainly bad, but I think the danger is far worse and far more frightening than even they imagine. This relates to the marriage of AI with the manufacture of media.

The notion of Media itself is a relatively new event in human history. For most of our time on this planet, the idea of media barely existed. Prior to the invention of the printing press, the largest library in Europe was at Cambridge University — it held 40 books.

The printing press was the first step into mass media, but the concept really took off relatively recently, first with the advent of radio in the 1920s, then television in the 1960s, and finally the web and all that has followed.

Today, we live in a world awash in media — almost all of it electronic and almost all of it video, film, or television. The average person today spends an astonishing 8 hours a day, every day, watching movies or TV or videos. That is more time than we spend doing anything else. Your grandparents might have gone to the movies once a month, and for an hour, they were transported to an artificial world, one of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Oz, in which they could escape the real world.

Today, we are essentially living in a movie theater all the time. We never leave. Our connection to the fake world is rarely broken now. Our sense of reality bears less and less connection to the real world and is more and more a product of that which Hollywood or Netflix or TikTok manufactures for us.

When we turn over the making of content to AI, we create a device that can deliver to us, on-demand, at any time, a world that is completely constructed to our own demands, desires, and fantasies. Tailor-made to our every whim; highly personalized, on-demand, and virtually limitless. We will no longer have the shared experience of Shakespeare or even Spielberg. The real world will effectively cease to exist. We will live in a perpetual and never-ending dream world of our own making.

Perhaps, as Climate Change makes the planet increasingly uninhabitable. it may be that a fake world is the only place that we find livable.

It may be our fate in the end.

As Stephen J. Gould once said, “in the end, it may be proven that intelligence is not the best trait for the survival of a species.”

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In the beginning, there was broadcast.

There were only three networks — NBC, CBS, and ABC. If you wanted to watch TV, that was the extent of your choices.

There was, of course, PBS, but no one went there.

The three networks divided a viewership of about 100 million households, so no matter what piece of junk you put on the air, whether it was My Mother the Car or Mitch Miller, you could deliver 30 million households to advertisers.

For this, they paid a lot. This was called The Golden Age of Television.

Then, in the 1980s came along and the world of watching went from 3 networks to 2,000 channels. This was a very big change. Consumers suddenly had lots of choices and wholly and very profitable channels and companies suddenly arose where nothing had existed before — companies like Discovery or Turner Movie Channel or even Jewish Living Channel.

The number of channels may have exploded, but the population of the United States did not, so now 2,000 channels were competing for the same 100 million households. While there were fewer viewers per channel, there was a demand for a lot more content.

The 3-network world had needed about 12,000 hours of content a year. McHale’s Navy, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners. A very limited world.

The advent of cable meant that now cable needed lots TV shows— like closer to 9 million hours of content a year. Shows like My 600 Pound Life or House Hunters or Pawn Wars. Lots of new shows.

Then, in 2007, Reed Hastings took his DVD rental service, Netflix, and took it online.

This was a revolution. In the linear world of The Food Network or NBC, you could only see the shows that a network was running at a given time. 8PM and it was House Hunters. 9PM and it was Property Brothers. The network decided and you watched what they offered.

But with Netflix, you got to pick what you wanted to watch whenever you wanted to watch it.

This was a revolution.

Clearly, people much preferred the Netflix model to the HBO model. Once they were given the option of watching whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted to watch it, that’s where they went.

Traditional broadcast and cable suddenly seemed, well, old and archaic.

The Netflix model was much more appealing, at least to viewers, but not to broadcasters.

Like any revolution, the Netflix Revolution was a two-edged sword. Technology gives, but it also takes away.

AMC, American Movie Channel took a risk and commissioned the series Mad Men, which turned out to be enormously popular. (HBO, ironically passed, a rather big mistake).

But Mad Men aired once a week, for an hour at a time. AMC sold commercials to advertisers on each Mad Men show. The first season ran 13 episodes, (as did the following 6 seasons). The show aired once a week, and if you wanted to see it, you had to tune into AMC on Thursday night at 10 PM. And millions did — millions whose eyeballs were then sold to advertisers. It was a very profitable venture. It had to be, because each episode of Mad Men cost about $2.5m to make.

That’s how cable worked.

But in the Netflix model, viewers might binge watch all 13 episodes of the first season in one night. And, there are no ads in the Netflix model. Instead, you pay a one-time subscription fee to watch as much as you like whenever you like.

The Netflix model chows through an enormous amount of material very very quickly,

Mad Men lasted AMC 13 weeks. For Netflix, Mad Men would last 13 hours.

AMC or Discovery or The Travel Channel had to fill a fixed number of hours of programs every day. It was a limited world. But Netflix has to keep feeding the beast. It has to provide LOTS more programs, in fact, an almost unlimited amount of programs, and to continue to attract subscribers, it has to keep commissioning new shows all the time — shows that get eaten up in a few hours.

This costs real money.

For example, an each episode of Bridgerton, a very popular series on Netflix, costs an estimated $7 million per episode. So far, there have been 16 episodes of Bridgerton made, with another season in the works. 24 shows at $7 million a show, that’s $168 million.

You have to sell a lot of subscriptions for Netflix at $15.49 to pay for Bridgerton — and that’s just Bridgerton. But if you’re Netflix, you need a LOT of series, all the time, endlessly, to keep people signed up.

Is it any wonder that Netflix is $14.5 billion in debt?

But of course, Netflix is not alone. The model is so popular that everyone is now getting into the online, non-linear world. Disney+, Amazon, Discovery-Warner. It’s where everyone is going to go. And as a result, everyone is going to have to start producing a whole lot more content to attract subscribers.

But of course, there are only so many channels that people will subscribe to.

It’s a real problem. Let’s call it The Netflix Curse.

There is, however, a cure for the curse. The answer is already in front of us, but it requires a very different model.

For networks like HBO or Discovery or HGTV, the content has always been made buy professional production companies. They make it in a very expensive way — producers, camera crews, editors, and so on. Watch the credit rolls.

But the online world is different.

Quibi tried this model — hiring expensive Hollywood producers to make content for online. This was a disaster. Quibi lost an astonishing $1.75b in a matter of months.

But look at successful online content companies — like TikTok or Facebook or Instagram.

Who makes the content for TikTok?

You do.

Who makes the content for Instagram?

You do. We all do. We do it with our phones.

Our phones are amazing tools for video content creation.

Now, you probably could not make Bridgerton with your iPhone. But I am willing to bet you could make House Hunters with your iPhone. I bet there are a lot of reality shows that you could make with your iPhone. I bet you have a lot of ideas for new shows for the endlessly expanding and exploding world that Netflix has unleashed that you could make with your phone.

And I am willing to bet that a lot of the content that is going to feed the Netflix model is not going to come from Hollywood.

It is going to come from you.

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We're thrilled to announce our platform's revamped website and the relocation of our blog to Substack. The new site showcases our bold vision and mission, highlighting the cutting-edge platform features that have everyone buzzing. Plus, the sleek design is sure to impress! Be sure to check it out!

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Our team has been working tirelessly to bring you a groundbreaking launch product tailored for a select user base in its initial release. We are making great progress towards launch and we can't wait to share it with you!

Featuring both web and mobile apps, we're building a captivating platform that includes an essential feature set:

• Create your user profile - Done!

• Apply for exclusive news creator status – Done!

• Explore and filter stories by topic – Done!

• Upload and edit stories – Done!

• Attach sources/citations – Done!

• Create and view engaging user profiles – Done!

• Search with ease – Done!

• Dive into discussions and comments on stories – Done!

• Report content violating our terms of service – In Progress

• Stay informed with notifications – Coming Soon!

• Follow/unfollow your favorite news creators and journalists – Coming Soon!

Stay tuned for an extraordinary journey as we continue to innovate and deliver the ultimate news experience! These features are the foundation for future additions, such as a rating system, training, and more. You can read more about our foundational features by visiting our new and improved product information website at https://unpress.news

We've provided some early design images of the website and app below. We welcome your thoughts, feedback, and participation in future usability studies. Join our chat channel to discuss this further, or email contact@unpress.com to let us know you’d like to be involved.

Note that these images are not the end state with all our features in place.

If you have any questions or feedback or want to participate in focus group usability studies, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Below are images from the mobile app. The image on the left is the explore page for browsing and searching, and the image on the right is the story view page, where you can watch the story on your phone and swipe through the ones you are interested in.

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Image courtesy Wikicommons

Harry and Meghan's $100m docusoap would seem to have been a win for Netflix, with more than 85 million viewers worldwide.

Of course, it has proven to be a very controversial series, but that is what drives the ratings, and what drives the ratings is what is good for Netflix.

There have been innumerable articles written about the series, the accusations, the lies, the incriminations, the expose of racial prejudice in the Royal Family, and God only knows what else.

I would prefer to look at the series purely as a reality show. Having produced many reality TV shows in my life, I looked at it in a slightly different way. As Reality TV, it was brilliant. It ticked all the boxes.

What makes Reality TV work is that, when it works, it captures moments of intimacy. The viewer should feel like they are seeing something that they would not normally get to see. It is the media manifestation of pure voyeurism; that is what grabs your attention and keeps you watching.

The Harry and Meghan show certainly delivered on that score. You, the viewer, are there, privy to their most private, their most intimate, their most 'real' moments. I particularly liked the moment when Harry and Meghan are both working at their laptops, side by side when out of nowhere, a text message comes through from Beyonce.

"Beyonce just texted me," Meghan says. "I didn't even know she knew who I am ," (let alone my phone number).

As a former Reality TV show producer, this is pure gold. This is the kind of stuff you wait for. Well, you don't really wait for it, you script it most of the time. But the secret to making reality TV work is that the viewer should feel like these things just happened and you just happened to be there and caught it. How lucky!

As I watched the Harry and Meghan show, purely from a professional point of view, I came to realize that Harry and Meghan must have had film crews following them all the time, pretty much living in their home with them. The sound is great - so either they are wired for sound, or there is a sound guy with a boom mike over their heads all the time. I am opting for the latter as I don't see them wearing any radio mics. Also, the lighting is always just about perfect, so my guess is that they also lit most of the scenes.

From time to time, you can also see that they used a two-camera shoot for these moments of intimacy and immediacy. Great job Liz Garbus, who directed the series.

When you look even more carefully, you can see that along with the intimate video (or at least the impression of intimate video), there are tons of really beautifully shot and staged (and nicely lit) black and white photos throughout the series. So, they not only had a film crew living with them and following them everywhere, they also had a professional photographer directing their intimate moment shots. Nice!

Well, you can do a lot with $100 million.

What they did, essentially, was produce (and air) an extremely professionally done Royal (at least for the moment) version of the Kardashians. This is Reality TV at its best. But let us be honest. It is not real. It is a TV. It is entertainment. It is manipulative. It is supposed to be. But above all else, it is a TV show.

Let's look at it for what it is, extremely well-produced, extremely well-directed entertainment.

We live in a world awash in entertainment. More and more, we learn about the world through entertainment. Because we watch so much entertainment, we are increasingly unable to distinguish between reality and entertainment. Our world is kind of an amalgam of the two.

In this world of infotainment, Harry and Meghan become actors in their own never-ending TV show. What is real? What is fake? It's hard to tell.

Donald Trump was an outlier in this new world. Did he really believe the stuff he said? It's hard to say, but I think, over time, he also became little more than an actor in his own Docudrama, which, mercifully, has apparently been canceled before it can be renewed for another season.

So enjoy the show. But bear in mind what it is. Entertainment.

Image courtesy Wiki commons

In the 1990s, I was part of a very interesting experiment in local news called Harlem Live.

The idea was rather simple. We gave video cameras to teenagers who lived in Harlem. We taught them to shoot and edit their own stories. We asked them to show us what life was really like in Harlem – to find news stories they thought were interesting.

There was a rationale behind this.

Harlem is part of New York City, but in a way, it very much lives in its own world.

The only time local TV news stations would send a reporter to Harlem in those days (and this may still be true today) was to cover a murder or a fire or a shooting or some other crime.

As a result, what we might call the Media Footprint for Harlem was extremely negative. If you asked the average New Yorker if they ever went up to Harlem, they rarely did. “Too dangerous,” they would say.

I learned this for a fact when I had a one-man show for my artwork at the Chashama Gallery on 125th Street. I cannot tell you the number of people who were afraid to visit the gallery – even on the opening night. “Nice, but too dangerous.”

The way the media portray a place is intrinsic to what people believe they know about it. I had an uncle who was a very successful corporate lawyer in Milan, but he refused to ever come to New York. “Too dangerous,” he told me. How did he know? He had seen Fort Apache, The Bronx, and Midnight Cowboy. That was enough for him.

Media Footprint.

The public perception of Harlem in the 1990s was no different. Crime, crime, crime… and fires.

This, of course, led to a general disinclination for downtown New Yorkers (downtown being anything south of 96th street) to visit Harlem restaurants, shops, and, yes, museums.

For kids growing up in Harlem who, like the rest of us, got their education from watching TV, it was a disconcerting disconnect. What they saw on local news often bore little relationship to what they experienced in their day-to-day lives, but they knew it was not good.

So the idea was to empower them to tell their own stories – to find news stories that reflected the Harlem that they knew – and not the Harlem that the occasional visiting local TV news crew would seek out.

This, of course, was in the days before the Internet and before smartphones, so we had to give them video cameras and editing gear. Luckily, I had a ton of that in-house.

The results were stunning – in two ways.

Much as hoped, they did indeed find great and very positive and uplifting stories about Harlem – shot them well, tracked them, and cut them beautifully – great training pays off.

Stories in hand, I then went to visit all the local TV news stations to see if anyone would air them.

My answer from all – a resounding no.

“Not real journalists.”

“Can’t trust their sources.”

“We only air things that our reporters make.”

And so on.

Today, I would make them part of UnPress, but in those days, all we could do was screen them for each other.

That, in itself, was perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from the experience.

As my friend, Boyah Farrah, explained to me, “Somalia has it rough.” Boyah is the author of the new and quite popular book America Made Me A Black Man (Simon & Schuster 2022).

The reason I know Boyah is because we share the same literary agent, Alicia Brooks. Boyah’s personal story, as told in his book, is an amazing tale of fortitude, courage, and survival – a refugee from the civil wars in Somalia, he came to the United States as a teenager, but remade himself and his life and has now returned to Somalia with the intent of setting up a school.

Somalia has it rough because the only thing Americans or Europeans know about Somalia is that it is a very dangerous place, riven by warlords, violence, pirates, and famine. The reason that people conjure that image up for Somalia is because that is the only Somalia that they know, and their knowledge of Somalia comes entirely from the coverage that Somalia gets from the news media.

Sending a reporter and a film crew to Somalia (or Bangladesh or Lesotho, for that matter) is expensive. Very expensive – airfares, hotels, meals, rented cars, drivers, translators, fixers. It costs a fortune. So places like The BBC or NBC or CNN have to think long and hard before they commit to doing a story about Somalia or places like it. And more often than not, the answer is no.

The only time that a major news organization will send a crew to Somalia is if there is an exciting enough story that will get ratings. And what kind of stories are those? Well, pirates is a good one. There was even a Tom Hanks movie about Somali pirates (“I am the captain now”), so it’s a story that American audiences can relate to.

Other than that, Somalia doesn’t exist.

Except for Pirates, or warlords, or violence, but it’s gotta be pretty good violence. So Somalia has what we might call a negative media footprint. Pirates, war, violence, starvation. Not the kind of place you are going to go to on your holiday. Not the kind of place you are likely to invest if you have a business.

Much of the world and most of Africa suffer from this negative media footprint. And it’s a self-perpetuating problem. Bad stories lead to a bad reputation which leads to a lack of investment which leads to more poverty and problems. Good for CNN, but not so good for anyone living there.

There is an answer, however.

It is for Somalia (and many other countries) to take control of its own media footprint. There was a time when they had to depend on the good graces of CNN or The BBC to design to send a crew to their country, but the results were generally disastrous. Bad press. Bad stories. Scary stories. In those days, Somalia (and Haiti and Malawi and Bangladesh) and no choice. CNN and NBC had a lock on TV news.

That is no longer the case.

Train a few Somali journalists to do positive stories and create a Somali news feed that goes right to the web. Bypass the broadcast networks. Tell your own story. All you need is an iPhone, really.

That’s it.

Can you do it?

We are going to try. UnPress, a new start-up I am a part of, is going to work with Boyah to train young Somali journalists to tell a very different story of their country and their lives.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said, ‘the best solution for bad free speech is more free speech’, so too, the best solution for bad news is more good news.

Carpe Medium

You can also read about how this works in my new book, THE RISE OF THE MEDIAVERSE.

The arrival of the iPhone as a video camera has caused a great deal of discussion and no small amount of dissent amongst videographers, particularly in the news business.

News shooters were used to carrying around massive cameras perched on their shoulders, and the very idea of shooting ‘professional’ news stories with what, for all intents and purposes, looks like a toy (and one that everyone else has, by the way), has engendered no small amount of angst.

Some will concede that they might use a phone in a pinch if they had nothing else.

There are many news stations now that are, in fact, using both phones and MMJs to shoot and capture news stories – mostly local – but they use the phones all wrong – as do the ‘professionals’. They work the way they have always worked, and they produce stories that look like they have always looked. This is wrong.

The iPhone, as a video camera, is not simply a smaller camera. It is something else entirely, and it should be used in an entirely different way. Used properly, it can create an entirely different kind of television or video news story. But it means working and thinking in a new and very different way.

In the world of still photography, and more significantly, in the world of still photojournalism, large format cameras were used for years because they were the only tools available. These early still photography cameras were large and bulky, and initially shot on single pieces of sheet film. This meant that, for the most part, the cameras had to be placed on tripods and that the photographer got only one shot, which had to work.

Because it often took so long to compose a shot, the subjects were made to stand rigid (the exposure times were long) – and the shots were quite formal.

This is a photograph of Colonel Archibald Gracie, a survivor of the Titanic, taken in 1912. Stiff, formal – a function of the limitation of the camera – and he looks just like a network TV news anchor delivering the nightly news or some interview subject on 60 Minutes.

The invention of the Leica camera in the 1930s (along with 35mm Agfa film on rolls of film) opened the door to a completely different kind of photojournalism. Now, for the first time, photographers were able to be freed from the heavy gear and go entirely handheld.

There were those then as now who complained about the bad technical quality of such small negatives on 35mm film, but the change was palpable in terms of the images and the power they transmitted. The difference was one of intimacy. Photojournalists like Cartier Bresson or W Eugene Smith began to use the cameras in a different way – to capture not images or events, but rather emotions – both the emotions of the subject and if they were really good their own emotions.

Migrant Mother – Dorothea Lang 1939 image courtesy Wiki Commons

This is an entirely different kind of photojournalism, and one that was only made possible because the Leica was a small, hand-held camera, and the photographer became unobtrusive and almost invisible. But that alone was not enough to engender a new kind of photojournalism. The photographer also had to work in a different way; to relate to the subject in a different way, but also to think about photography itself in a different way. The Leica became a tool not just to capture an image but also to capture an emotion.

Painting underwent the same kind of transformative event in the 1950s. Photography had rendered painting, as an exercise to exactly reproduce images on canvas, pointless. Photographs did it better and far faster. This opened the door for a different kind of art – one that was impressionistic – one that sought not to reproduce what one saw but rather what both the subjects and the artist felt.

Picasso’s Guernica – image courtesy Wiki Commons

Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica, depicts the bombing of the Spanish city, but what he really captures and transmits is the pain, both of the villagers but also his own pain at what has happened. His artwork transmits emotions to the viewer. Picasso forbade the painting from being shown in Spain until there was a democratic government, and so it hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 1981, when Spain was restored to democracy.

In the same Museum of Modern Art, in 1955, opened a photographic exhibition called The Family of Man. It was a collection of 503 photographs from 68 countries, and it was the official elevation of photojournalism from a reproductive craft to an art form. This was due to Leica more than anything else. The Leica allowed the photographer to capture both images but also emotion.

What Leica did for photography in the 1950s, the iPhone can now do for Video Journalism in the 2020s – that is, create an entirely new kind of television or video journalism – one that is far more intimate, far more powerful.

When we run our boot camps, we tell the participants not to just point the phone at a subject and record, but rather to seek to feel, not just how the subject feels, but also how they feel, and use the phone to capture and later transmit most just images, but also emotions.

It can be done, but it requires thinking and working in an entirely different way.

But when it works, it really works.

Roland Garros -before he was a French tennis open, he was a flying ace

Last week, NASA finally launched its Artemis rocket headed for the moon.

This mission was unmanned, but if all goes according to plan, NASA expects to put people back on the moon by 2025.

The last time anyone was on the moon was in 1972, and when you look at the Artemis mission, it looks pretty much the same as the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon in 1969.

It's a bit peculiar, this whole moon mission. You would think that in the intervening 60 years since the Americans first landed on the moon, the technology might have improved just a bit. It has in every other aspect of travel and transportation, particularly aircraft.

If all goes according to plan, it will have been 56 years since the first moon landing. If we go back 56 years from the launch of the Saturn V in 1969, it takes us to 1913. Same distance.

If trips to the moon have not changed much in the intervening 56 years, flight certainly has. In 1913, Roland Garros, the French ace pilot broke the world record for non-stop flight by crossing the Mediterranean Sea in an airplane (see photo above). The flight lasted 8 hours. Today, you may still recognize the name as France, in honor of his great achievement, named the tennis stadium where the French Open is held after him.

It would have been inconceivable to think that in 1969, the apex of flying would have been a second attempt at crossing the Mediterranean in a small plane in only 8 hours. But that is where we are, moon-wise, so to speak

So it is fair, I think, to raise the question of why, after successfully landing on the moon in 1969, we simply stopped going.

The answer, I think, is that it was....boring.

That is, it was bad television.

The first lunar landing was watched with riveted attention by one of the largest global TV audiences in history, more than 600 million people tuned in to see Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface, live, no less. Broadcasting live from the moon in 1969 was in itself a major technological achievement.

Yet with each successive Apollo launch, (excluding Apollo 13, which made a better movie that a live TV transmission), the television audiences dwindled down to nothing.

So much nothing that the remaining 3 Apollo flights to the moon were cancelled altogether. Lack of funding driven by a lack of interest on the part of the viewing public.

OK. That was great, but what else can you do?

Well, we can drive this car on the lunar surface.

Boring.

Well, we can hit golf balls on the lunar surface.

The PGA has nothing to worry about.

Nope, by the time of Apollo 17, the last trip to the moon, no one was watching at all.

In effect, the Amazing Race To The Moon show was cancelled for bad ratings.

Now, like Return to Gilligan's Island, NASA is hoping a re-tread of the original show will bring in the much needed audience that makes Congress write checks. I would not count on it.

In 1969, given the choice between watching people walk on the moon and watching Captain James T. Kirk pilot the Starship Enterprise across the galaxies, viewers in overwhelming numbers voted for Star Trek and then Star Wars. What difference does it make if something is real or fake - as millions of TikTok fans who believe the earth to be flat can attest.

The problem with real science, like real life, is that it is fundamentally boring as entertainment.

Watch live as Thomas Edison, live from his laboratory in New Jersey attempts to invent the electric light. Look, he's trying out another filament. And there goes the switch! Nope, didn't work either. That would be the 1,435th try. But stand by, in a few hours we're going to try it again.

If we had to depend on TV ratings for the invention of the light bulb, we would still all be sitting in the dark.

If you found this interesting, be sure to check out my new book THE RISE OF THE MEDIAVERSE

I have recently begun to pay attention to Twitter.

For years, I ignored it, putting most of my efforts into Facebook, but Alicia Brooks, my literary agent strongly suggested that I become a ‘presence’ on Twitter, as most publishers spend a lot of time there, so last week, I started @Rosenblumtv. (Feel free to follow me, I am going to need a lot of followers!)

In any event, and of course, owing to Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter for an eye-watering $44 billion, there has been a great deal of discussion about ‘free speech’.

I have always been a great advocate of free speech, but I was astonished to see so many postings from people who declare themselves liberals calling for all kinds of what is essentially censorship on Twitter.

Here’s but one example of the kind of stuff that is regularly there:

I have no idea who Shibetoshi Nakamoto is, other than they have a rather astonishing 1.9 million followers, so their opinions carry some weight.

What then is ‘free speech’?

In 1977, the American Nazi Party planned to hold a march through the center of Skokie, Illinois, a decidedly Jewish suburb of Chicago.

This was clearly a provocative act, and as Shibetoshi Nakamoto might observe, it is literally showing up at your house and screaming in your face- not virtually, but actually. If ever there were people who should ‘not be allowed to see abusive stuff,’ it was no doubt the Jewish residents of Skokie, home to hundreds of holocaust survivors.

The Village of Skokie went to court to get an injunction to stop the parade, and it was then that the Nazis contacted The ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union.

For those readers unfamiliar with the ACLU, it has always been a pillar of the American liberal or left, decried by generations of Conservatives.

The Nazis asked the ACLU, of all people, to take the case and defend their First Amendment rights. The ACLU accepted and a lawyer named David Goldberg took the lead.

The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in the end, the courts ruled that the Nazis had a First Amendment right to hold their rally in front of the Skokie Village Hall.

The case provoked enormous outrage from both liberals and Conservatives, Jews and Gentiles alike. But David Goldberg and the ACLU held their ground. Goldberg wrote: “…the Nazis are not the real issue. The Skokie laws are the real issue.”

Over time, the Skokie case became a landmark defense of First Amendment rights.

As David Goldberg would later write:

There were times when, during speeches I gave about the Skokie case, Holocaust survivors courageously stood up to say that I was right to have represented the Nazis. Several years later, another survivor sent me a letter saying the same thing. These survivors said that they did not want the Nazis driven underground by speech-repressive laws or court injunctions. They explained that they wanted to be able to see their enemies in plain sight so they would know who they were.

A free press is messy. It is supposed to be. That is the very essence of a free press, a place where all opinions, no matter how repulsive in some cases, my be heard.

If you isolate people from opinions with which they don’t agree or might find offensive, all you succeed in doing is driving the offensive underground. They still exist; they still fester.

As Hubert Humphrey once said, ‘sunshine is the best disinfectant,’ and he was right.

Last week, former President Donald Trump (and current candidate for 2024) had dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, both noted and now well-known antisemites.

We know who they are and how they feel, no matter how revolting their opinion because they are able to express them in a free and open press. That’s what a free press is for, not just to allow those with whom we disagree (or cannot stand) to speak, but to make sure that the rest of us clearly hear what they have to say and then take our own judgements.

Justice Louis Brandeis put it best when he said, ‘the best remedy for bad free speech is more free speech’. Better than censorship and banning. In China and Russia, the expression of ideas or opinions that might be ‘upsetting’ to people are banned.

The path to oppression is often paved with the best of intentions.

It’s an analysis of the impact of the invention of photography on society, but what Sontag has to say about photography works equally well for both video and for Twitter, for that matter.

“Photography,” Sontag notes, “implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding.”

That is because there is an editorial power attached to which photograph the photographer (or the editor) chooses to show us and, more importantly, what they choose not to show us. The image gives us the illusion of knowing something.

In the world of Twitter, that illusion can now be married to instant outrage, which is exactly what happened this morning. Twitter is excellent at instant outrage.

My Twitter feed erupted with outrage over a story carried by a more than marginal ‘news’ organization but vastly magnified on Twitter.

Camilla, the Queen Consort (let’s remember I live in the UK now, so this is big stuff here) was visiting a children’s school.

As you can plainly see from the still lifted from the video that was taken, Camilla clearly “picks up a Black child’s arm by her sleeve.” Clearly, she is a racist who refrains from even touching a Black person.

The Twitterverse (the Mediaverse in my mind) quickly erupts with outrage.

On and on.

You get the idea.

Outrage.

Yet, this is clearly not the case if we look at the complete video. Camilla is, in fact, simply examining and then complimenting the child on her bracelet.

Not everyone was taken in:

But one never misses the opportunity to bring up the ever-sainted Diana as a comparison, particularly as she is starring in this week’s episode of The Crown.

Sontag makes the point that a photograph gives us what she calls “the semblance of wisdom.” This is not at all dissimilar from Neil Postman’s “illusion of knowledge,” in his seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s a main theme in my own book. We see it, and having seen it, now believe it. Seeing, after all, is believing. The idea that an image can be manipulated, not even through photoshop, but simply by selective editorial choice, warps our idea of what is true and what is false. The grabbed frame, after all, is true, in a way, but out of context, it carries an entirely different meaning.

It doesn’t matter. So long as it provokes outrage, it is good enough.

Good enough to garner eyeballs, and so drive traffic, and so increases ad rates – and that, in the end, is what it is generally all about.

This, of course, is the basis for UnPress.

When I went to school, we were told that human beings were the only animals that used tools.

This turned out not to be true, as any regular viewer of National Geographic can attest. Even some crows have learned to use simple tools.

But one thing that we do as a species that neither crows nor monkeys, as far as we know do, is tell stories.

As a species, we are inveterate storytellers. Our history is replete with stories. Stories are the way that we communicate ideas, concepts and history to each other, and pass on knowledge from generation to generation.

Take the Bible — a treasure trove of stories. Take Exodus in particular. The whole point of The Book of Exodus is to get to the Ten Commandments. But if the Book of Exodus were just the Ten Commandments, nobody would remember them. So the Ten Commandments are wrapped into a great story — the story of Moses. Let’s say, the Amazing Adventures of Moses. He has a tough childhood, unhappy Egyptian prince, kills someone, heads for the desert, given a mission, doesn’t want to do it, rises to the occasion, lots of problems, overcomes them and finally arrives at Mount Sinai where he gets the Ten Commandments. A really great story. 3500 year later, we still know it like it was yesterday.

That’ the power of storytelling.

Recently, we were hired to help launch a 24-hour local cable news network in the US. Instead of doing conventional news ‘packages’, we instead wrapped the news in stories — character, arc of story, conclusion — Netflix meets the News. Within a few months, those stations rose to the #1 slot in their market. As Jack Warner said, “Give the people what they want.” And what people want are stories.

Stories help us make sense of an otherwise seemingly very confusing and randomized world.

I am just reading In The Wake of the Plague — The Black Death and the World it Made by Norman F. Cantor.

In the 14th Century, the Black Plague or bubonic plague swept across Europe, killing anywhere from 1/3rd to 1/2 of the population. This was no Covid. This was more like a nuclear war. In an age before science, no one could figure it out. What had happened. To make sense of the seemingly senseless, people developed stories — a narrative that would explain it. Clearly, God was not happy with the people of the earth. This was God’s punishment, and so a solution that would please God would clearly end the plague. For some, this meant killing Jews — which must have seemed logical at the time, and so wave after wave of murderous progroms were set off — made sense, at least to them.

In a more scientific bent, the King of France appointed a commission of University of Paris professors to account for the Black Death. After much research, they released their report. The Black Death had clearly been caused by the influence of Saturn on the House of Jupiter. OK. Now we can understand. Thank God for science.

This morning, I read a piece in The NY Times that the US is close to a civil war because we essentially have two sides of the country who are buying into wildly different stories about who we are and where we are and where we are headed.

Not much has changed.

As we watch Britain in general, and the British economy in particular, implode, it is time to ask, how does a great nation commit suicide? Only three years ago, Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, bringing a Conservative majority of 80 seats. Truly astonishing.

Now, The Daily Star, a British tabloid, is asking the question (and is running a contest) Can Liz Trust Outlast A Head of Lettuce? Most people are voting for the lettuce. Meanwhile, the £, once a very solid currency, is headed for parity with the US dollar — a drop of nearly 20% in a few weeks.

What happened?

This was precipitated by an unrelenting drive to attack Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister, in the press. The “crime’ went under the umbrella term Partygate.

During the lockdown, Boris behaved in less-than-perfect ways. OK. Who did not? Who did not transgress a bit? He had a staff party. He ate a piece of his birthday cake. He had a beer the day of Prince Philip’s funeral?

In Russia, Putin was breaking every norm of society and singlehandedly starting the biggest European war since 1945, but Boris ate a piece of cake.

In any normal society, people would say, ‘well, having staff parties during lockdown was probably not the best of ideas, but really, we have more important things to deal with than this.’ But the press is not normal people. The press is in the business of selling eyeballs — that’s their product. You are not the client of the press. The client is the advertiser. That’s who pays for commercial time or ads in the paper. And what are the press selling to the advertiser? They are selling you — your attention, your eyeballs. You are the product. The more eyeballs, the more money. So what drives decisions on whom to attack and how is not really based on the benefit of the nation. More often than not, it is based on the benefit of the advertiser, that is, ratings. Partygate was the perfect device for driving ratings. It was the gift that kept giving — an almost entirely media-created event. But how to keep it going? I mean. eating a piece of birthday cake or having a beer during lockdown is not exactly high crimes and misdemeanors. So you have to create outrage. Outrage today is the best product we have. Outrage sells. Get people mad.

And how do you get people mad about someone eating a piece of birthday cake? Well, this was after all, at the height of lockdown, so you find someone whose father died the same day that Boris ate the cake, and you have them cry. “My father was dying while the Prime Minister was eating cake with his staff.” Hard to argue with that one. Makes great ratings. So let’s do it again. Many people’s loved ones died of Covid while Boris was eating a piece of birthday cake. Find more. So they did. Now we have a scandal. Shared a few bottles of wine with the staff during Prince Philip’s funeral? OUTRAGE! I don’t know about you, but we were all wearing black and rending our garments at our house.

And so Boris died the death of a thousand cuts. One mini-scandal after the next. It’s how we kill public figures these days- for ratings. The media got a great scandal and great ratings. It was so good that the press forced Boris to resign. Not since Richard Nixon! What an achievement.

And what did the British people get out of it? Liz Truss. Don’t ask too hard for something — you might just get it.

The winner of three Oscars shot a video for the song Cannibal by Marcus Mumford. The artist talked about this on his Twitter page.

In the Twitterverse and in cyberspace, this was big news.

Nice, but rather banal and mediocre, at least when it comes to using an iPhone to shoot video and tell a story.

Here’s another video done around the same time.

This one was not done by Steven Spielberg but rather by Rick Villaroman during one of our Video Storytelling Bootcamps. — in this case, for KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco.

You tell me which one is better? And Rick did not have Kate Capshaw working as a grip. He did it all by himself — found the story, shot it, edited it, voiced it, and produced it — all on an iPhone and all in one day.

iPhones may not be the future of feature films, but in my mind, they are certainly the future of the television news business.

Now, ironically, after I read about Spielberg’s adventures in iPhone video, I actually sent him a link to Rick’s video. I suggested that here was an example of what a talented person (with the right training of course) could do with an iPhone.

Still waiting for his answer.

But one never knows.

What in the world has happened to the deep liberal tradition of free speech?

So, Elon Musk, the genius behind SpaceX and Tesla (among other things), has bought Twitter.

In reaction, the Twittersphere explodes with hysteria over the prospect that Musk is going to — God Forbid- open up the site and allow all voices to be heard.

MSNBC commentator Tristan Snell tweeted, “Stay! And hold your ground like a Ukrainian.” He’s also a commentator for CNN.

Huh?

Hold your ground against what? Against a free press?

One would have thought that a card-carrying member of the Fourth Estate would be on the first line of defense FOR a free press, not preparing to man the barricades against one.

@CallToActivism, whoever that is, has 861,000 followers, so they must have some traction — warns, “We’ll be damend if Elon is going to run us off Twitter.”

I can’t recall where Musk said he would ban anyone from Twitter. Quite to the contrary, he threatens to open the platform up. Is that really so frightening?

It saddens me that liberals are calling for a ‘mediated’ Twitter — only voices we agree with should be allowed.

Liberals used to be on the front lines of defending a free press. It was the very liberal ACLU that bravely defended the rights of Nazis to march in the Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois, in 1978.

The foundation of a democracy is in a free press and free speech. And free presses are messy. They are supposed to be messy. That is the whole idea. A free press that works should make people think; it should challenge their assumptions; it should publish things they disagree with. It should make people angry. That’s fine. That is how it is supposed to work.

A mediate press is oatmeal. And more to the point, it is dangerous.

A mediated press is great so long as you are the mediator. But once you establish that premise- banning things we don’t like — there is no guarantee that you will remain the mediator.

Russia has a mediated press. Putin is the mediator. He only allows things that he likes and that he agrees with to be published — so the vast majority of the population of Russia believes that Nazis control Ukraine and that Russian soldiers are liberating the country. That’s what a mediate press gets you in the end.

So, Mr. Snell, if you want to compare the battle of Twitter to the War in Ukraine, I think you’re on the wrong side. If you want to stand with the Ukrainians, you have also to defend a free press, even if you don’t like what is being printed. It beats Putin’s mediated press, which is the side you have chosen.

There is an old expression that says, ‘it is easier to invent the future than to predict it.’

Mark Zuckerberg appears about to prove this aphorism false.

After pouring tens of billions into the Metaverse and pivoting the once phenomenally successful Facebook to the world of Meta, no one attempted to invent the future more than Mark Zuckerberg. And now the results are in — it is an unmitigated disaster.

The graphics are appalling — the avatars don’t even have legs. The hang-out places are empty. Hardly anyone goes there at all, and when they do, the conversations are limited to ‘what’s up?’ The Metaverse, it turns out, is a dead zone. And last week, the market gave its verdict on Meta, the parent company of Facebook shed an astonishing $700 billion in value.

The Wall Street Journal recently referred to the Metaverse as a “sad and empty place.”

So if the Metaverse is not the future of media, what is?

My all-time favorite quote is from Andy Grove, the former Chairman and CEO of Intel. Grove said, “listen to the technology. The technology will tell you what to do.”

So, if we listen to the technology (as opposed to listening to Mark Zuckerberg), what is the technology telling us?

It tells us three things:

1. People now spend 8 hours a day, every day, watching TV, movies, or videos. This is now the predominant means of communication in the world. The average person spends just 19 minutes a day reading. Text is dead. Video is addictive. People are not living in the Metaverse. They are living in what we might call the Mediaverse.

2. So who gets to decide what we will all be seeing — the things that shape our views of the world? Up until now, the Mediaverse has been dominated by a very few, very powerful companies — they decide what we will see and what we will hear about and know. The reason for this is twofold — first, creating content was very complicated and expensive, and second, once the content was created, getting it into people’s homes was equally complicated and expensive — you had to own a broadcast network or a cable channel. That was a barrier to entry.

3. The arrival of the iPhone — that shoots, edits, and delivers broadcast quality video, and the arrival of broadband that puts video into your home (Netflix, after all, is actually just a giant website), means that now ANYONE can produce content on their own or as a group. If you own a smartphone, you have the same power as CNN.

This is an enormous, almost unthinkable change.

It is going to completely restructure and redefine the entire media universe.

The primary and fundamental change we are going to see is the flow of content. Up until now, since the invention of the printing press, and even before, content has been made by the very few and then distributed to the very many either by a newspaper, magazine, movie studio, TV network, or even stone tablet — if you want to go back that far. We make it, and you consume it.

Now, if we listen to the technology, the old world of media is going to be turned on its head. Now, it is going to be a world of we make it, and we share it.

This is particularly important when it comes to the world of news and information because it is on that basis that we make so many critical decisions. Up until now, news and information have also been highly controlled by a very few who decide what we will see and learn and, more importantly, what we will not see and learn about.

All of this is going to change — not because Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk decided it would be so — it is going to change because the technology already in our hands makes this change inevitable.

This is where UnPress comes in. UnPress is going to train a generation of millions of journalists and storytellers — give them a platform upon which to share their stories and news — and create a pathway for them to earn a real living doing it.

That’s the future — the Mediaverse, not the Metaverse.