Facebook 1954

If you had set out to create Facebook in 1954, the first thing you would have done was to rent several floors of a Midtown office building.

If you had set out to create Facebook in 1954, the first thing you would have done was to rent several floors of a Midtown office building, and filled it with professional writers, all of whom would be hired and on staff.

Their job would have been to create all the content that was needed to fill the pages and pages of Facebook every day.

If you had set out to create Instagram in 1959, the first thing you would have done would be to hire hundreds of professional photographers and get a massive office space somewhere for all of them to work. Where else were all the photos going to come from? Not to mention dark rooms.

If you had set out to create TripAdvisor in 1962, what how would you start? First, you would have to hire thousands of travel agents and travel writers, then get them some serious midtown office space.

OK.

Now, let’s reverse the experiment.

If you were going to create a TV news operation in the year 2022, pretending that TV news had never existed before, what would it look like?

My guess is that it would not look like the TV newsrooms that we have today. That it is because they were all created in the 1950’s. Big rooms filled with paid professionals, there to create the content. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS- they are all the children of the 1950’s. Almost nothing has changed.

No, if you were going to create a news operation today from scratch, it would probably look a lot more like Facebook or Instagram or Airbnb for that matter — millions of contributors, all working on their own to make the content.

As it happens, when television was invented in 1939, there was no pre-existing model of what it was supposed to look like and how it was supposed to work. The closest anyone could come was radio news, which was then the dominant medium — NBC leading the pack. And how was radio news made? A newsreader sat at a desk and read copy into a microphone. When TV came along in the early 1950’s. What did people do? They moved cameras into the radio newsroom and you saw an anchor, sitting at a desk, reading copy. Sound familiar? It still looks the same today.

Time for a change.

Suppose we could start from scratch, with no pre-conceived ideas of what TV news was supposed to look like and how it should be made. In a world in which iPhones shoot 4K (8K on the 14), that is four times HiDef; when they edit video, when they add graphics and music and go live from anywhere I the world — and where there are 7 billion of them in 7 billion hands around the world — how would you design an online news company? Probably not the way they were designed in the 1950’s, which is pretty much what we have today.

Probably a lot closer to Instagram or eBay for that matter. Millions of people contributing millions of stories and ideas.

So, to say the news business is ripe for re-invention is an understatement.

At UnPress we are starting from scratch. A whole new concept for how news should work; who gets to make it and how it looks.

It’s a very radical experiment, but we think it’s going to work.

If you would like to be part of this experiment, get in touch. Happy to explain all.