It’s Shark Week!!!! — Again
Invented more than 30 years ago by then Discovery producer Steve Cheskin, Shark Week proved to be a ratings hit for Discovery
Over at Discovery Channel it’s SHARK WEEK…. again.
Scary!!!
Invented more than 30 years ago by then Discovery producer Steve Cheskin, Shark Week proved to be a ratings hit for Discovery. People tuned in by the millions to watch hour after hour of shark attacks.
Don’t go in the water!! Well, why not? The TV business is a business, and it is actually the business of selling spots to advertisers. That, after all, is who pays the bills. A 30-second spot on Discovery can cost upwards of $100,000. The more viewers you can rope in, the more money the network makes. It’s a pretty simple equation. Most people think that TV shows in the ‘news and information’ world are serving their viewers. Well, they are, in a way. They are serving them on a platter to the advertisers. In the TV business, it is the viewers that are the ‘product’ that is being sold to the advertisers. The more viewers, the more eyeballs you can garner, and the more product you have to sell. Hence, SHARK WEEK! (or Terrorists! or Monkey Pox!!!). Scary brings in those eyeballs.
Of course, what it also does is ‘educate’ the viewers about the ‘dangerous’ world in which we all live. And I put educate in quotes for a reason. Last year, there were eleven shark-related fatalities in the world.
Eleven.
Nine of them were deemed ‘non-provoked.’
Last year, 41 people, mostly children, died of TV sets falling on them. Now that’s a week that Discovery probably does not want to go near, but nearly four times as fatal as shark attacks. Back in the real world, 1.5 million people died of diabetes last year, but you don’t see DIABETES WEEK on Discovery, or anywhere else for that matter. So the current media world of ‘news and information’ is really about neither. It is about numbers and entertainment, which is really a tragedy because no one who watches seems to know that. As a society, we educate ourselves based on what we see on TV.
100 million sharks are killed yearly, bringing the species, which has been around for a few million years, to the brink of extinction. Killing sharks? Sure, they are dangerous. How do I know? I saw it on TV. OK, but suppose we could re-invent news and information? Suppose we could change the kinds of stories that we cover? Suppose we could make the viewer paramount here, as opposed to the advertiser? Suppose that we could take control of the content out of the hands of a few massive media companies and put that control in the hands of the viewers themselves? Suppose we could say to millions of people around the world — tell us the news stories that matter to you? Then, suppose we could share those with the world. Well, that is exactly what we are going to do. And how are we going to do it?
Watch this space, and if you want to be part of the News Revolution, get in touch, we are happy to tell you more.