What The News Business Can Learn From Henry Ford
In 1920, Henry Ford opened the River Rouge plant in Michigan.
In 1920, Henry Ford opened the River Rouge plant in Michigan.
It was the world’s largest vertically integrated factory in the world. Its was a mile and a half long and a mile wide. Raw iron ore came in on one side and a finished car exited at the other. A car could be made in this way in a day. Glass, steel, rubber, leather, every aspect of the car was created and assembled here. The efficiency was breathtaking.
Ford’s dream was to make the motor car available to everyone, and to do that he had to drive down the cost of manufacturing.
Before Ford, an automobile was essentially hand made, one car at a time. It could take months, if not a year, to make a single car. That made cars expensive. Before Ford, they were the toys of the wealthy. After Ford, everyone could have one.
The TV news business is, at its heart, a manufacturing business. Instead of building cars, people in the news business build stories.
TV news stories today are manufactured the way cars were manufactured before Ford — piecemeal. Each story is hand-crafted, generally by a team of people. Story by story, hand made. It is incredibly expensive and it is incredibly inefficient.
This was fine when there were only three TV networks, and each network presented a half our of news a night. The networks made so much money that they did not care what it cost or how inefficient the system was.
Today, those three networks and their nightly half hours have been replaced by an almost limitless demand for news — between 24-hour cable, networks moving to non-linear VOD and of course the web itself, TV (or online video) news is a beast that must be continually fed and updated.
Henry Ford created a system that radically dropped the cost of manufacturing a car without sacrificing the quality; in fact, improving it. What can we learn from Henry Ford?
At UnPress we are creating the world’s first vertically integrated news organization.
In the TV news business we don’t need a factory a mile long. All we need to manufacture our stories is an iPhone. Our primary asset here is not iron and steel and rubber, it’s people.
Joan Konner, the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University used to tell me “journalism is not a nurturing business.” And that is true. As a rule, it chews people up and then unceremoniously throws them out when they are not needed any longer.
We want to change that at UnPress.
If you went to Columbia’s J-School, (which I did — I also taught there for many years), you paid your tuition (now a rather astonishing $61,671 a year) and after you got your diploma, they bid you a fond farewell. The only time I heard from them after that was to ask for a contribution. You were on your own.
If you went to work for a TV station, you got hired, and then, after while, if things did not work out, you were let go. The same is of course, true for newspapers, more than 2,000 of which have closed in the US in the past decade.
Not nurturing.
At UnPress we are going to nurture our content contributors from cradle to grave, so to speak.
We’ll train people to shoot, cut, produce, report; the mechanics along with the fundamentals of journalism. Our relationship with them never ends.
Then we’ll provide a platform for them to share their work with the world.
Then, we’ll continue to work with them to show them pathways to expand their skills and their income. The world TV business generated $1.73 trillion a year. There’s plenty to go around. You just have to know how to get it. UnPress will show you and help you get there.
Vertically integrated news.
It’s a good idea. Thanks Henry Ford.
originally published by Michael Rosenblum, August 26 2022