Bootstrapping a Videoblogging Army

[Ryan Price]

Every time I happen to catch a few minutes of the nightly news, I kind
of want to vomit. The scare tactics, the way they talk down to the
audience, the insanely short clips, and the tons of other tricks that
mainstream media uses to bolster ratings and viewership really grind
my grindable parts.

Then we have the exact polar opposites, like Orlando Event TV (http://
oetv.tv) – Orlando Event TV this and several other shows produced
locally are really trying to show everyone what it really means to be
a citizen of this community, and they are all about the transparency.
When you watch this video of Mark Baratelli in Winter Park, for
example, there’s no question that he’s just goofing around, hamming it
up. Most of all he’s being himself, and you have to respect that.

I had a similar dream not too long ago, and that manifested itself as
Orlando Scene TV and a bunch of other sites, like Orlando Video. The
honest truth here is that I was not able to keep the momentum going
for long periods of time. Producing video and being an unstoppable
advocate for your product take a lot of time, energy, and the
cooperation of a passionate community. Then there’s a question of
money – how can I pay my rent, etc. if all I’m ever doing is recording
people’s rock shows and theatre performances. It just never added up
for me.

Then a little while ago I realized that the only way to really get a
local indie TV project off the ground would be to distribute the
workload as much as possible.

What does this look like? Well, now that I have the idea from The Art
of Community to come up with a list of teams and their
responsibilities, I see the teams as follows:

Link to see the Image: Internet TV and Local Events Community
http://ryanpricemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/internet_tv.png

Let me be clear about a few things:

Audience

The role of the audience here is to let us know that we are giving
them something they want, and to give us some ideas to keep moving
this machine forward. Kickstarter [http://www.kickstarter.com/] (or
something like it) could be a powerful force here: we can hold certain
great ideas for ransom unless there is a certain amount of community
support. The audience laid out here is really a fraction of the
audience, the most passionate 2%. I also think this group will be web-
savvy enough to have their own web sites or popular facebook profiles
(hundreds of friends), and they will want to use these channels to
help us promote our cause.
Tech Leads

Aside from pushing buttons, I also put these people in the role of
“product designers”. If Jony Ive has a lot to do with the success of
Apple products, then we should be able to assign a few people in our
community a similar amount of responsibility. These people are very
highly skilled, and may only contribute once every few years, when we
redesign the title graphics and the website, or they may help us
create fliers, blog badges an mini-sites on a more frequent basis.
These are also the User Experience designers – in charge of the
overall way in which people interact with the product.
Producers

Here, a producer is anyone who makes something. That means hosts,
script or show notes writers, video editors, etc. A production team
could be all of one person, or it could be as large as 5 or 6. It
really depends on the skills of everyone involved and the scope of the
particular project. A large goal here would be to make sure that
anyone who counts as a producer could technically do everything by
him- or herself if needed, but it’s really a question of time. Like I
said before, this is the repetitive and time-hogging part, even if we
can streamline the whole process.

The other key is to make sure that everyone owns his or her work,
not only from an intellectual property perspective, but in a support
fashion as well – if someone has a question about the restaurant you
reviewed, you should be the one to get the notification and reply. In
this way, people may start to develop a “beat” or even “channels” of
information, and it could make sense to give certain producers their
own sites. Pulling a line from The Starfish and the Spider, the
producers give little more than spiritual guidance to the community.
He can suggest large projects or hair-brained schemes, but he will be
on his own unless they get a decent number of other community members
to support and participate. These ideas can even come from the
Audience, but as they don’t often produce content, an audience member
will have to find a champion for her great idea.

The last piece of this puzzle for me is the equipment. We only need a
few REALLY expensive tools – many people already own a computer, and
video editing tools are freely available. Coming by decent video
cameras is what used to be difficult, until recently. If you really
want to spend some green, go ahead and get a Flip or a Kodak – even
most consumer still cameras have pretty nice video capabilities.
However, this still costs anywhere from $100 – $350, and that is a
large financial barrier right now.

What if we could make the cost of entry $30?
That’s such a small amount, we could probably raise a few hundred
dollars from our community and outfit an entire army with these cheap
video tools in no time at all!

I heard about the Coby CAM3000 Mini Digital Camcorder on a podcast I
regularly listen to, The Daily Giz Wiz. As far as I know, this is the
absolutely least expensive (yet decent) tool for capturing video made
by a well-known manufacturer. I plan on picking one up just to field
test it – it’s so affordable, why not?

The other part of my plan here is to get some training and best
practices in the heads of these videobloggers before they get out in
the wild. We already have some community spaces and LOTS of events
happening, so the material is always out there. We could pair up one
new guy with an experienced producer and mentor them in the basics.
Make sure they know not to film in too much or too little light, how
to get some decent sound, introduce them to some basic video editing,
and how to post videos. This might take one long day or a few evenings
out, but there will be a certain point when a new producer will just
have to get out on her own and start learning by doing.

We won’t just “give” out these cameras – they will have to be earned.
If we apply some sort of a value to the camera – say, 10 points, and
videos another – say 1 point for a video shorter than 3 minutes, 2
points for a video 4 minutes or longer of a reasonable quality – later
when we can offer better equipment – the Kodak Zi8, or the Flip Mino
HD, or perhaps even other stuff to barter for. I also have this
thought right now that if we have any advertising revenue to share, it
will be based on your continued contribution of at least X points in a
1-3 month period – we would probably need a way to make sure that we
always have fresh content coming in, so we need to assign deadlines to
keep people from getting lazy. As soon as this machine loses a certain
amount of momentum, it might as well not be running at all.

That’s as far as I’m going to wander into this thought experiment for
now. I don’t have a great picture of how other organizations do it,
and this is just something I’ve been stewing on for a few months when
I really get the chance to think about it, which is not very often at
all. I’d love to take a look at how NowPublic [http://nowpublic.com/]
and a whole bunch of other public media entities handle this. There
are lots of questions unanswered here, but I’ve been struggling to
really write down and communicate this idea to a large group for a
while now.

If you’d like to talk more, I think we should wake up this mailing
list [http://groups.google.com/group/newmediaorlando]. I’m going to
send this same text out there to see if we get any bites. Please blog
about this, tweet it, point to the list page, get everyone who might
be interested involved in the discussion.

Tonight is a Florida Creatives Happy Hour, and Friday is MOOM. We
should be having a Likemind on December 4th, and another Happy Hour on
December 21st. If you’d like to talk in person, these days are really
good ones to engage me and others who are interested in making Orlando
more awesome.

Peace,
Ryan Price
@liberatr
ryanpricemedia.com
Other events this week: http://floridacreatives.com/event/2009/11/16/week