Travel Channel meets the networked economy

I’ve sorted out my reflections on the second Travel Channel Academy, which I attended from July 19 through 22. For me, it was an excellent experience. I wanted to get ideas for how to teach journalism students to shoot and edit video without requiring them to take a full-semester class to do it. I got lots of ideas.

The 20 other students at TCA came for different reasons. What caught me by surprise was that all of them — I think it’s accurate to say “all” — were there largely because of the Travel Channel connection. While I appreciated the Travel Channel link (because, well, even if it isn’t journalism, it’s also not the UCLA film school), that wasn’t the main attraction for me.

I’m actually going to show a connection to the newspaper business here, but I have to unspool a long thread first.

Plenty of people aspire to be a Travel Channel “host.” This was news to me. Many students in the class clearly saw this as a serious goal, like aspiring to become a TV news anchor. But — with travel. Many people could roll the names of Travel Channel stars such as Anthony Bourdain and Samantha Brown glibly off their tongues in any conversation. As a cable channel surfer, I knew about most of the personalities discussed, but one was unique. Tiffany Burnett was “discovered” in an audition tape she submitted for the “5 Takes” series, produced by Rosenblum’s team. Several of my fellow students saw Burnett’s success story as a dream to be pursued.

The students attending were serious and should be taken seriously. TCA is not the video equivalent of the old back-cover ads in magazines that promised you a career as an artist if you could draw a simple sketch. The training is real — although it’s not adequate for every single person who attends. (That’s not intended as a condemnation; the same is true of most training and workshops that teach technology skills. Not everyone can learn enough in a short workshop to then go out and do what was taught. The point is that some people can and do.) Rosenblum wants to put 1,000 people through this training in the next year.

The students came from various backgrounds. A couple were schoolteachers. One was an experienced photojournalist. Three or more of the younger ones had a broadcast journalism degree. Some were looking for a total career change, like the engineer from the Midwest. Having paid $2,500 tuition for four days, obviously no one was a bum.

Most thought it was worth it. On the last day of my workshop, I asked as many people as I could whether they felt satisfied. The simple summary is: Most said yes, they were satisfied — or even ecstatic, in some cases. Now, the fine print is, I did not talk to everyone (I asked at least 10, maybe more). One student dropped out and didn’t even show up on Day 4. People’s satisfaction varied — some said they had come mainly to make contacts among Travel Channel staff members, and they had done so, and that made it all worthwhile. Others said they had learned how to shoot video and how to use the camera, but they didn’t feel very confident about video editing. Some said almost the opposite — editing great, shooting not so great. Of course, there were various complaints.

I wouldn’t say everyone is guaranteed to like TCA, but if you want to get your work on the Travel Channel (which all the others did seem to want), then I would recommend it. If you don’t give a hoot about the Travel Channel, probably you should stay away.

Michael Rosenblum has been writing a lot about all of this on his blog, so I don’t need to rehash the future vision of the Travel Channel here.

Why the Travel Channel is thinking smart. Rosenblum estimated that 4.5 million hours of video are shown each year (in North America) across all the many cable channels. Audiences are, naturally, much smaller than in the days when we had only three networks. Smaller audiences mean the ad dollars are tiny for, say, MSNBC’s daytime programming. So the channel (any channel) is making far less money per half-hour — even the popular half-hours. How do you produce new programming with a vastly reduced budget?

This is starting to sound like the newspaper business, isn’t it?

If you could get 1,000 people to pay you to “audition,” to show you whether they had new, interesting ideas — wouldn’t you put something in and make it worth their while?

And mind you, you’re not offering them a job with a salary. You’re inviting them to freelance.

The Travel Channel is not asking people to work for free. They’ll pay, for example, $250 per minute used (on-air) for “What’s Your Trip.” They’ll make a contract with a VJ (or “TJ”) for a half-hour show, a mini-series, a season — and pay a per-episode rate. A work for hire. How much? There will be a negotiation, of course.

What did a half-hour of television cost under the old system? What does an hour with Anthony Bourdain cost, with his camera crew and landing a helicopter in the Borneo jungle? In the new world, the Tiffany wannabes might well deliver that half hour for as little as $10,000. For TV people, this is heaven on earth.

Back to newspapers — and journalism, perhaps. Ain’t nobody gonna give you $10,000 to uncover scandal and corruption, sorry.

Learning to Do More with Less

Rosenblum likened this new world to a magazine model — specialty magazines have a very small salaried staff for editorial, and an army of freelancers. Television used to be too complicated — and too expensive — to even consider such a model. Technology has changed that.

The Travel Channel might be ahead of the game, but everyone will be doing this, eventually.

And I don’t mean only TV. The Travel Channel has online firmly in its sights. Never mind that their current Web site needs a massive navigation overhaul and redesign. They’re focused on slicing and dicing all their video into tasty chunks that work well online.

Why invest time and money in training? Because not that many people know how to do this kind of work — yet. All those kids making anime music videos will know how to cut and edit like champions, but they won’t necessarily know how to tell a story.

I came out of TCA thinking about the future. About narration that’s interesting and compelling. About how we will tell stories with cameras — instead of with text. About 20-somethings who want to be Tiffany. And above all, of course, about the future of journalism.

Journalism is a child of the printing press (Rosenblum spiels the same schtick as I do about Gutenberg), even though news was spread by mouth and by drum for centuries before metal types were cast in Germany. As we move out of the age of printed texts and deeper into the digital era, journalism will not necessarily come loping along beside us. Adjustments must be made.

The Travel Channel is adjusting itself to the new marketplace. Is journalism adjusting in the same proactive way, looking for new talent and offering opportunities to new people?

> See all posts here about TCA.