Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World.

This picture was taken last week during a visit to the National Press Club in Washington. I was there to meet some great people and make a presentation, but I got the chance to walk around, look at all the marvelous photographs and try and absorb the history of the place.

The Press Club represents the essence of all that professional journalists hold dear. Bathed in the lives and deaths of those who went before, it is a lasting testimony to an institution that finds itself facing significant internal and external pressures today.

On the way home, I began writing this essay, Voyeurism: Journalism’s 21st Century Crisis. As always, I make no claim to special insight or knowledge. This vision is simply my thoughts about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be headed. The way I look at it, it’s all there for anybody to see, but the price of a pair of glasses is a willingness to be honest with ourselves.

The people I was with in Washington agreed with me that this is perhaps the most exciting era in the history of communications, but that traditional media companies must “drive their car and fix it at the same time.” That is a significant challenge, and a how-to manual would certainly help. Unfortunately, we’ve got to make a lot of it up as we go along, and our ties to our assumptions, traditions and history might just be a net liability.

I’m in D.C. for a presentation in the morning, but I wanted to take a moment to write about my endless distaste for the phrases “user-generated” or “consumer-generated” content.

Who writes this stuff anyway? Could there be anything more disrespectful to the people formerly known as the audience than to reference them this way? Users? Consumers?

Here’s what bugs me. J.D. Lasica’s wonderful term, the Personal Media Revolution, describes a very real revolution in terms of media. His book, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation is one of those must-have books, if you want to understand what’s really going on. And what’s going on is that people — those formerly known as the audience — are taking matters into their own hands. The revolution is a real one, and it’s against, in part, the people who come up with terms like “user-generated” or “consumer-generated” content. They’re not users. They’re not consumers. They’re people!

We make these condescending terms, because we still think of us as an “us” and the audience as “them.” In the Media 2.0 world, we’re all the same, and that’s the key to unlocking creativity in building platforms of information service.

I realize that the modernist marketing world needs to create slots for everything, because logic works that way. But collaboration isn’t a one-way street, and not everybody’s dying to get their stuff to us ’cause we’re the mighty media. Nuh-uh. We’re in this new media thing together.

In the words of the immortal Gordon Borrell, “The deer now have guns.” We’re smart if we respect that and stupid if we don’t.

A front page Wall Street Journal article today examines the history and the conflict between television companies and Google over YouTube and its hosting of copyrighted materials. It’s a pretty fair read with a couple of interesting quotes: (The article is behind the paper’s subscription wall, so I won’t provide a link.)

“The problem the media companies have in dealing with Google is that we’re not in a position of strength,” acknowledges a senior executive at one of the companies.”

…the current strife might eventually prove to be no more than hard-nosed negotiating…

Mr. Schmidt (Google’s Eric) said late last month that he was sure Google “will eventually do some very significant deals” with TV companies, but suggested that none were imminent. “I’m not in a great hurry on this issue,” he said. “It’s more important to get it right.”

There is more at stake in this battle than meets the eye, for the very nature of contemporary copyright law is what’s being challenged. It’s a touchpoint between the controlled distribution of modernism and the shared distribution of postmodernism, and I don’t think anybody really knows where it’s all heading.

I do know that the whole concept of copyright needs to be reexamined by lawmakers, because the public interest is not served by current law. Content creators aren’t served by it either, only the copyright holders — the elite and tightly-controlled world of music, film, video, print and artistic publishers — is benefited, and this artificial government only has itself to blame for its current conundrum.

There’s a motive for creativity that’s rarely discussed in the light of copyright, but it’s expressed in many ways through creative works.

Harry Chapin’s “Mr. Tanner:” “Music was his life; it was not his livelihood.”

Bill Monroe, when I interviewed him in 1979: “I never wrote any songs; I just heard them before anybody else.”

From The Agony and the Ecstasy: “We’re artists. We’ll always be a slave to another man’s nickel.”

The movie “Crossroads” about an old blues musician: “Lots of towns, lots of songs, lots of women, good times, bad times. All he ever wanted to hear anybody say was, ‘He was good. He could really play.’”

Jeong-Hyun Lim (funtwo) in response to all the fuss about his “Canon in D” video on YouTube: “Some said my vibrato is quite sloppy, and I agree with that, so these days I’m doing my best to improve my vibrato skill.” The guy uttered not a word about money. It was all about his music.

So as we watch this whole thing unfold, let’s remember that this is really a cultural war underway. I don’t say that one side is right and the other wrong, because I don’t think that’s really the issue. However, the victor will write the rules for the future, and we ought to be prepared for it to go either way.

In the case of the Long Island man who died a year ago but whose body was discovered this week sitting in front of his television set, one wonders if Nielsen would’ve counted him as a viewer the whole time he was deceased. After all, the set was running.

It gives new meaning to the whole “running in the background viewing” meme.

(To quote George Carlin, “These are the kinds of thoughts that kept me out of the good schools.”)

Rosenblumtv

The writer is Michael Rosenblum, he of Video Journalist fame (or infamy). Michael is vilified by those who think he’s out to destroy television with his small cameras and “one-man-bands” (a pejorative term in television newsrooms). The loudest critics are video news photographers, that unique breed of adventurer that finds the “talent” aspects of the business to be otherworldly.

I’ve known Michael for many years, and I can tell you that he’s not out to destroy anything. His wish is just the opposite; he wants to save people’s jobs by altering the archaic status-quo of the traditional newsgathering process. I think he’s a genius and an innovator, but no one can argue that Michael Rosenblum is a storyteller. That comes out clearly in his blog.

From an entry called “Edward III, Crecy and Local TV Newsrooms,” Rosenblum tells the tale of how the use of new technology altered warfare in the time of Edward III of England. The battle was at Crecy, where the French army — made up of thousands of armored knights — met the king’s bowmen. He likens the strategy to that necessary for stations in the conversion to Video Journalists.

The French, in vastly superior numbers marched north to Crecy filled with over confidence. They looked out on the English forces and laughed. They would cut them to ribbons by lunchtime.

So the French army marched into battle with the English bowmen, on foot. The bowmen let loose their arrows - like rain.. and the French knights began to go down. The English were shooting the horses out from under the knights. This was against the rules! On the muddy ground, immobilized in their suits of armor, the knights were helpless as the English bowman set upon them and killed them on the spot. This was also considered unsporting behaviour. One was supposed, at worst, to ransome the nobleman.

The French army was decimated at Crecy, and later Edward repeated the trick at Poitiers. It was, in a moment, the end of knights, armor, chivalry and medieval warfare. A thousand years of history vanished in an afternoon.

What brought down the French army was first and foremost the technology of the long bow. But more than that, it was the pure foresight and courage of Edward to completely embrace the new technology and understand how to implement it. He could have just added a few bowmen to his army of knights (just as newsrooms could add a few VJs to their conventional reporters and cameramen). Neither does the trick. Edward reinvented warfare from the ground up based on the light, simple and portable technology of the long bow. It was an incredibly brave thing to do.

Michael’s been diligent to keep quality entries coming since he launched his blog last week. I hope he keeps it up. We need his experience and his voice.

There are certain similarities about all bloggers, regardless of the community in which I find them. In Raleigh, WNCN-TV hosted its first blogger meetup Monday, and I’m happy to report that these bloggers, like those in San Francisco, Nashville, Greensboro and elsewhere, are fun folks to be around. The Raleigh bunch are bright, extremely media-savvy people who are easy to talk with and eager to be helpful.

This is often a real surprise to some traditional news people, who expect them to be (I guess) a bunch of angry and hostile guys in their pajamas. Their knowledge of the local media scene was remarkable. Who knew?

Raleigh is a part of the Research Triangle, so there are a lot of tech blogs in the area. Andy Beal, for example, calls Raleigh home, as do Wayne Sutton, Marcus Williford and Nathan Gilliatt. Stephanie is launching a blog with an upbeat tone. Rob does career help. Then there are Luther, Zoe, Chuck, Jason and Matt. Some of them showed up with ideas about possibly doing business with the station, but for the most part, it was just curious bloggers being themselves.

There were a couple of good takeaways for me. I expected them to want embeddable (is that a word) videos from the station, but I was surprised by the request for trackbacks on station stories. It makes sense, though. A lot of stations are making comments available, but I can’t think of anybody who allows trackbacks.

The station is off to a good start, because they’ve agreed to listen. They’re already planning the next meet-up, a more social-like event that will be held at a time when more bloggers can make it. I hope they’ll invite me again.

UN urged to take action on asteroid threat
Illness from tainted peanut butter spreads
8 US troops die in Afghan copter crash
Bird flu spreads in Russia
Double car bombing kills at least 35 in Baghdad
Next stop Iran?

In the words of the immortal Frank Barone, “Holy Crap!”

Oh, and on the funny page, Britney shaved her head, Anna Nicole is still dead (though now embalmed), and “another woman” may have been involved in Hugh Grant’s breakup.

Find your own links. I’m going back to bed.

For those of you who feel the press has gone just a wee bit overboard with Anna Nicole, here’s a blog entry that’ll warm your heart. Every journalist in the world should read this, for what our profession has devolved to is nothing less than tragic. Thank you Chez (and the wonderful Pajiba for the tip).

WNCN-TV in Raleigh is hosting its first blogger meet-up on Monday at noon at the station. I’m going to be there, so drop on by and say hello. I’d love to get to know you.

Lunch is being served, and attendees will get a cool, collectible and highly coveted NBC17 coffee mug AND a t-shirt. How about that for swag?

Here’s the Evite, in case you didn’t get one.

This is the start of what we hope will be a highly supportive effort by the station on behalf of the local blogosphere, and I sure hope we get a nice turnout. There aren’t a lot of local media companies willing to do it right, so I want to extend a personal invitation to Triangle area bloggers to come out a meet a group that is.

Steve Outing posts an insightful look into the future of news that contains this gem from his interview with Robin Sloan, manager of new media strategy for Al Gore’s Current TV.

“I think ‘news’ just becomes a less distinct category. You don’t sit down with a newspaper, or even a news website, or even a super wireless e-paper device, for 10 minutes in the morning to very formally ‘get your news.’ Rather, you get all sorts of news and information — from the personal to the professional to the political — throughout the day, in little bits and bursts, via many different media. With any luck, in 5-10 years the word ‘news’ will be sort of confusing: Don’t you just mean ‘life’?”

Yes! Very astute, Mr. Sloan. … Because within 5-10 years we’ll all pretty much be carrying around with us the means to receive important and personally relevant news at any time and in any place — I’m thinking of how the cell phone will evolve to become your information lifeline — or otherwise be sitting in front of some connected screen, so the devoted “watch/read the news” experience goes away. It (news and information that’s relevant to me) is just always there.

Sloan elaborates: “A key point is that news will continue to be delivered on many media — websites, blogs, TV, phones, pamphlet-y things, those little java jackets they have at coffee shops, whatever. It’s not about everything going digital and never seeing a molecule of real matter again. But it IS about the death of the monolithic news experience.”

Nobody really knows where all of this is heading, but I always tell clients to follow the young people. Media habits are set by age 25, and that crowd is completely different than the one we now serve.

Go read Steve’s article. You’ll be glad you did.

Sumner Redstone reveals his core assumptions about Viacom’s posturing with YouTube in a wonderful interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Go read the whole thing, but here are some snippets:

THR: Let’s talk about new media. There are some that say Viacom has missed the boat when it comes to the Web 2.0 revolution.
Redstone: Wait a minute, wait a minute. We don’t miss boats. Other people miss boats, and they may have missed the Viacom boat. The fact of the matter is, without copyright protection, there is no entertainment business. And so we instructed YouTube to remove 100,000 pieces of video from their site. Why? Because they were using it without paying for it. I don’t believe in that. If you want to use us, pay us. Or make a deal with us that is commensurate with the value of our product. We are the only totally content company, and our content has taken years and years to develop, with a lot of hard work. People who want to use it are going to pay us, or good-bye…

THR: Is taking your content off YouTube an indication that you would prefer to do it entirely on your own?
Redstone: I’m ambivalent, but if YouTube would come along and offer us a deal that is commensurate with the value of the programming that we spend so many millions and so much time to create, we would certainly look at that.

These are textbook economic scarcity arguments, and they make complete sense in the mass content distribution world. Redstone is right, then, when he states that without copyright protection, there is no entertainment business. The key assumption here is that control of scarcity is the vehicle for making money. It’s hard to argue with that.

Where things get messy, however, is this statement: “…THEY (emphasis mine) were using it without paying for it.” Here, he refers to YouTube, but the reality is that the “they” actually refers to the users of YouTube, not the company itself. The real matter then is one of sharing clips via a platform that makes it easy to do so. Let me sing an old song: we’ve been sharing copyrighted materials with each other for as long as content companies have been making it available. We swapped 45s with each other when I was a teenager. The first tool to make it easy was audio tape. Then video tape. Then digital. Now, via public platforms.

Each time one of these innovations came along, the copyright industry’s response was to raise prices. Citing losses of sales, $18 CDs were justified along with $10 movie tickets. Never was the pocketbook of the average customer taken into consideration, and if it had been, perhaps we wouldn’t be talking about this stuff today.

Where do you draw the line in all this? If I invite ten friends over to watch a DVD of The Departed, does that constitute theft? How about twenty friends? These are murky legal waters, the waves of which are currently washing over the whole entertainment business.

In Redstone’s interview, he compares the YouTube situation with cable companies that pay Viacom for their content. This seems a logical argument, but it comes from the notion that YouTube — as a company — is controlling the sharing of video clips. That it doesn’t is the monkey wrench in the argument of the content business, and that’s why I think it would be a whole lot smarter for Viacom to work with YouTube than against it.

The negotiations are continuing, I’m sure. Redstone wants a deal that is “commensurate with the value of our product.” The real question is who determines that value?

We must always remember that the Personal Media Revolution is very personal and a very real revolution. Who are people revolting against? It’s a sad business day, indeed, when your customers become your enemy.

In a case that has ramifications for all media in the digital space, a federal judge in Austin, TX has dismissed a $30 million lawsuit against MySpace over the sexual assault of a 14-year old girl. The girl, who listed her age as 18 on her MySpace profile, was first contacted by her assailant on the site. The suit charged MySpace with negligence, gross negligence, fraud and negligent misrepresentation.

The judge cited the Communications Decency Act of 1996 in dismissing the negligence and gross negligence charges, something we all need to consider. The CDA is increasingly providing safe haven for web businesses, because it protects them against messages people send to each other via a site. This includes comments on blogs, for example.

This is important, because liability is one of the key factors in broadcasting’s slow entry into the more vibrant, interactive paths of Media 2.0. What this ruling says, in part, is that MySpace should be given the same protection as any common carrier, such as a telephone company. If, for example, a sexual assault victim made contact with his or her assailant via telephone, the phone company would not be liable for damages in any case. Providing the vehicle for interaction does not automatically put that vehicle in our legal system’s bullseye.

But lawyers make their living in other people’s (deep) pockets, and case law is their drug of choice. Nobody knows that better than media companies, so I don’t blame anybody for being cautious. Judge Sam Sparks wrote, “If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace.” As a parent of children who use MySpace, I couldn’t agree with that more.

“This is allowing sites like MySpace to avoid the responsibility to make the Internet safe for children,” Jason Itkin, the lawyer in the case, said. “MySpace knows its Web site is a playground for sexual predators. Because of that, MySpace should be doing some very basic safety precautions.” This kind of inflammatory rhetoric is stock-in-trade and plays off fundamental fears that many people have about the wild west nature of the web. As I’ve written before, however, two-thirds of the users of MySpace keep their profiles “private,” which puts the “stalking” red herring into perspective.

The Wall Street Journal’s legal blog also points out that the head of security for MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam, is not the kind of guy who would take threats lightly.

Nigam joined MySpace after four years at Microsoft, where he was responsible for criminal compliance, security, and law enforcement affairs. Prior to joining Microsoft, the BU Law grad headed up the Motion Picture Association of America’s enforcement arm, and before that was a prosecutor for both the DOJ’s Criminal Division and the L.A. County DA’s Office.

The lawyer in the Austin case plans an appeal, and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. There are similar lawsuits against MySpace in California.

Proceed with caution, but do proceed.

(Here’s the ruling, thanks to Howard Bashman’s unique aggregator)

I don’t normally do this, but this clip from YouTube so grabbed my heart this morning that I thought I’d share it along with a little commentary. There are two points here for media observers:

One, this is the real value of YouTube and “the problem” for the industry that has had a lock on the video niche for a half-century. I suspect that on this Valentine’s Day, many thousands of people will be touched by little Andrew. As of this writing, the video has been viewed 53,878 times. Let’s see what that is by day’s end. While all the publicity about YouTube centers around big media getting screwed, the users of the site keep populating it with items like this.

The second point is that the song in the video is by Akon, a Universal/Motown recording artist. It’s either playing on the radio or on a CD or MP3 in the car. That Andrew’s parents have now “recorded” the boy singing along with the copyrighted song is a violation of copyright law. A lawyer could argue that it’s a music video for which the artist, writer, band, studio and record company were not compensated.

And I suspect that I am, technically, complicit in breaking the law by sharing this copyrighted work here. This is the absurdity of the law in the digital age and why we need to re-write the thing.

So, whether you’re alone or not on this Valentine’s Day, enjoy Andrew singing Akon’s version of “Lonely.” He really gets into it about 2 minutes into the tune, so hang with it.

A new Borrell Associates’ report due to be released Tuesday finds that newspaper-run websites are making more money from VIDEO advertising than TV station sites are by a ratio of almost 3 to 1 ($81 million to $32 million).

The numbers are small, but the growth isn’t, and Borrell is saying it’s just begun.

Video Ads, Paid Search Dominate Local Web by 2012

Source: Borrell Associates Inc., 2/2007

The report states that the newspaper money is coming from a new type of video ad.

Where will most of that (advertising) money go? Not to the purveyors of traditional “word from our sponsor” commercials, but to those who can offer long-form video information that their Web site visitors actually choose to see.

A few years ago, Doc Searls, one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, wrote that “there is no demand for messages.” He argued that the illusion of such a demand was one of the central tenets of mass marketing and one that technology was helping people overcome (think TiVo). We’ve been so busy “driving traffic” that we forgot to ask if anybody really wanted to get in the car.

It’s important to understand, however, that this has never been a desire to get away from advertising; it’s the unwanted nature of the beast that’s the problem.

The most important point of the Borrell report isn’t that newspapers are beating TV stations at their own game. It’s HOW they’re doing it, for this is a market that has tremendous potential for growth, especially at the local level.

Smart newspapers are offering these ads as part of their online classifieds, and there’s no reason television stations can’t do the same. Classifieds are the place in the print world where people go when they want advertising. But let’s step away from the print paradigm for a moment and look at this from a television perspective. What are video classifieds if not a series of channels in a station line-up? This is the world we need to explore, and the Web makes that possible.

This is the practice over at our old friend YouTube. YouTube sells “channels” to big advertisers, who are then responsible for providing the content for the channel. It is, in effect, long-form video advertising, and some of it is darned good. The advantage that YouTube brings is, of course, the staggering community of people who can choose to click on those ad channels. Check out their “partners” channel page. Could you do something similar? Why not? This is VIDEO, for crying out loud — local television’s bread and butter.

Borrell told me that the 2.0 world is “coming quickly,” and that media companies need only look at his projections to understand that local online search and local online video are where we need to point our guns.

The traditional mass-media forms of packaging news and selling “display” advertising around it are becoming less viable on the Internet. This new environment mimics what we know of cable TV, only with far greater interactivity and consumer control.

The most exciting thing I’ve seen in the numbers is the consumer demand for advertising, which pales in comparison to consumer demand for local news. In the end, the local media company that wins is one that can deliver a wealth of interactive content — especially video — around consumer verticals like real estate, health, automotive and other high-priced items that require lots of prior research.

There’s a general assumption out there that people are avoiding commercials, because they don’t like advertising. The Interactive Advertising Bureau goes to great lengths to point out that this isn’t true. People just don’t like to be interrupted by commercials. Will they seek out commercials? You bet.

Again, think of the enormous demand for online classifieds across all ad segments. And what is EBay, if not a place where people advertise their wares?

People need to shop and are always looking for bargains or selection, regardless of what they’re buying. While most people watching a commercial may do so for entertainment or because they have no choice, there is a small percentage that actually wants MORE information, as my friend Steve Marx constantly preaches. We need to be in the business of helping consumers find that more information.

Another piece of evidence revealing a demand for advertising is click-throughs for online ads. The rate that people click through is a crude measurement of demand. These rates vary depending on the relevancy of the content within which ads are placed — the more contextual the ads, the better the response. The average is somewhere around a half a percent, but contextual ads have much higher rates. That means some people want more, and providing long form video ads online is one way we can meet that need.

This new Borrell report is an absolute stunner and perhaps one of the most important and useful pieces of information to come along in years. It will be available for general distribution via the Borrell site at noon on Tuesday.

This business between “content creators” and Google/YouTube continues to baffle, and I wanted to take a few moments today to make a couple of points.

When was the last time anybody sent you a clip from The Daily Show or The Colbert Report?

Thought so.

There’s renewed buzz that all these “content” folks are going to build their own portal to put all their clips in one place. This is something they should have done a long time ago, but there’s that old competitive thing. Will they actually do it? Will they create their own online “spectrum?”

The bigger question is will people frequent the joint if they do? People aren’t exactly knocking down the walls of Viacom websites to get at all those clips, so I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.

The Wall St. Journal had one of those “inside sources” pieces this morning explaining that the content boys have Google by the short hairs, because they can prove the great god took money from a site that served illegal downloads. The story quotes “people close to the negotiations” and tries hard to paint a picture of Google as a monster out to bring about the demise of the copyright cartel and profit from it at the same time. It’s just so unfair!

You know, I support our laws and agree that these people have a bone to pick with, well, somebody over the gobs of money they think they could’ve made if they’d thought of YouTube first. To lose money, however, you first have to have made it, and that’s not the case with YouTube.

Moreover, the problem isn’t Google, it’s their own customers. You can make or enforce laws blocking profit-making from taking place in the “illegal” use of copyrighted material, but you cannot stop people from being people. Steve Jobs is telling the record industry to give it up, because hackers will always beat DRM. It’s just technology, after all, and nobody has a lock on that.

What we need is to rethink things like copyright and authorship, so that we don’t try and force industrial age concepts on the digital world. We want unbundled content, and that’s what we’re going to have. That’s not okay with the copyright police, because they’re stuck in a command-and-control mindset.

Nobody’s trying to rob anybody, except the copyright industry. After all, their greed gave us $18 CDs, one-third of prime time devoted to commercials, and forcing people to pay at the theater to sit through 20 minutes of ads. Is enough ever enough for these people?

Okay, here we go again.

Those of you who’ve been long-time readers will recall that I went without health insurance for several years while building my company. I’ve written posts about the “private pay discount” for health services that is relatively universal. What it means is that if you pay cash at the time of services, you get a 30% discount. I’ve used this to make the case that this 30% is funny money that drives the cost of health insurance — not necessarily healthcare — up, up, up.

Last year, I got health insurance, but I’m paying close attention to it, because I pay premiums in addition to a hefty deductible. Last fall, I decided to get a physical, because I turned, ugh, 60 in July. The doctor ran me through a lot of tests, including a cat scan of my sinuses. I told her and her office people that I did NOT want the test, unless insurance paid for it. They checked with the people who would do the cat scan, who researched with my insurance company and said it would be covered.

I got a bill for $955.

The insurance company “applied it to my deductible,” which is the same as me paying for it. But here’s the interesting part. The original bill was $1,364, which the insurance company used their “discount” to reduce to $955 (what discount?). If, however, I had walked in off the street and paid cash for the test, it would’ve cost $887, according to the business office of the clinic.

So what’s the real cost of the service? That, my friends, is the question we all ought to be asking, and one that I’m not sure universal health insurance would answer.

I have no recourse but to pay the bill, despite the fact that I would NEVER have had the test knowing it would’ve come out of my pocket. The physical problem just wouldn’t have been worth it. The fault is mine, because I trusted the doctor’s office to get it right. From now on, I’ll make the call myself.

And so it goes…

I won’t be the first to say that I love the Geico caveman ad campaign. It’s funny on so many levels that I can’t begin to describe how the spots tickle my funny bone.

The one pictured here, where the cave dude is on a moving sidewalk at the airport, has been around for awhile, but I will actually stop what I’m doing to watch it. It’s perfect. The music is hypnotic and fits the ad perfectly, too. I’m not sure the ads sells insurance, but I think it’s one of the most creative campaign concepts to come down-the-pike in years.

I think the thing I like most about the ads is the way the whole campaign makes fun of political correctness. Every group or sub-group in our culture (white males exempted) is a victim, and these poor fellows are at the very bottom of the food chain. It’s brilliant, and I’m really enjoying it.

If these guys are as smart as I think they are, can there be a movie far behind?

When I first started writing about culture years ago, it was already clear that technology was serving the masses in what was and is an on-going quest for power over their own lives. There’s a fascinating story about the auto industry in today’s Wall St. Journal that reminded me of this, and it’s a powerful lesson for media companies as well.

To back-up a bit, we’ve entered the postmodern era in Western culture. I use that term, but others call it post-industrial, post-colonial or post-Christian. Regardless of what you call it, it includes a shift away from institutional power to individual power, and technology is its principal weapon. The illustration most used here is of the contemporary doctor, whose authority has dramatically changed as a result of the explosion of information that’s at the fingertips of most patients. The doctor is still the doctor, but her authority has changed.

This change is occurring at every level of every institution that governed the modern (industrial) world, and it’s both a frightening and exciting time to be alive.

The more I explored these changes, the more they became evident, which is why my first postulate is that the disruptive influences attacking media are all about people, not technology.

Fast-forward to the Wall St. Journal article. The theme is that the CEO of AutoNation, the U.S.’s largest chain of auto dealers, is asserting his clout in “suggesting” that Detroit change the way it makes cars. The issue is excess inventory at dealerships — billions of dollars worth of cars that are hard to sell. And why? Because nobody wants them.

At one AutoNation Inc. location in Delray Beach, Fla., scores of “orphan” vehicles have been sitting on the lot for months. One hulking silver Dodge Ram pickup has languished unsold for 237 days, an eternity by automotive standards. The problem? Chrysler equipped the truck with a V6 engine instead of the V8 requested by most buyers of big trucks.

Parked nearby is a red Jeep Grand Cherokee with four-wheel drive, a feature popular in snowy climes but not sunny Florida. One Chrysler Sebring convertible is so loaded with options that its sticker price is $32,0000 — nearly as much as a BMW 3 Series.

“No customer would have asked for these vehicles that way, and they never should have been built that way,” says Mr. (AutoNation CEO Michael J.) Jackson. “This has to change.”

Sounds obvious, but it means completely re-doing the century-old, top-down manufacturing concept originated by Henry Ford, who pumped out millions of nearly identical Model-Ts. “You want a car,” the message was, “you take what we give you.”

The lesson for media is likewise obvious. The consumer is now in charge, folks, and we have no choice but to embrace a culture where customer choice is the mandate. Why is the late news in most markets dying? Because there’s little demand for it anymore. Why is the web growing as a source for news and information? Because it meets the wants and needs of people who are clearly in charge.

These profound cultural changes are like the proverbial frog in the cooking pot, and one day, institutional power will walk out the front door and not recognize anything. “What happened?” will be the hue and cry.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Interestingly, the Wall St. Journal article is behind its vaunted pay wall. Earth to Dow Jones…)

The controversy over past rantings of two bloggers hired by the Edwards campaign has been interesting to watch. I won’t argue the merits of either side of the matter; I simply wish to make an observation.

Is there a better illustration of the differences between the IRL (In Real Life, for the uneducated) and URL worlds than this? The inflammatory statements written by these bloggers weren’t questioned in the least when they were first written. Why? Well, that’s just the way of the blogosphere. Anything goes here.

Sacred cows (especially those political) are mercilessly assaulted — and often in language that would embarrass a sailor — every minute of every day in the blogosphere, and nobody thinks anything about it. Caveat emptor. I find it refreshing, for I’d much rather know everything about the person I’m reading than to have it hidden by “cultural norms” or an institutional byline.

Not so “in real life,” where political correctness — with its rules of propriety and rightness — governs speech (it stopped being free a long time ago, BTW). In the real world, biases are withheld and hidden, as if they don’t exist or at least aren’t allowed to exist. Unfortunately, they do, and the best we have is that we don’t talk about them.

Human nature doesn’t stop being human nature just because the guy across from you wants to see a smile. Who’s the bigger threat to culture, the one who speaks what’s on her mind or the one who hides what she really thinks?

So writers who work in a space where they’re free to speak their minds are dragged into the world where speaking your mind is punished, and we’re surprised by this?

I’ve written a thousand times that the core disruption we’re all facing is cultural, not technological, and this event is just another chapter in that story.

To me, it’s not so much a case of “be careful what you say online” as it is a case of matter coming into contact with anti-matter. And anybody who’s ever watched Star Trek knows where that leads.

By now, everybody (self included) has expressed their opinion about the Viacom/YouTube smackdown. NBC Universal’s new chief, Jeff Zucker, joined the fray during his first day on the job by echoing one of Viacom’s positions. “YouTube needs to prove,” he said, “that it will implement its filtering technology across its online platform. It’s proven it can do it when it wants to.”

The chest-beating from Viacom and now NBC Universal are the inevitable tactics of an industry that’s fighting for its life as wave after wave of disruptive technologies and innovations threaten to crush the ship that has kept us afloat for so many years. As content creators, these entertainment companies have the right to do whatever they wish regarding “their” content. The problem is that once it has aired, people think of it as theirs.

This is not a new twist to human nature. We’ve been able to tape programs for decades and share them with our friends. What’s new is this digital thing; it’s just so much easier now. And the graph below from Alexa shows the problem for Viacom. I’ve compared YouTube’s traffic (the red line) with comedycentral.com (the blue line). The comedycentral.com line is jammed to the bottom by YouTube — so much so that you can’t even see it.

There has been no appreciable growth in the comedycentral.com site since Viacom yanked its videos, so what’s the point? Clearly, Viacom isn’t betting that people will flock to its site, because they won’t. NBC learned this lesson in the winter of 2005-2006, when it demanded YouTube pull the Lazy Sunday clip from Saturday Night Live. Their argument at the time was that people would come to the nbc.com site to watch the clips. They didn’t.

The tough truth in all this ought to be easy to understand, but it’s not. YouTube is — in some very tangible ways — the new “spectrum” for video.

Broadcasters are licensed by the FCC to play in over-the-air bandwidth spectrum capable of sustaining a television signal. This space is “managed” by the government. It’s plenty scarce, and that’s what gives it such value. All of our instincts and intuition as broadcasters flow from operating in a world of scarcity.

Online, however, abundance is the theme and scarcity is determined by access to an audience that is self-selecting in its moods and choices. Hence, YouTube functions in a way very similar to spectrum. You want a “license” to do business there? Simply open a channel. You have to play with everybody else in the world of abundance, but you can use it to your advantage, if you’re smart.

And here’s the thing. These copyrighted videos and the controversy over them hide the real value of YouTube. According to a new report by Deloitte and Touche, “at any one time, three to five of the top 100 most frequently watched videos will be ads.” The report adds, “Some of the more effective advertisements on YouTube are both entertaining and so subtle that it’s hard to even tell if they were meant to be advertisements.”

We need to pay attention to what’s really taking place at YouTube and not get caught up in all the positioning that’s taking place in the high stakes game of chicken that Viacom (and potentially NBC Universal) is playing with Google.

We ought to be experimenting in this space. After all, it doesn’t cost a dime to do it.

(Originally published in our Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)