Online Media Cultist

I love HBO’s The Wire. I mean love. It’s so gritty, so real, has such great characters, great writing, great stories, and is occasionally deeply and richly and oddly funny in that way that The Sopranos defined.

And I dig exec producer David Simon – from everything I’ve seen he’s super smart, interesting, and obviously has been behind one powerhouse of a show about his hometown of Baltimore, now going into its fifth and final season.

There’s a great interview with him here on Ain’t It Cool News. But I do have to take issue with him when he says:

And newspaper managers - who have so much contempt for their own product that they give it away for free, misreading the internet as advertising for the product, when it was the product itself - they tell us they are going to do more with less. You do less with less, that’s why they call it less.

I do get where he’s coming from. He’s an old newspaper guy, and the upcoming season of The Wire takes a look at how the media is partly complicit in the plight of the inner city, how stories are driven by bottom lines and sensational headlines instead of by a dedication to getting to the real stories and real problems, which ironically cost more money and tend to sell less well with the populace.

But blaming advertising-supported online content is pointing a finger in the wrong direction, I’m afraid. Newspapers were consolidating under monopolistic corporations well before people starting heading online in droves for news and information. Further, while the Internet is ripping to shreds old models for how content providers and traditional media companies make money, there’s every chance, I would argue, that the online world can and in some ways already does provide a platform where top-notch reporting can find an audience and make money at the same time.

There are those in traditional media who get it, and many more who still do not.

HBO gets it, as they are allowing episodes of the upcoming series Flight of the Conchords to be available on video sharing sites (YouTube and others, I’m guessing).

What’s to get? You have to let go of your content. Set it free, allow people to take it, embed it, post it on their MySpace profile, their blog, e-mail it to their friends, and basically do whatever they want with it. Allowing people to do that essentially creates a free workforce of grassroots marketers, and exponentially increases the odds that new people will see it.

It’s a counterintuitive thing for traditional media folk to wrap their minds around. Traditional conventional wisdom says: I have high quality original content, so I need to keep tight control over it. On TV, that will force people to watch or subscribe to my channel. In print, that will force people to buy or subscribe to my newspaper or magazine. And on the web, that will force people to visit my website. He shoots, he scores, drinks on me at Hoolihan’s!

It’s the web part that’s different. There are just too many distribution points available to force content to be available at just one. Even high quality content will be lost in a sea of other stuff. Attention spans are short, choices are infinite, and competition for attention sits around every e-corner.

A good recent example of not getting it is VH1Classic.com’s choice to not allow classic music videos to be embeddable.

Check out the Flight of the Conchords fellas, below. They’re from New Zealand, and they’re pretty great. Looking forward to seeing their show on HBO (and online!). Hey, I’m marketing for them right now…

You knew that Mark Cuban would come out swinging on this one.

In a piece entitled You Go Viacom! the Blog Maverick ripped into “Gootube” (one of his favorite current targets) for being complacent and basically setting itself up for the massive $1 billion lawsuit that it’s now looking at from heavy hitter media company Viacom.

Cuban uses the example of HBO programs to explain the case from the standpoint of television content providers, noting that the reported $2.2 million fee per episode that A&E paid to syndicate The Sopranos would be far devalued in a world where the hit show was easily available via YouTube.

Cuban ends on an ominous note, writing, “Google may not know it, but they have already lost,” on the notion that entertainment companies are if nothing else superior in bending copyright laws to their needs.

While my opinion is just one more blogospheric whim in a sea of speculation, my hunch is that Viacom is looking to cut an advantageous deal here, and the $1 billion number is simply bluster and a means to gain leverage. This is not the age of Napster, the music industry in particular is in mortal danger, and entertainment companies will not be able to use the legal route forever as a last stand against the Internet wave.