May 18th, 2006
“Mediocrity Is Finished”
This year’s “Shoot Yourself In the Foot” award goes to News Corp’s Peter Chernin:
Chernin is a big believer in user-generated content. News Corp.’s MySpace is thriving. But he does not believe that there’s a vast backlog of great unmade TV shows and movies that cannot connect with audiences because of bottlenecks in distribution. To the contrary, he and the other creative executives at Fox argue that the digital revolution will increase the value of high-quality, professional, branded content.
“If you don’t have incredibly dynamic, exciting, frankly great content, you are toast,” Chernin says. “In this world of infinite choice, mediocrity is finished.”
So MySpace, with its endlessly bland user-generated contentm is “thriving,” but the “digital revolution will increase the value of high-quality, professional, branded content.”
Hard to have that cake and eat it too, huh, Pete? Is the future of content “professional” or “user-generated”? Well, which is it?
Wait! Just got a call from Pete — he says it’s whatever News Corp investors need it to be. And he says that he’s got to be careful not to kill the goose:
It bears noting that MySpace is only a small part of the News Corp. empire, yet the company’s television, movie, and other media properties aren’t doing too shabbily, either. The other sectors may not have the sex appeal of MySpace, but they are generating gobs of cash — more than $2 billion so far this year — and that inflow is no doubt funding numerous initiatives that aim to meld the content platforms together.
Perhaps News Corp should think about paying of some MySpace’s 30 billion page views per month back to investors as a dividend — they could really take that to the bank!
I suppose “mediocrity” is in the eye of the beholder. For MySpace users, their friends are dishing up content that holds their attention more than that “professional” slop on TV (especially Fox).
How about this for a prediction: Media executive HYPE is finished.
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I think there’s a way to read what he’s saying consistently:
1) There is a market selling vanity press to frustrated would-be writers who inflict their rantings on their friends and family.
2) But nobody outside their friends and family wants to read that junk, so marketed entertainment is going to be high-quality professional productions.
It’s like someone saying “Home videos are a great market for camera and film companies, but theaters will still be showing Hollywood productions”. And you say “Well, which is it? Home movies, or Hollywood productions? They’re both content! Is the future of content “professional†(Hollywood) or “user-generated†(home videos)?
It’s different business models serving different needs. People watch both home videos and Hollywood movies, for different reasons.
It will be both: users generate content out of real life, but professional storytellers can create fiction that show us what life could be like. We need both. I would hope that mediocrity is finished if mediocrity means anything that is neither personal or well told.
Chas,
Is content that is “personal” exempt from being “well told”? Are there no standards for content that users generate “out of real life”? Or is the entire huge sloshing vat of user generated content all of equal value?
I guess if “professionals” want their content to be automatically valued, all they need to do is pass themselves off as “users.”
This pure hype factor — just like everything with a dot com appended was automatically good back in 1999.
Scott,
I don’t disagree that this may be hype, as might all I read about user-generated content. Take it all with a grain of salt.
In regards to your question, “is content that is ‘personal’ exempt from being ‘well told’?”, absolutely not. But while anyone might be capable of creating stories, the truth is that it takes talent, practice, and educating yourself in the techniques of storytelling to tell one well: it doesn’t just happen. Sure, I can write a story, but I’m not Hemingway, Faulkner or Steinbeck.
To be a professional storyteller requires study and practice in the art, and the art is not about sharing my pictures, my video, and my story about my life, it’s in the ability to share the universal emotional experience of what it is to be human. That’s not easy to do. It takes huge talent. For example, the director Ang Lee is someone with huge talent. His recent film, Brokeback Mountain, is art: it told a universal story of love that moved people, regardless of their sexual preference.
I’ll quit blabbing now. My point is users will continue to generate content. Most of it is simply sharing their lives, very little of it is storytelling. Of the stuff that is storytelling, some of it will be good, most of it won’t, just like most of the content produced by professionals.
I’ll end by saying, again, it will be both.
I don’t think there is any contradiction in what he’s saying. Fox didn’t buy MySpace to make money from ads –they bought it so they could repurpose (high-quality) content direct to MySpace users.
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