Media: the Queen of Bloggers; Al Gore's TV venture; and MTV is 25 years old (that's ancient)

1. Huffington Peers Beyond Politics -- by Kathleen Craig

Arianna Huffington had plenty to talk about in her keynote at last weekend's BlogHer conference in San Jose, California. A little more than a year after founding The Huffington Post, the site provides a thriving example of the potential for blogs to be an influential voice in politics.

Now Huffington is readying a new phase in the life of her eponymous publishing site, with a planned expansion of a politics-free zone on the Huffington Post called Politics Aside that will cover everything from relationships and sex to green living and cooking.

No matter how important politics become in our lives, said Huffington, "there's a lot more, and it's important to acknowledge that other side."

Wired News sat down with Huffington at BlogHer to talk about how blogging has changed her relationship with technology, delve into her thoughts on how traditional media and blogs can compliment one another, and ask about her new book, On Becoming Fearless ... in Love, Work and Life.

Wired News: Why did you choose to come to the BlogHer conference?

Arianna Huffington: Part of it is where my thinking is right now about women and women's power. I've been working over the last year on a book specifically addressed to women and fearlessness, so to me this was a great group of women I wanted to meet, some of whose blogs I read, and I wanted to see them in person.

I really believe that this is a moment where we can have an epidemic of fearlessness among women that can really change everything -- and I feel everything does need changing at the moment. It's a real moment when we all need to be our own leaders. I write in the book about the leader in the mirror: to stop looking for that knight on the white horse who's going to save us, and be disappointed again and again.

I don't want to go through another four years being disappointed by another election. I feel that this is the time to really own the fact that leadership is not just attached to public office, and that leadership is going to come from women. It's obviously going to come from men too, but we need to step up to our own leadership potential.

And in order to do that, we need to be fearless, because there's nothing like a woman stepping up to her own leadership potential to attract an enormous amount of detractors. It's like you put a target on your back, you're going to be attacked.

I saw that when I ran for governor, I saw that when I expressed views that are strongly felt. But I also saw that it really doesn't matter, that they cannot really bring you down unless you internalize it, so that's really my message, from my own experience, it's only when we internalize it that it can take us down.

WN: Has the Huffington Post changed your relationship to technology? Have you found yourself personally learning how to use the blog tools, for instance?

Huffington: Yes. And it's kind of interesting -- I'm not a natural technology person, so I had to actually take to it because of the power it had. There are people who are attracted to technology for it's own sake, that's not me, but I am attracted to it because of the potential. And learning the tools is just so empowering.

WN: Do you in fact blog yourself?

Huffington: Yes.

WN: You're not simply writing in some word-processing program and having someone else post, but you actually format your post yourself?

Huffington: I actually blog. When I'm traveling, I will send it in, in any form possible; I will dictate it, I will put it on my BlackBerry and send it. I don't want to let the technology get in the way of the message.

There are some people who feel that if you don't do it yourself on Moveable Type it's not blogging. I don't believe that. I said at the beginning (of the Huffington Post): I will accept blogs from interesting voices in any form, they can send them by carrier pigeon as far as I'm concerned. And I have had Arthur Schlesinger fax us everything, he barely has a typewriter. So if I insisted that he should do it in Moveable Type, it would never happen. I've had Larry David call me from the set and dictate his blog to me.

For me what matters is having that voice; how it gets there is less significant. It's very interesting, and without the technology we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing, but I don't want the technology to become a barrier. I just love the whole way (blogs) kind of show your work, the hyperlinks and transparency of the whole thing. I remember when we first started inviting people to blog, and we would have somebody say, "So what are these red things on the blog?" It's the process of education, which is what I went through, we have to do it with a lot of (those) we invite to blog.

WN: You are bringing in a lot of bloggers who wouldn't necessarily be comfortable with the tools. Do you find that many of them are just bewildered by it?

Huffington: You know, most of them quickly use their own passwords and blog directly on the site. Some send it to us to post for them, but it's a very, very tiny, tiny minority, I would say under 1 percent.

WN: The Huffington Post has a really interesting mix of news and bloggers. I'm curious where you go to read your own news, aside from the Huffington Post? Are you reading the newspapers, for instance?

Huffington: Yes, I still read newspapers, I still read weeklies and monthlies. And I go to a lot of blogs. I go to blogs (like) Kausfiles -- I love Jane Hamsher's blog, Firedoglake .

I love Crooks and Liars and the videos that John Amato puts up so quickly. I also go to a lot of political blogs, Daily Kos , and Instapundit -- I like to read across the political spectrum. And on the more traditional side, I read the Congressional Quarterly . I have to be dragged away from my computer. And it helps, you know, having more mobile devices when I travel.

WN: Do you feel like the blogs are changing yours, and other people's, relationship to the news?

Huffington: Yes, I think that what happens is, some stories get more stickiness. It's amazing to me how many big stories don't have a lot of legs, without the blogosphere giving them legs. And so that's what I find so interesting, the kind of passion and relentlessness that bloggers bring to the news, the obsessiveness, if you want.

I gave a speech recently to the Magazine Editors Association. I said, "You have ADD and we have OCD, and together we can be crazy effective." The mainstream media have ADD -- they cover a story and as soon as they cover it, they think it's done.

WN: And you disagree?

Huffington: I disagree. For me, I think you have to cover a story until something happens. And it may not be in your lifetime, but you need to keep covering it. Part of it is that the best bloggers write about their passions, they don't write about everything. And there are many important things that happen that I don't write about, not because I don't think they're important, but because they're not where my own passion is.

So my best writing is about my passions, and I think that goes with every blogger. And often reporters go where the assignment desk sends them.

There are many great reporters. I don't in any way minimize the significance of what is done by the mainstream media. But I think we're all still deeply affected by how they misreported the lead up to the war. It's not something, given what's happening now, that we can easily forget.


2. Surprise! Current TV is generating electricity
By Janice Littlejohn

Just before Al Gore launched Current TV a year ago, there were more than a few guffaws heard throughout the industry. The idea of a young adult cable channel consisting of viewer-created video "pods" and interactive ads seemed like a joke.

Nobody's laughing anymore.

"Obviously, they didn't get what we were doing," says Joel Hyatt, CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Current TV. "Now, just shy of our first anniversary, the entire industry is copying us -- how we are engaging our audience to contribute to the content they consume. Those executives that scoffed at us are now saying to their teams: Go figure out how to do what Current is doing."

Indeed, in the year since the 24-hour network premiered on Aug. 1, 2005, Current TV is seeing its model readily duplicated by such major cable players as MTV and VH1, and soon, the newly formed CW broadcast network.

Although Current is by no means the creator of the viewer-contributed genre, the channel has done much to integrate and showcase such content into both its on-air and online programming.

"We really set out to be at the cutting edge," Hyatt says, "to be at the intersection of television and the Internet, bringing what we felt was badly needed innovation to television and doing so by borrowing much of what one could learn from the experience of the Internet. We want to be the television home page of the Internet generation."

At the moment, Current still appears to be more of a zap-by-it channel than appointment television. And its newfangled idea of quick-hit pod programs might have to be incorporated with old-school 30-minute and hour-long series.

Adapting to programming

"What MTV and The CW are doing," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York, "is taking this concept that Current is developing and putting it within actual programming.

"My guess is," Thompson continues, "that Current TV is going to do exactly what virtually every other cable network has done: diversifying their schedules, diversifying their genres and depending on scheduled series. That's the way, for over half a century, programming works on television."

But, says David Neuman, president of programming for Current, "if you stick to the notion of half-hour and hour shows and set a schedule, you're disenfranchising all those people that may actually be able to contribute. We want to create compelling television for the audience while radically innovating and facilitating the contributions of the audience creating this product."

Nearly a third of Current's non-fiction programming, aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds, is derived from viewer contributions. Most of these pods, which are tagged "VC2" (VC squared), are about five to nine minutes long and viewers can select their favorites online for future play on the channel.

‘Citizen journalists'

Currently, pod topics range from the renewed popularity of the Rubik's Cube to a first-person diary of an illegal immigrant in America. These "citizen journalists" also have covered the war-torn streets of Iraq, the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina and most recently, life in Beirut and the conflicts in Haifa, where a bombing is captured in graphic detail. (Contributors are paid a nominal sum for content aired on Current, while others have regular freelance gigs.)

"We're the place that you go for the highest and best form of these kinds of user-generated pieces," Neuman says. "If you have a video of your kid's second birthday, go to YouTube. But if you want to see somebody in the middle of the conflict in Haifa, to show you what it's like to have bombs raining down over your head, you come to Current."

Realizing that great programming starts with great storytelling, Current has launched a novel idea featuring award-winning filmmakers, journalists and authors -- including Robert Redford, Elvis Mitchell and Dave Eggers -- who will star in online training guides for aspiring VC2 producers.

This summer, Current debuted its "Seeds of Tolerance" campaign, a partnership with the Third Millennium Foundation, which will reward $100,000 to the producer of the best video on tolerance and diversity.

"There's too much happening in this world for us not to care and not to be involved," says Laura Ling, supervising producer of the channel's video journalism division. "There is that desire, especially in this generation, and we can see it through the reaction we've gotten thus far and if we can build on that, it will be a great achievement."

On the distribution end, Current recently signed a deal with Comcast Digital Cable that almost doubles the channel's reach from its initial 17 million U.S. households to about 30 million.


3. The Ever-Changing Eternal Youth of MTV, Now 25 Going on 11 – by VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Though MTV is 25 today, the channel’s rightful age is 11. Family and school culture wear thin around that age, and it’s time to try out for a larger, grander affiliation: with American popular culture.

At 11, though you still have no vote or cash, you begin to want to adorn your identity as a citizen and a consumer. You still can’t do or say or buy, but (with the right baby sitter) you can watch and learn. And speaking of baby sitters, 11 is also the age when you can finally talk to those baby sitters, when you’re almost a baby sitter yourself and when you need to be able to converse about Busta Rhymes, Beyoncé and “Laguna Beach,” and fast.

Since MTV first showed up in 1981, it has doubled as a primer for 11-year-olds of every stripe: that is, for everyone planning his or her debut in AmeriGlobaLand, which includes not only provincial preteenagers in the United States, but also Bulgarians, Koreans, Kenyans and Mexicans intending to release albums, sell T-shirts online or immigrate.

I first saw MTV in 1983 during a weekend trip to New York City. Bored at dinner with my parents, I wandered into our host’s television room and found the boulder-size set tuned to a something that looked nothing like ABC, my childhood favorite. The video was “Jeopardy,” by the Greg Kihn Band. It seemed like some kind of mandarin book that communicated, “You’re going to have to know this.”

Hair feathered and tuxedo-clad, Mr. Kihn is getting married while he lip-syncs his song, and he looks terrified in that Kabuki way of the early videos. As his ominously veiled bride waits through the ceremony, he surveys the congregation. His parents are handcuffed to each other. Another equally sinister-looking man and woman, holding hands, come to be conjoined. Their held hands transformed into a single alien limb: it was horrible and amazing.

Under her veil the bride is a fleshless ghoul, not unlike the ones in Michael Jackson ’s interminable “Thriller” video, which appeared later that year. And so Mr. Kihn, as the lyrics sound — “don’t be cute, don’t be funny now” — flees matrimony, racing through a haunted landscape of monsters until he finally busts out entirely, bounding down the steps of the church to freedom. Next door, a hip bride who looks like Pat Benatar(my ego-ideal, in other words) is fleeing her own miserable wedding. Their eyes lock. Kindred spirits. They jump into his convertible and drive away. I was agape.

People were always running out on other people in those early videos. For about 10 years the channel illustrated a rock ’n’ roll parable of liberation, the big holiday from propriety that is adolescence. And MTV told and retold the story of freedom from the old folks with any kind of iconography that might get through to us. No letting limbs merge with those of our parents: get it? No tolerating the screaming dad, O.K.? MTV saw itself as staging a breakout, extracting kids from domestic traps, showing over and over youthful defiance, family-free teenagers and fallen grooms and brides.

Folk heroes skipped merrily out of the family tenement, like Cyndi Lauper in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” or revved and heaved at the thought of their dissatisfied suburban parents, like Prince in “When Doves Cry.” From the dance floor George Michael in Wham! pleaded with a friend not to marry too soon in “Young Guns (Go for It!).” The video implied a gayer life would come to those who waited.

In the 90’s grunge seemed to disconcert MTV, which was not exactly proficient in the stripped-down sound or image. The bloated hair bands of course had thrived in videos. But the channel that had grown fat on hairspray and dry ice quickly tried to sell a series of contrived anti-illusions, the most successful of which were the “Unplugged” acoustic series — which gave us one of Nirvana’s greatest albums — and “The Real World,” the original reality series, on which, they say, people stopped being polite and started getting real.

But then, having spent its first 20 years conscientiously breaking up families, MTV did an about-face. In one of its most ingenious moves yet, the channel brazenly reconstituted the family with “The Osbournes” in 2002. Some people have families who are more blown-out than their friends, it turns out; in those cases hanging out at home can be a revolutionary act.

On “Newlyweds” the next year, Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson embraced the Wham! taboo: early marriage. Across the pop culture landscape, family life seemed cool, but, no. The Osbournes fell on hard times, and the Lachey-Simpsons divorced. Lesser married lights, like Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro, who split after making “’Til Death Do Us Part” on MTV, didn’t stand a chance.

Now some call the post-reality-show crack-up the MTV curse. But didn’t they realize that blowing open couples, and families, and parents and children, is what MTV is all about? Sure, Madonna , revirginized, popped out of her wedding cake in 1984. And Jessica Simpson, devirginized, appeared as a kitchen-bound helpmeet to Nick nearly 20 years later. Both were sending up earlier images: Madonna as a promiscuous heartbreaker and Jessica as careerist daddy’s girl. But both quickly reverted. And welcome back. Bridal innocence, when you could be a pop star? Just kidding.

For 25 years and certainly since 1985, when Dire Straits made fun of MTV to its face in “Money for Nothing,” the channel has been joking with us. Television was pretty serious business before MTV. People did not randomly mug at the camera or go bananas on live shows like “TRL.” They didn’t bill themselves as weirdos; they billed themselves as wholesome. Ed Sullivan introduced music as if it were a funeral. Someone like Beavis or Andy Milonakis could only have played Coney Island.

Now MTV, 25 going on 11, is trying to break out again. It doesn’t want to be considered just another aging cable channel. It’s leaping to broadband broadcasting and trying to play down its big birthday. I have no complaints. In its quarter-century, MTV has done everything right, amply compensating for early mistakes, like its notorious snub of hip-hop. And there’s still something marvelous about its continual reinterpretation of domesticity, from the confining teenage bedrooms of the 80’s to the “Real World” party palaces to Lauren and Heidi’s rich-girl condo on “The Hills.”

Yesterday I turned on MTV to find the home-décor war horse “MTV Cribs.” Paulina Rubio, the girlish Latin pop star, led the camera through her spectacular house in Miami. It was immaculate, airy, elegant, filled with light. As she seemed to float through her tour, she appeared to have no obligations or ties except to her yoga teacher. For a moment I thought she had the most beautiful house I’d ever seen. I was agape.