April 22, 2007 at 12:23 pm
News Organizations in the Age of Digital Distribution
It would be a horrific and callous mistake to analyze the actions of the Virginia Tech shooter as the actions of a sane man. My heart goes out to the victims and the families. Cho Seung-Hui was clearly a very disturbed young man; his actions cannot be rationalized.
But the multimedia manifesto - and it’s distribution methods - pose some interesting questions in the age of self publishing.
I can’t claim to have any answers, but I’ve given this matter some thought.
Why did the shooter choose to send his multimedia package via mail to NBC? Why, in the age of easy, digital self-publishing, did he not simply upload his material to YouTube - create a blog on blogger, add his images to Flickr or Photobucket? An individual with the technical ability to create QuickTime movies and burn them to disk would more than likely be able to use YouTube.
If his goal was to spread his message - to be at last and finally understood - why send his manifesto to a news organization that would have no choice but to ethically edit the material that they chose to brand, publish and distribute?
What are the distribution advantages to utilizing an ‘old-school’ method of publishing?
In a discussion with a colleague, I posed these questions. He posed an interesting alternative - perhaps in the age of self-publishing, granting content exclusivity to a traditional news organization creates credibility in the way that self-published content could not.
Building on this idea, I wondered if sending the material directly to a news organization wasn’t a slick manipulation of NBC - which might, under different circumstances, have chosen not to air the material out of sensitivity to the victims. (Granting an exclusive scoop to one organization, as cynical as it may seem, almost inevitably guarantees that they will publish the material.)
Putting all questions of the individual’s motivation aside - what lessons about the role of news organizations in the age of self-publishing can we garner from this horrifically public, tragic story? Does this mean that traditional news organizations will indeed continue to have relevance in a self-publishing environment?
Tags: digital distribution, news organizations, traditional media, VA tech
Murray:
April 23, 2007 at 7:57 am
This is an interesting topic. I’ve attended two social networking conferences in Atlanta within the last 4 months. At both of those conferences MSM and print publications in particular were talked about as being frail and dying. Some of what they said was true, but this post points out the one aspect of MSM that will be around for a long time. Although I wonder if this particular example applies to TV more than it applies to us?
Steve Shanafelt:
April 23, 2007 at 10:57 am
It seems to me that Cho wasn’t so much interested in distributing his message as he was in acting out a drama/action story that he’d created for himself. It’s not too much to guess that the ending of the story was one where he found himself on TV, at the exact center of attention.
In that context, it’s not surprising that Cho didn’t go the web route. For all the things that the internet is great at, it’s rotten at keeping people all looking at the same thing at the same time like TV does. And, since it seems like Cho was trying to get the biggest bang for his buck, it shouldn’t be surprising that he didn’t go this route.
Mailing a package to NBC is a pretty simple thing to do. He doesn’t have to register any accounts, come up with usernames and passwords, sign-in to anything, or upload anything. He doesn’t have to follow any more rules. He just burns a disk or two, finds out the mailing address from their web site, buys an envelope and a stamp and chucks the thing in the mail.
And, as you’ve suggested, sending it to a major media outlet also guarantees that he meets his goal. A lot of people use the internet, but EVERYONE watches the news. His teachers, his family, the doctors and administrators and all the people who have been rotten to him his entire life … now they can’t get away from his “message” (even it amounts to “you were pretty much right about me”). It’s a perfect movie ending.
For us in the media, there’s a tendency to think about the “best” way of getting a story or message out there. We often think of the ideal being the fastest way to reach the most people with the story so that we can scoop the other media outlets. From this perspective, Cho’s method seems horribly wasteful. Obviously, more people would have heard his message faster if he’d gone through the internet.
But, there’s also no reason to think that Cho was concerned in the least about how fast his message spread to how many people, probably because: a) everyone would pretty much know about it immediately, no matter how he sent out the information; b) he was mostly concerned with killing people, not with media coverage; and c) he’d be too dead to enjoy it anyways.
Suppose for an instant, however, that he had gone for the new-media approach. Even if he had held off on publishing everything until the moment just before he went on his rampage, Cho would have lost the one thing he was very obviously trying to keep: control.
As we all know, once you release something to the internet, it’s got a life of its own. Anyone could have done whatever they wanted to with his content. For the brief moment before the pages were taken down by the web site’s owners, his YouTube/blog/Flickr pages would be filled with hateful comments. His content would be ripped off the internet, but the handful of people who did manage to grab it would spread the thing virally. It would only be a matter of time before some cynical, shock-comedy gagster remixed his sincere (if obviously ill) manifesto into some mockery of itself, putting his images to, say, Pearl Jam’s song “Jeremy” or, as is more likely, one of the Spice Girls’ greatest hits.
Of course, this will eventually happen anyways, but with NBC controlling the tapes, it will happen much less, much later. And before it does, Cho is guaranteed at least a few days of people honestly and seriously examining his life, rather than instantly mocking his message. Again, a perfect movie ending. (At least by comparison to making him another “Dancing Osama” or something.)
So, what do we learn here? Nothing all that revealing, I’m afraid. Most people would still rather see their suicide/rampage message on the nightly news rather than on YouTube, even if they could theoretically reach more people faster the other way. And, as long at this is the case, certain people (not just killers) will always want to talk to the big outlets first.
Alejandro Leal:
April 23, 2007 at 1:33 pm
You say:
It would seem to me that you’ve actually fallen prey to the same “slick manipulation” you erroneously attribute to Cho. You’re just digging for bizarre motives that are just not there.
Why would Cho want any more “credibility” for his package? He wasn’t submitting a cover letter or a resume. He didn’t want to “self-publish.” He was submitting his suicide note.
I think his actions, if we chose to use your word, assign any and all the “credibility” he needed for his message.
The fact that it was a “multimedia” package was but a consequence of the technological world we live in today. Makes no difference what medium he chose to deliver his message, because his message was by far more important (in this situation) than the medium.
NBC wen’t public with the video because, as a member of the moribund MSM, they needed to latch on to an exclusive scoop. This is text-book media behavior; not Cho’s creative exploits.
Steve Shanafelt:
April 23, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Alejandro Leal: I agree with you up to a point, but the fact remains that he DID submit his “multi-media manifesto” to a major news outlet for a reason. Obviously, to him it was more than a suicide note.
The medium is actually quite important, because, unlike the pre-web world, Cho had a number of ways to release the information that someone like Charles Whitman or, for that matter, Jack the Ripper (a mass-media manipulator in his own right) didn’t have. And yet, knowing this, he opted to not use them. Why?
Because he wanted people to see it on HIS terms, in the story that he’d scripted for himself. If it had been a simple suicide note via video, he wouldn’t have sent it anywhere. He could have left it all as QT files on his computer, and still been assured that someone would eventually find it. He could have even burned the DVD and left it right out in the open for the police.
But he didn’t.
He rightly believed that NBC would make the videos big news. (They would have been anyways, but in this scenerio HE is the one making the call as to how it happens, and not, say, the cops.) Textbook media behavior? Of course, and Cho — like everyone else in the world — was aware of it. I think it’s pretty safe to say that he was trying to exploit a well-known tendency of the media.
And instead of releasing the videos online, which would be faster, easier and more likely to inform more people of his entire, unedited message, he opted to send it to a TV network.
“Well, he was crazy,” just doesn’t explain that. Obviously, he’d thought about it and planned it to a remarkable extent. I think the suggestion of credibility goes a long way towards explaining this choice.
Why would he want credibility? I’d guess it was because he was trying to justify his actions to the world. By having his message on TV, perhaps he hoped people would realize that it was them who had driven him to do this, which appears to be the gist of his message.
I suppose there’s some alternate reasonings, though. Such as: a) that he just didn’t think of YouTube, even though I’ve never met a modern college student who isn’t at least aware of it; b) was too lazy to upload video, but not too lazy to film video, burn a disk and go to the post office; or c) had some problem with the internet, but not with computers and software.
Jon:
April 24, 2007 at 8:37 pm
I’m not going to comment on the comments here, although they are interesting. I was struck by the big question in the original post:
“What lessons about the role of news organizations in the age of self-publishing can we garner from this horrifically public, tragic story? Does this mean that traditional news organizations will indeed continue to have relevance in a self-publishing environment?”
My first reaction when I read that: But of course.
Much is made of the democratization made possible with the internet, especially in our current “web 2.0″ mania. But for most people, the internet, if relevant at all, is simply a tool, and not one for consuming news, but one for shopping, communicating with friends, or watching porn.
People who might not be as engaged with the world trust these organizations; and it will take more than web 2.0 to even mitigate their dominance.
Sure, there are examples of prominent news stories that build buzz online (which indeed has been the “place of trust” for some — and for many “influencers”) and then work their way back out into the MSM, but they are still rare.
I just think that it’s too easy, in our sort of professional-we-care-about-media-and-the-press-and-the-state-of-the-country bubble, to forget the simple fact: most people get their news from TV. Not the internet. And they don’t even get it from CNN, or Fox (Gasp), but they get it from local-yahoo-we-love-VNRs-Channelwhatever.
And that’s a different problem.
Roxanne Cooper:
April 24, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I think it’s important to note that YouTube, Google, Blogger, etc. have pulled/censored far-less controversial material than Cho’s manifesto. So, I doubt it would have stayed up for more than a few hours. Once the piece was out and subsequently pulled because of complaints, it would be very difficult for mass market media to then air it. Then the story would become the censorship of the manifesto and not Cho’s actual rant.
Of course, the piece might have survived the Google cops on the internet underground (Ever try finding a copy of Lynn Cheney’s “Sisters” on the web?). But then Cho’s possible intent to hurt his living victims might have been lost.