Month: August 2014

At Google, the Book Tour Becomes Big Business

Ellen

5/12/2011   The New York Times

When Tina Fey visited the Bay Area in April on her book tour for “Bossypants,” she made just two stops. She gave an interview before a sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Theater, as part of the City Arts & Lectures series. And she dropped by the Mountain View headquarters of Google.

At an Authors@Google “fireside chat,” Ms. Fey, the “30 Rock” creator and star, had a friendly conversation with Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, in front of an audience of hundreds of employees who greeted her with a standing ovation.

As Google’s reach into many aspects of media production and distribution grows ever greater, A-list authors, actors, musicians and others are taking part in the company’s six-year-old on-campus speaker series.

Lady Gaga recently shared the stage with Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president for location and local services, as did Christy Turlington, the supermodel turned documentary director. The YouTube video of “Google Goes Gaga” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

The unlikely spectacle of technology executives chatting up celebrities talk-show-style originated as part of Google’s effort to create a quasi-collegiate atmosphere on its campus. The events increasingly dovetail with Google’s interests in publishing, broadcasting, music distribution and other media businesses. The company is selling “Bossypants” as a Google e-book for $12.99 in its online bookstore, which it opened in December.

For authors and other creative professionals, an appearance at the Googleplex, the company’s sprawling complex of office buildings, is good business — but nonetheless conjures some mixed emotions in light of Google’s complicated relationship with content creators. The company is involved in a bitter lawsuit over its efforts to scan all of the world’s books and make them available online, and has long stood accused of unfairly profiting from work that is excerpted and indexed by the company’s search services.

“I think it’s a great thing that they’re doing this,” Chris Clarke, a natural history and environmental writer, said of the talks. “I don’t think that it clears their karma as far as trying to become the sole-source provider of all intellectual property everywhere.”

The speaker series began in 2005 with the New Yorker writers Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki as its first two guests and has since featured hundreds of authors, musicians, chefs, economists and politicians.

Google employees involved in the program say that it evolved out of employees’ interests and at their initiative.

“The program was a grass-roots effort that started when a few Googlers realized that some remarkable people were passing through the halls of the Googleplex,” said Ann Farmer, an information engineer. She is one of more than two dozen employee volunteers who organize the events, which are now held three to five times a week.

Since 2005, more than 1,000 guests have appeared. Garry Kasparov, the chess master, and Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, are among some 600 authors, mostly of nonfiction, who have participated. The list includes a number of authors who have written books about Google.

Talks now take place at Google offices around the world, with employees from 18 offices participating via videoconferencing. At larger events, employees use Google Moderator software, which fields questions from the audience, ranking the most popular ones.

In the early days of the series, the employees had to cajole speakers to attend, working personal connections, since the company did not pay an honorarium. But the program gained traction, with some talks drawing more than a million viewers on YouTube. “Let’s put it this way,” said Ms. Farmer. “The tables have turned.”

As of April 1, Cliff Redeker, 27, is the company’s official “speakers specialist.” He used to organize author visits in his spare time as a support specialist, but now his full-time job is dedicated to the speaker series.

The series has made the Googleplex an increasingly important stop for authors promoting their work in the Bay Area, as many major bookstores that featured readings have closed.

“It’s not going to replace bookstore events,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent in Brooklyn, “but if I have an author going to San Francisco, I always want my author to stop in at Google and do an event there as well.”

The Google books lawsuit, though, combined with a broader concern that the Internet is undermining the ability of authors to get paid for their work, remains a big issue for some.

As of last October, Google Books had already scanned more than 15 million titles from more than 100 countries in 400 languages. On March 22, a federal judge threw out a settlement agreement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers. The Authors Guild had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company over copyright infringement.

Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer and author of “Close to the Machine” and “The Bug,” is a member of the Authors Guild, and she sees the speakers program as a way to “soften the blow.”

She said, from Google’s perspective, it is “ ‘Look, see? We’re not making money off of you. We’re promoting you.’ ”

The YouTube factor also introduces a novel dynamic.

“You know this is going to be videotaped, and there is a sense that you’re speaking for posterity,” said Christopher McDougall, the author of “Born to Run,” who has appeared at the company’s offices in Mountain View and New York. “With the Google events, it was more about talking to the camera than talking to the people.”

Typically, some employees have their laptops open during the talk, and the guest speaks not just to them but also to a future audience on YouTube.

Sherry Turkle, author of “Alone Together,” who directs the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self, appeared at Google’s office in New York to promote her book. Yet she says, “We shouldn’t kid ourselves that going on YouTube to watch an author is the same thing as going to a bookstore.”

For many authors, though, it’s all good. T. J. Stiles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” who is on the executive council of the Authors Guild, said of the speaker series: “That’s Google focusing on authors, not just addressing books as the subject of an information aggregation operation. It’s a healthy development.”

For one Bay Area independent bookstore, the program has been a boon. Books Inc. provides books for the events held at the Mountain View campus. At most talks, employees can buy the books at a deep discount, because Google subsidizes the purchases. For some special events, the company simply buys the books and gives them away.

Having a chance to attend the talks is a great perk for Googlers that reinforces the sense that their work, and technology in general, is driving the cultural conversation in a way it never has before.

“This didn’t happen in Web 1.0,” said Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, a division of Frank N. Magid Associates, who was a consultant to Excite in the late 1990s. “I never saw a single celebrity ever.”

 

A version of this article appeared in print on May 13, 2011, on page A23A of the National edition with the headline: At Google, the Book Tour Becomes Big Business.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/us/13bcgoogle.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&emc=eta1

 

In Cable Niches, Less Reality and More Original Shows

Ellen

5/8/2011   The New York Times

LisaRaye McCoy, left, Stacey Dash and Charity Shea will star on “Single Ladies,” a new dramatic series to start this spring on VH1.

Stacy Littlejohn worked her way up in network television like so many other writers and producers — she was a writers’ assistant on a Fox show, a joke writer on a CW show, a writer-producer on a half-hour ABC show.

Now, for the first time, she is in charge of a one-hour drama, but it is not for any network she envisioned earlier in her career. It is for VH1, the older-skewing version of MTV.

Niche cable channels like VH1 that have depended solely on unscripted programs or repeats of others’ scripted programs are now trotting out their own comedies and dramas. Their aim is diversification. When Ms. Littlejohn’s drama, “Single Ladies,” has its premiere late this month, “it’ll distinguish VH1 amid their steady diet of reality shows,” she said.

Top-tier cable channels like USA and TBS have been creating dramas and sitcoms for more than a decade, but now relative small fry are doing the same. The shows are a way to stay competitive.

“I think the bar has been raised in scripted,” said Jennifer Caserta, the general manager of IFC, the Independent Film Channel, which may be better known now for the sitcoms “Portlandia” and “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.”

The trend toward more scripted cable shows has been evident at advertiser presentations by VH1, IFC and other channels this spring.

Cable channels are in the middle of the upfront advertising period, when they secure commitments for ad spending for the rest of the year.

Channel owners like Scripps Networks and Viacom have forecast big gains in the upfront period this year because ratings continue to drift toward cable and away from broadcast, and the advertising marketplace is rebounding. Cable ad time, which is generally less expensive than broadcast ad time, is expected to grow faster than broadcast.

The cable and broadcast marketplaces “seem well positioned for truly strong results,” the News Corporation chief operating officer, Chase Carey, told investors last week.

For small channels, scripted shows are centerpieces that can be displayed to advertisers — and can command premium advertising rates.

“More scripted shows, more incredible performances,” screamed a banner at the presentation last month by the cable channel BET, which has struck ratings gold with scripted comedies and is looking for its first drama project. Often, though not always, scripted programs are perceived to be safer harbors for advertisers than reality programs. Bhavana Smith, a vice president at Draftfcb, an advertising network owned by the Interpublic Group, called scripted a “more controlled environment” for brand integrations.

“Do you really want to rely on Snooki to do justice to your brand?,” she asked, referring to a “Jersey Shore” cast member.

At IFC, the Cheetos snack brand was featured on the most recent season of “Portlandia” and the Jameson whiskey brand was featured on “Todd Margaret.” Ms. Caserta said each companies’ advertising “is humorous in itself, so incorporating them into our scripted comedies was easy.”

Most cable channels still subsist largely on so-called reality shows. They are generally less expensive to produce than scripted shows, and they are generally repeatable dozens or even hundreds of times.

But there are advantages to having an original scripted show on the schedule. Such shows convey status — they can define a channel’s identity, help to deliver higher per-subscriber fees, and impress executives at the parent company.

In other words, sometimes it is about ego.

Small channels like AMC, with “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” and TV Land, with “Hot in Cleveland” and “Retired at 35,” have provided something of a blueprint for others. BBC America, for instance, is developing its own dramas to supplement what it imports from Britain. With the trial in scripted television can come error. CMT, the country music channel, last month canceled its first sitcom, “Working Class,” due to low ratings.

Simon Applebaum, who hosts the television podcast “Tomorrow Will Be Televised” and who has been attending cable upfront presentations all spring, noted in a blog post last month that production companies that have traditionally specialized in reality shows, like Endemol U.S.A. (“Big Brother”) and Bunim-Murray (“The Real World”), have started up scripted divisions.

“What’s more, if cable networks turn their projects down, they have alternative routes to go,” he wrote, noting that Netflix recently licensed its first original scripted show and that DirecTV had carried “Friday Night Lights” in a deal with NBC.

Ultimately, the hunger for richly detailed characters and robust plot development benefits writers, because ideas have to start somewhere.

“It has provided a lot of incredibly talented people with great creative outlets,” said Dana Walden, the chairman of the 20th Century Fox Television studio.

It also provides channels with a distraction from the monotonous hours of reality and repeats that otherwise fill up their schedules. As Ms. Littlejohn put it, “Single Ladies” could be a “jewel in the crown” for VH1.

“Single Ladies,” backed by Queen Latifah, is a comedic drama about three best friends. It is set in Atlanta, where production is wrapping up this month.

Ms. Littlejohn says working for VH1 feels precedent-setting. Because the channel has never had an hourlong scripted show before, “I’m creating the formula,” she said. To save money, episodes are being produced two at a time, more swiftly than Ms. Littlejohn is used to.

“There’s less money on cable,” she acknowledged. But “less” is relative. “VH1 — bless their heart — they’re spending more money than they’ve ever spent, so I love them for this,” she said.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 9, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Cable Niches, Less Reality and Repeats and More Original Shows.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/business/media/09scripted.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

 

The Reluctant Transgender Role Model

Ellen

5/6/2011   The New York Times

AT the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, I wheedled a ticket to “Becoming Chaz,” a documentary about the sex change of Chastity Bono. Having long admired the Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato World of Wonder productions — slyly edu-taining films like “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and oodles of just-louche-enough-for-reality-TV shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — I anticipated their usual mix of human interest, alternative lifestyle and salacious tabloid.

Chaz (formerly Chastity Bono) at home in California.
Chastity Bono with her parents, Sonny and Cher Bono, in 1972. Chaz Bono, after his sex change, with his girlfriend, Jennifer Elia, and with his mother.

This unflinchingly personal film, which will have its premiere on Oprah Winfrey’s network on Tuesday, details Chastity Bono’s journey from her spangled childhood in rhinestone pantsuits on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” to a more recent two years in her televised life: Chastity, now Chaz, invited cameras to witness the searingly intimate experience of his gender transition.

Chaz, 42, and Jennifer Elia, his longtime girlfriend, must navigate his hormone injections, mood swings and personality changes, and live through a medical procedure that is part of the process of making Chaz a legal male in the State of California: he undergoes “top surgery” and has his breasts removed.

The operation is so graphic, and such a commitment — physically, emotionally and financially — that as a wincing viewer you come away with a palpable understanding of how unendurably he must be suffering in his body to want to have his own sex characteristics amputated.

Yet despite being a lifelong liberal from San Francisco and friendly with a number of transgender people, I found the film as unsettling as it was inspiring.

I came away forced to confront a whole swag-bag full of transphobias that I didn’t know I’d had. So I went to Los Angeles to talk to the filmmakers, and to Chaz himself.

Just sitting on a couch with Chaz at his publicist’s office is a consciousness-raising experience. He’s an affable, candid, pudgy, regular guy: very sweet, very comfortable in his skin, jeans, navy blue polo shirt and simple boots. His look might seem deliberately invisible if not for his hair, which he shapes into an excellent controlled pomp that could be described as Office-Casual Elvis.

At this point in his transition, Chaz is in his “second puberty,” a six- to seven-year process of hormone injections. The medical technology for genital reconstruction surgery (masculine genitoplasty, for a transgender man like Chaz) is still too new, expensive, imperfect and risky for him to opt for “bottom surgery.”

“I am in a holding pattern,” he said. “The payoff just isn’t quite enough. I wish I had a penis, but I am O.K. for now.”

At age 13, Chaz told me, he knew he was attracted to women, and assumed he was a lesbian.

“I knew my whole life something was different,” he said. “As a small kid, I could be one of the boys, playing sports, fitting in. When I hit puberty, I felt like my body was literally betraying me. I got smacked everywhere with femaleness. That was really traumatic.”

Realizing that he should be male took years of deduction.

“Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.”

Though emboldened by seeing transgender people in the media, he still thought of gender-transition as the last resort of the suicidal: “I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That’s why they’re willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.”

Several scenes in the film are interviews with Cher, who I assumed would act as a guide and interpreter through this signal event in her family. Yet Cher struggles throughout the film and never quite offers a sound bite of unequivocal support for her transgender son. Seeing Cher — gay icon nonpareil — so uncharacteristically jangled raised a sticky batch of questions:

Could it be possible that the fact that Chaz is now a man is somehow Cher’s fault? Did the toxic culture of celebrity damage Chastity/Chaz’s gender identity? Did Cher’s almost drag-queenlike hyper-female persona somehow devour Chastity’s emerging femininity? Could Chaz’s transition have been motivated by gender-bent Oedipal revenge? Is he reclaiming the childhood attention his superstar mother always diverted?

I had to ask: It is remotely possible that he needed to make the transition because his mom is Cher?

He gave me a warm and genuine smile.

“I don’t think the way I grew up had any effect on this issue,” Chaz said. “There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.”

But being born into celebrity created a different hurdle: Chaz knew he would not be able to change sexes privately. “I thought, the whole world is going to find out! How am I going to be able to live a life after that? I was scared. I believed that people were going to be actively hostile towards me.”

As a “last ditch effort,” he tried to live as a male but without medical intervention. It didn’t work. “I feel very traditionally male,” he said. “I needed a male body.”

Being in-between genders, Chaz said, was far more difficult than becoming a man. He was a misfit. Now, he said, he is treated much better by people, especially men.

“I’m constantly shocked by how friendly and cool straight men are to each other. ‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’ I expected to feel better and happier, but I really underestimated the impact my transition would have. I didn’t realize that life could be this easy, that I could ever feel this comfortable. It was unimaginable.”

In the film, Jennifer is hilariously outspoken about her ordeal, coming to terms with her lover’s gender transition.

“Jenny and I had to relearn how to be together,” Chaz said. “I never really understood women before, to be honest, but I had a tolerance for women that I don’t have now.”

I laughed. Chaz blushed.

“No, really. There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating. I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that Jen can talk endlessly.” He shrugged. “I just kind of zone out.”

“You just don’t care!”

“I just don’t care!” He laughed. “I’ve learned that the differences between men and women are so biological. I think if people realized that, it would be easier. I would be a great relationship counselor. I know the difference that hormones really make.”

Sex, for him, is completely different now. “I am completely monogamous,” he said, “but I need release much more often than Jen does.”

The weirdest guy thing he does now?

“I got way more gadget-oriented, I have to say. I don’t know why. Definitely since transitioning I’ve wanted to be up on the latest, coolest toy.”

IN their offices on Hollywood Boulevard, Messrs. Bailey and Barbato, the directors, disabused me of the rest of my Cher-related notions.

“That’s a sexy theory, but no,” Mr. Barbato told me. “People don’t change their sex to get back at their parents, any more than people become gay to get back at their parents.”

The two men compared today’s cultural blind spot regarding transgender people to attitudes about homosexuality during World War II, when homosexuals in the armed forces were considered psychiatrically abnormal and were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider gender identity disorder a medical issue, it is still classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association  — a stigma that is difficult for any marginalized group to shake.

“The notion of trans is incomprehensible to most people,” Mr. Bailey said. “It is so foreign.”

One of the most interesting aspects of their film is the fact that although Chaz makes the physical transition, the more demanding transition, arguably, is the emotional one that everyone around him must make. There is, in essence, a death and mourning of Chastity, the woman, and an adjustment to Chaz, whom his girlfriend now compares to dating “Chastity’s twin brother.”

But I couldn’t stop asking about Cher.

“Cher is very real in this film,” Mr. Barbato said. “She’s not editing herself. She’s processing this majorly traumatic thing for any mother: She’s struggling with the fact that her daughter has turned into a man.”

Mr. Bailey brings up a fascinating moment in the film: He asks Cher a question, and she just stares, motionless and unblinking as a cobra — an excruciatingly long and pregnant pause. Then her whole posture shifts. She says, “If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, I couldn’t get to the surgeon fast enough.” Right then and there it occurs to her how to relate to it.

I bring up how uncomfortable we are as a society with people who don’t fit into the usual gender roles, how they can seem unsettling on a visceral level, like a dangling participle or an unresolved chord.

“I like things that are incomplete,” Mr. Bailey said. “Life is unresolvedness.”

I felt slightly less lame about my own process of understanding when Rosie O’Donnell (a curator of OWN’s social documentary series) told me, in a phone interview, that she, too, had to pave some inner potholes en route to accepting gender transitioning.

“As a gay woman, I found it hard to understand,” she said. “I know some very masculine gay women, and I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of repressed homophobia, where being straight makes it more O.K. But all of us struggle with whatever it is: special-needs kids, gay people. We all have our speed bumps.”

History mostly demonstrates the violence of embracing either pole of moral certainty. The black and white of gender identification has always pushed an infinitude of differences into the margins. Who knows? To finally usher a complete color wheel of sexuality into the mainstream, perhaps it takes a child of Cher.

 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 15, 2011

An article last Sunday about the gender transitioning of Chaz (formerly Chastity) Bono misstated the classification of gender identity disorder. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider it a medical issue and there is considerable debate over whether to classify it as such, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — IV, the standard reference for psychiatric disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, classifies it as a mental disorder; that classification did not end in 1999.

 

A version of this article appeared in print on May 8, 2011, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Reluctant Transgender Role Model.

 

 

YouTube Acquires a Producer of Videos

Ellen

3/7/2011   The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — YouTube, the video site owned by Google, formally announced on Monday that it had acquired Next New Networks, a Web video production company, in its biggest effort yet to move beyond short, quirky home videos to professionally produced content.

The acquisition of Next New Networks, which produces original programming and helps video creators distribute their films and make money, is YouTube’s biggest leap into creating its own programming. But that will be minimal, the companies said. Original programming has taken a back seat at Next New Networks, and Google has shied away from producing its own content.

“We want to make as clean a line as possible for us to build the platform on YouTube and then let the content production happen with our partners,” said Tom Pickett, director of global content operation at YouTube.

Google will pay less than $50 million for the company, according to two people briefed on the terms of the deal. The New York Times first reported YouTube’s interest in the company in December. The companies declined to comment on the price.

Improving its original programming is crucial for YouTube, which faces competition from Web video services like Hulu, iTunes and Netflix. For its part, Google, which is trying to popularize its Google TV service, needs more Web video that people will watch for hours at a time.

“There’s still a lot of YouTube that’s about the single video experience right now,” Mr. Pickett said. “We want to think about sets of videos and program experiences. That’s where we’re heading and we think this team is going to help us get there.”

Many video creators on YouTube “are making money and doing great, but as a group they have not added up to shake the foundations of the way people watch content,” said James L. McQuivey, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research. “Maybe it’s just that they’re not aggregated in a meaningful way, but as long as YouTube remains something you do between phone calls at work, it won’t change the way the industry envisions its relationship with the viewer.”

The company also said Monday that it was creating a program called YouTube Next that will help the video makers with whom YouTube shares ad revenue to produce more professional content by giving them grants and training.

Next New Networks, which attracts two billion views a month, compares itself to cable networks, which do not own all their programming but package and broadcast other people’s shows. It helps video creators with advertising, distribution of their shows to various Web sites, and in building an audience by including shows as part of a programming package.

It created the shows “Barely Political” and “Indy Mogul.” It produces videos for the Gregory Brothers, whose video “Bed Intruder Song” was the most-watched video on YouTube last year, and Hungry Nation, a series of online food shows. The Gregory Brothers’ videos, for instance, had up to 20,000 views an episode before the group started working with Next New Networks, and now they have up to two million views for an episode, said Lance Podell, chairman of Next New Networks.

Most of Next New’s shows are on YouTube, but others appear on services like iTunes and Vimeo, and that will continue.

“At this point, we are YouTube-focused, but that doesn’t mean that as an adviser to creators we won’t be able to suggest to them how their business can build on YouTube and off of YouTube,” Mr. Podell said.

He will be director and global head of YouTube Next lab and audience development. YouTube also said it hired the former head of digital distribution at Paramount, Alex Carloss, to work on content acquisition.

Next New Networks, which was founded in 2007, has raised $26 million from investment firms including Spark Capital, Fuse Capital and Goldman Sachs. The company is based in New York and will remain there. YouTube is based in San Bruno, Calif.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2011, on page B4 of the New York edition.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/technology/08youtube.html?emc=eta1

 

Media Matters’ war against Fox

Ellen

3/26/2011   Politico

Brock (left) described Media Matters’ campaign against Fox as ‘guerrilla warfare.’ | Courtesy of Media Matters, AP Photo, POLITICO Screengrab

The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.

The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals — not least among the donors who fund Media Matters’ staff of about 90, who are arrayed in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue.

“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.

The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”

In an interview and a 2010 planning memo shared with POLITICO, Brock listed the fronts on which Media Matters — which he said is operating on a $10 million-plus annual budget — is working to chip away at Fox and its parent company, News Corp. They include its bread-and-butter distribution of embarrassing clips and attempts to rebut Fox points, as well as a series of under-the-radar tactics.

Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor. (In the interest of full disclosure, Media Matters last month also issued a report criticizing “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy’s criticism of this reporter’s blog.)

Brock said Media Matters also plans to run a broad campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp., an effort which most likely will involve opening a United Kingdom arm in London to attack the company’s interests there. The group hired an executive from MoveOn.org to work on developing campaigns among News Corp. shareholders and also is looking for ways to turn regulators in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere against the network.

The group will “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests — whether that be here or looking at what’s going on in London right now,” Brock said, referring to News Corp.’s — apparently successful — move to take a majority stake in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

A spokeswoman for Fox News, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Media Matters’ efforts, but the group draws regular barbs from Fox hosts Beck and Bill O’Reilly.

“Tonight is not an episode you casually watch and take out of context like Media Matters does,” Beck remarked last month.

A more extended attack came in February on the freewheeling late night show Red Eye, which conducted a mock interview with a purported Media Matters employee.

“It’s horrible. All we do is sit and watch Fox News and make up stuff about Fox News. It is the saddest place I have ever seen in my life. I think about it, and I want to throw up,” the mock employee said. “I get to work and I take off my clothes, and they strap me into a chair in front of a TV with [Fox News Channel] on. They keep my eyelids propped open like in “Clockwork Orange,” and I sit and type all day.

“If there was no Beck, George Soros would come down and demand we make it up,” the “interviewee” continued. “I would watch the “Flintstones” and transcribe Fred Flintstone’s words and attribute them to Beck. It was the only way to get Soros to stop hitting me.”

(A Soros associate said the financier, who gave Media Matters $1 million last year, did not earmark it for the Fox campaign. Soros suggested in a recent CNN interview that the Fox depictions of him as a sinister media manipulator would better be applied to Murdoch.)

In some views, the war between Media Matters and Fox is not, necessarily, bad for either side. Media Matters has transformed itself into a pillar of the progressive movement with its aggressive new brand of media campaigning. And the attacks cement Fox’s status on the right.

“Fox is happy about it — and it makes their position more vivid among their supporters,” said Paul Levinson, a media studies professor at Fordham University. “One way of keeping your core supporters happy is to be attacked by people your core supporters don’t like.”

But Media Matters says its digging has begun to pay off. The group has trickled out a series of emails from Washington Bureau Chief Bill Sammon, leaks from inside the network, which show him, for instance, circulating a memo on “Obama’s references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists.”

The leaks are part of a broader project to take advantage of internal dissent, Media Matters Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt said.

“We made a list of every single person who works for Fox and tried to figure out who might be disgruntled and why, and we went out to try to meet them,” he said. “Clearly, somebody in that organization is giving us primary source documents.”

Media Matters, he said, is also conducting “opposition research” on a dozen or so “mid- and senior-level execs and producers,” a campaign style move that he and Brock said would simply involve recording their public appearances and digging into public records associated with them.

And Brock’s 2010 planning memo offers a glimpse at Media Matters’ shift from media critic to a new species of political animal.

“Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press,” its memo says. “Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.”

 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51949.html

 

 

Time Warner eyes stake in Maker Studios

Ellen

11/14/2012   Variety

Time Warner is eyeing an investment in digital upstart Maker Studios, a key producer of original programming for YouTube.

Conglom is in discussions with the Culver City, Calif.-based Maker about purchasing a minority stake in the company, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the talks.

It’s possible, however, that Time Warner could get beaten to the punch as other media giants kick the tires at Maker. COO Courtney Holt, who joined the company a year ago from MySpace Music, has been working on raising a new round of capital, according to sources. The venture has already raised $4 million to date from venture capital firms including Greycroft Partners and GRP Partners.

A Time Warner spokesman declined comment; a rep for Maker could not be reached for comment.

The potential for a Time Warner-Maker tie-up underscores Big Media’s growing interest in companies that specialize in original programming for YouTube, which is far and away the primary destination for consumers of online video. Maker was second only to musicvideo hubs Vevo and Warner Music among YouTube partner channels during September, according to Comscore Video Metrix, with 23.5 million unique visitors.

Founded in 2009, Maker pockets a portion of the revenues derived from a network of amateur talent feeding over 2,000 YouTube channels in exchange for providing them various production and management services. Maker’s channels boast a growing worldwide audience, generating more than 1.7 billion views as of September.

The venture has been attracting TV-size audiences to its top YouTube series including “Epic Rap Battles of History,” though it hasn’t been without growing pains: Last month, Maker star Ray William Johnson, who has more subscriptions than any content creator on YouTube, signaled he was leaving the company amid a contract dispute, though he currently remains in production on his hit show “=3.”

What makes the Maker model so attractive is its ability to corral significant viewership at a fraction of the production costs, though the ad revenues YouTube content attracts pales in comparison to what TV programming fetches. In addition, Maker could provide Time Warner with inhouse entree to its TV and film brands on YouTube, where content consumption patterns adhere to a set of rules quite different than traditional media. Maker could also be a place to incubate low-cost intellectual property before migrating it to other platforms.

It’s unclear what part of Time Warner would be providing the funding, but the likeliest source is Time Warner Investments, a portfolio filled with “mid-stage” new-media ventures including analytics firm Bluefin Labs, social-TV hub GetGlue and ad network Tremor Video. However, it’s possible that entities within the conglom that have done their own digital investing could be in the mix including Warner Bros. TV Group, Turner Broadcasting and HBO.

Maker may be finding it difficult to tap VC circles for a fresh infusion, which could make a conglom like Time Warner the next logical option. But that could also spell the beginning of the end of its independent status.

New funding could help fuel expansion plans, though the company has already grown exponentially in the past three years. Founded by Lisa Donovan, Danny Zappin and Ben Donovan, Maker started with just nine employees. The company now has about 300 employees and 20,000 new video uploads per month. With more than 20,000 square feet of studio space in Culver City, Maker employs a staff of editors, cinematographers and others in core functions to produce more than 300 videos a month.

 

http://variety.com/2012/digital/news/time-warner-eyes-stake-in-maker-studios-1118062235/#.UKRWlVel-8w.email

 

PMK-BNC Launches Digital Agency Vowel

Ellen

4/14/2014   Variety

Public relations giant PMK-BNC has launched digital agency Vowel, which will provide its clients with creative ways to reach online audiences, the company said.

Vowel will absorb PMK-BNC’s social marketing firm Spokes as part of the move.

“Brands, talent and entertainment properties are increasingly looking for integrated communications programs to build loyalty with audiences across multiple platforms. Vowel will deliver those solutions,” said PMK-BNC co-chairman, Michael Nyman.

Joseph Assad, chief operating officer of PMK-BNC’s New York office runs the new division, while Spokes co-founder Jeff Diamond joins Vowel as senior VP and Matt Kennerson serves as senior developer.

Vowel develops and distributes original content, produces social media strategies, manages platform development, creates custom online solutions, handles influencer marketing, and provides measurement and analytics.

“PMK-BNC already has a track record of producing acclaimed digital and influencer content for a range of clients. Vowel is an evolution of that offering,” Assad said. “Along with the technical know-how of Spokes, Vowel offers a comprehensive solution to what clients today are looking for: a holistic approach to digital and social in a way that can enhance and integrate into PR, experiential and marketing.”

 

http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/pmk-bnc-launches-digital-agency-vowel-1201157170/

 

Where The Growth Business Is For Jeffrey Katzenberg: Online Video

Ellen

6/26/2014   Deadline.com

So now we know. After getting roasted by some competing studio heads (if not on Wall Street) earlier this year when he said movies are “not a growth business,” DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg traveled south to Anaheim today to talk about online video, a business he does see growing into the next big entertainment business platform. Katzenberg sat down onstage with Hank Green, himself a prominent video blogger with brother John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars. The brothers are co-founders of Vidcon, the massive industry confab and fan festival filling the Anaheim Convention Center the next three days. Katzenberg used the friendly audience of video creators, distributors and others in the business to talk about why online video, particularly on YouTube, is such a promising creation and distribution platform for a new generation of talent outside traditional Hollywood.

“I think the opportunities ahead are so immense,” Katzenberg said. “This platform is in its infancy. Monetizing that is still a struggle. What we will see in a very short period of time, that will all start to migrate up to the top of the pyramid. I believe in five years, 95 percent of the value will come from the top 5 percent” of video creators.

And DWA already has invested substantially in the space, buying multi-channel network AweseomenessTV a year ago and launching the daily video digest YouTube Nation about four months ago. Last week, the company officially announced the programming slate for DreamworksTV, another YouTube channel under Awesomeness that will feature short animations involving notable DWA characters such as Shrek and Po the Panda, along with planned animated series featuring characters from its Classic Media library acquisition.

Katzenberg was particularly upbeat about YouTube Nation, which highlights notable videos and up-and-comers in a 5- to 6-minute daily roundup. “We have created a lighthouse that is in service of everything that is great and unique and singular about what I believe will be the most important platform in the world, which is YouTube,” Katzenberg said. The channel already has accreted 1.6 million subscribers and 25 million views, and ultimately, the company hopes to extend YouTube Nation into specialized shows focused on verticals such as sports and beauty. The idea for the program came from Katzenberg’s own fascination, and frustration, with the vast YouTube sea of content, he said.

“Being someone who’s just a fan of the platform, the content, the creators, I loved it, and at the same time, I was incredibly frustrated by my ability to consume it,” Katzenberg said. “It just overwhelmed me. It was an ocean of opportunity I kept feeling I was missing. It pissed me off that I would find out on, like the Today show, something I should be watching.”

He also touted the opportunities for AwesomenessTV (“Our biggest and most exciting bet”), which has a show on Nickelodeon among other ventures and whose YouTube channels Katzenberg said now have 50 million subscribers and 1 billion views a month.

“They are at the foundation of making careers,” Katzenberg said of the team running Awesomeness. “They’ve become this great host where great talent can find audiences. This is all about value creation. If you’re looking for a place now to go and connect with that audience, it’s hard to find a better place to make that launch.”

With 18,000 fans and online-video industry types attending Vidcon, the scene is strongly reminiscent of the San Diego Comic-Con without the cosplay at a time, say 10 years ago, when Hollywood was just beginning to embrace the franchise-marketing possibilities there. Vidcon this year includes sponsors such as Kia Motors, Friskies, NBC, UTA, Best Buy, Samsung, HLN, Taco Bell and other big media and consumer brands. Today is Industry Day, with a series of presentations by prominent video creators and even old-school veterans such as MTV and Nickelodeon pioneer Fred Seibert, now 62 and once again exploring a new medium with his Frederator Studios.

 

http://www.deadline.com/2014/06/where-the-growth-business-is-for-jeffrey-katzenberg-online-video/#more-756168

 

Bill Clinton: The sequel

Ellen

9/24/2010   Politico

Clinton, flanked by communications adviser Matt McKenna (left) and top aide Doug Band. | John Shinkle Close

NEW YORK — No newspapers, no television, no Web: If someone boycotted them all, it might have been possible to avoid Bill Clinton this past week.

Everyone else knew that he was back at center stage — full of ideas, full of meetings, full of formal pronouncements and provocative asides.

CEOs like Google’s Eric Schmidt, movie stars like Jim Carrey, boldfaced international names like Tony Blair — and President Barack Obama himself — mingled with the former president at the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual conclave that each year swells to new proportions.

Some 40 heads of state here for a United Nations summit booked time for personal meetings with Clinton. A parade of interviewers — many feigning interest in the CGI in order to quiz him on politics — have asked Clinton to divine the mysteries of the 2010 elections as though he were a bearded oracle atop a peak in the Himalayas.

Consumers of this week’s glut of Clinton coverage might be forgiven for wondering: What happened to the idea that the 42nd president was an embittered has-been, his presidency no longer relevant with a younger and bolder Democrat in the Oval Office, his reputation permanently bruised by a graceless and losing season on the campaign trail for his wife in 2008?

This week’s New York extravaganza was a reminder that the widely written Clinton obituaries of two years ago were not merely premature but divorced from history: Clinton’s life for decades has been marked by familiar cycles of victory, disaster and recovery.

“There will be good times and not-so-good times,” Clinton said Wednesday in a wide-ranging POLITICO interview. “I have loved the life I’ve had since I left the White House.”

This week put the latest comeback in sharp relief. The CGI summit came after a recent Gallup poll put Clinton’s approval rating at 61 percent, 9 points higher than Obama’s and 16 points higher than George W. Bush’s. Obama, who once dismissed Clinton as an incrementalist president in contrast to his own “transformational” ambitions, is now being urged by many midterm-dreading Democrats to study the 1990s — history lessons Clinton remains happy to deliver.

The CGI also offered a milestone to measure the broader arc of Clinton’s post-presidency, a period now nearly a decade long. Over 10 years, Clinton and Douglas J. Band, 37, the man who has become by far his most powerful aide and among his closest confidants, have succeeded in turning the 42nd president into a global brand — one that at times seems to operate as a kind of free-floating mini-state.

The brand resides partly in the realm of good deeds, as in Clinton’s earthquake relief work in Haiti or his foundation’s efforts against AIDS in Africa. It resides in the realm of money, specifically his success in making himself worth at least tens of millions of dollars through speeches and investments after leaving the presidency deep in debt from legal bills. The brand resides partly in the realm of celebrity, as when Clinton and Band watch the World Cup in South Africa with Mick Jagger and Katie Couric in their suite. And, it goes without saying, it resides in the realm of politics, as Clinton jets off to far corners of the country to raise money and stump for Democrats.

What may surprise people about the Clinton of 2010 is how little it resembles the Clinton of 2001. After leaving the presidency in January, former first lady Hillary Clinton was all set, newly elected to the U.S. Senate. But the former president himself was at loose ends, viewed by many in his inner circle as deeply demoralized, possibly even depressed.

The final hours of his presidency were scarred by the Marc Rich pardon scandal — an earlier occasion, like the 2008 campaign, when some commentators believed Clinton had permanently marred his legacy. With his wife in Washington and most of his White House aides scattered to new jobs, Clinton was brooding at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., often alone except for his personal valet, Oscar Flores. Having spent his life cosseted by aides, Clinton had trouble navigating some routine aspects of modern life. One aide went with him to the automated teller machine at the bank and saw that he had a million dollars in a standard checking account. Perhaps, sir, you should consider moving some of that, the aide suggested.

What’s more, Clinton seemed to have little conception of how to spend his post-presidency beyond reflecting on the achievements of his tenure and nursing his grievances over the defeats. One close aide said at the time he worried that Clinton would squander his legacy “like Willie Mays,” who finished his career greeting customers at a casino.

It was during this period that Band was enlisted to help Clinton. The University of Florida graduate was a familiar figure in the Clinton fold but not then an exalted one. He was the last of four personal aides — known by the coarse title “butt boys” in White House parlance — to work with Clinton at the White House. The job was to be by the president’s side almost constantly from morning to night, at home and on the road, keeping track of his speeches, making sure he didn’t lose his glasses, coughing and shooting peevish glares when Oval Office visitors overstayed their welcome. It might have been a menial job at times, but it also offered uncommon access to the behind-the-scenes life of the president.

The Clintons prevailed on Band to give up a job offer from Goldman Sachs to stay with the former president.

Recalling that period now, Band said in a POLITICO interview that he is shocked to think of how threadbare Clinton’s operation was: “He has this whole new life, but the apparatus of the presidency is completely gone.”

Band said it took time for Clinton and the people around him to conceive a strategy for leveraging an ex-president’s assets — mainly fame and the ability to command an audience with virtually anyone on the planet — into a formal operation.

“He’s one of the most recognizable and important people alive,” Band said, adding that while this creates opportunity, “the burden and the challenge of it is significant. … You have to create the organization, you have to raise the money, and you have to build that enterprise from scratch.”

At the beginning, Band’s role was much the same as the body-man assignments he took on at the White House. Over the years, however, it became clear that he was no longer a mere “butt boy.” A series of rivals to be Clinton’s top staff aide gradually fell by the wayside. In practice, if not title, Band became something like the chief operating officer of Clinton’s life.

These days, Band is sometimes treated as a principal rather than a staff man. He sits on Coca-Cola’s international advisory board and is involved in efforts to recruit the World Cup and America’s Cup to the United States. He was invited to Vernon Jordan’s birthday party this summer as a guest, not as Clinton’s coat holder.

With new power, controversy inevitably followed. Particularly in New York, Band is a regular name in the papers, even though he rarely speaks on the record. His reputation among outside observers of the Clinton operation, and even some on the inside, sometimes seems like a composite. It is one part H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s single-minded enforcer. And it is one part George Stephanopoulos, another person who as a young man won entree to a world of celebrity by virtue of his relationship with Clinton.

Before his marriage in 2007, Band showed up in the tabloids for dating model Naomi Campbell. (His wedding to Lily Rafii in Paris was attended by Clinton and a host of tycoons and was topped off with fireworks. The couple now has a 9-month-old child.) He also won unwelcome publicity in 2007, when a Wall Street Journal article detailed a business deal gone sour with a jet-setting Italian scam artist who later went to prison.

Band said he realizes that the reason many people seek him out or that doors open to him is because of his role with Clinton, and that someone in his role must tread modestly. His reputation as the enforcer in the Clinton circle comes because someone must fend off a ceaseless barrage of invitations, entreaties and requests for favors that descend on a former president — a task Clinton, with his accommodating temperament, would never take on for himself.

But Band seems to warm to the task. While Clinton now gets along well with Obama, there is occasional chest-bumping between Band and West Wing aides like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel over whether enough deference is being shown to the former president and his allies. In 2008, John Edwards called, seeking a statement of support from Clinton when his affair with Rielle Hunter exploded publicly. A loyalist with a long memory, Band sent back word, asking whether Edwards recalled his own denunciation of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky controversy.

Band’s loyalists within the Clinton team said his reputation as an operator has obscured his achievements as a strategist. Clinton’s efforts bear Band’s imprint more than that of any other person, except the former president himself.

It is now a far-flung enterprise. At Clinton’s Harlem office, there are 120 employees. From his home in Little Rock, former White House aide Bruce Lindsey weighs in on issues relating to Clinton’s foundation and his record at his presidential library. Policy aide Ira Magaziner, who works on AIDS issues, lives in Rhode Island, and communications adviser Matt McKenna works most of the time from home in Montana. On some policy and political matters, former White House advisers John Podesta or Tom Freedman weigh in from Washington.

The Clinton Global Initiative, according to Clinton, first grew from a suggestion by Band: The former president should try to replicate the annual gatherings of the elite in Davos, Switzerland. Clinton said he wanted the focus to be on global philanthropy, moving beyond panels and speeches and requiring that all participants make specific pledges of money and effort aimed at innovative solutions to world problems. This week marked the sixth CGI summit. In an interview, Clinton said one of the biggest successes of recent years has been enlisting more CEOs to help promote market-based solutions for health care and other humanitarian challenges.

Band said one project has been neglected over the past decade: an organized effort by veterans of Clinton’s White House and other allies to promote and defend his eight years in office.

In the interview, Clinton made clear that he thinks Republicans do a better job than Democrats of developing a sheen of mythology around their presidents.

“President [Ronald] Reagan has got a much higher standing than he did when he left the White House because the Republicans are smart, and they work relentlessly on legacy,” Clinton said. “They understand how important it is to have their narrative out there. When he left the White House, people were worried about Iran-Contra and didn’t feel too hot about things.”

The Reagan comparison also touches on one of the sore points of another relationship: the one between Clinton and Obama. During the 2008 campaign, Obama made waves when he implicitly pooh-poohed Clinton’s accomplishments during an interview with a Reno newspaper.

“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said at the time. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

Clinton, in his interview, chalked that quote up to politics and offered repeated praise for Obama’s intelligence and policy judgments, though he did critique the president’s political strategy. Aides said Clinton nursed deep resentments over the 2008 campaign for at least a year afterward, but he has gradually let them go.

“You’ve got to draw distinctions, and that’s the deal,” Clinton said. “Politics is a contact sport. And to complain about contact is like a pro-football quarterback complaining if he gets sacked on the weekend.”

He made clear that he regards his own achievements as “transformational,” even if Obama professed not to. He said the fact that Obama passed health care while Clinton did not was simply a matter of “arithmetic” — Obama had more Democrats in the Senate.

He also noted that Obama remains undefined. In diagnosing what’s ailing the presidency, Clinton volunteered that a negative public caricature was able to take hold partly because Obama didn’t have a long background in public life.

“Partly, he was vulnerable to that because he came up so fast,” Clinton said of a president 15 years his junior. “He even wrote in his autobiography that at the time it was a positive thing: People could see a blank slate and write their hopes and dreams in it. And that’s what his branders, as they call themselves, thought about that.”

The comment was intended as a sympathetic analysis of Obama’s political challenges, yet it carried an echo of Clinton’s warning three years ago that Obama’s re´sume´ was too thin to be president.

Clinton did not say directly what many moderate Democrats believe — that the Obama team, in its disdain for what it considered Clinton’s small-bore brand of politics, did not appreciate his instinct for how to advance a progressive agenda in a country that remains skeptical of government. Now that Democrats are facing peril in the midterms, Obama may think anew about Clinton.

Here at the CGI, there was no absence of people who think the 42nd president’s example remains relevant. Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm said “people are nostalgic for the Clinton style of governance.”

“His experience after 1994 was ‘communicate, communicate, communicate.’ I think that’s something President Obama and the Democrats will try to do too,” she said. “He brings the perspective of somebody who has been able to govern through crisis and opposition in the legislature.”

“He has leveraged his celebrity and his knowledge in a way no one has,” said civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. “What Barack maybe needs to look at are the people close to him. He needs better communicators.”

 

 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42661_Page5.html

 

Online Video Start-Ups Seek to Carve Out a Place Beside YouTube

Ellen

6/5/2011   The New York Times

Doug Walker preparing for “Nostalgia Critic,” a popular show for Channel Awesome.

CHICAGO — For many Internet users, YouTube is synonymous with online video. But Mike Michaud and several friends who live in suburban Chicago are trying to change that.

Mr. Michaud co-owns Channel Awesome, an aspiring Viacom of the online video world, which promotes online shows about video games, comic books and assorted realms of popular culture. He was a casualty of the recession, having been laid off by Circuit City, the electronics retail chain that later was closed, and now he is a beneficiary of the advertising rebound, having doubled his revenue last year, enough to employ seven people full time.

“People may still scoff at online video, but this is a real business now,” he said over breakfast recently. Channel Awesome’s primary partner is not YouTube, but Blip.tv, which distributes made-for-the-Web series and surrounds them with ads. The companies that create these series are small, are popping up in unexpected places — like Mr. Michaud’s home — and are creating unlikely stars in lucrative niches.

Blip.tv founders Mike Hudack, left, Dina Kaplan and Justin Day.

Channel Awesome’s best-known weekly show, “Nostalgia Critic,” which another Circuit City cast off, Doug Walker, produces from his home five minutes from Mr. Michaud’s, draws about three million views a month. Several of Blip’s top production partners are on track to earn at least a $1 million in ad revenue from Blip this year, said Dina Kaplan, a co-founder of Blip.

Like YouTube, Blip splits advertising revenues with Web series producers. But unlike YouTube, which also streams amateur videos, and Netflix, which streams feature films and television shows, Blip is solely focused on those producers. Rather than competing directly, it is trying to carve a niche next to YouTube in the expanding world of Web video.

“This ecosystem that we started working with in 2005 has finally come into its own,” Ms. Kaplan said, citing the success of companies like Mr. Michaud’s, Blip’s relationships with top advertisers like Procter & Gamble, and the growing popularity of streaming video on televisions.

Shows hosted by Blip’s servers now account for 330 million video views a month, the company says. Blip is in its third round of financing by venture capital firms that have invested $18 million.   But what the system has been lacking, Blip executives and other industry specialists say, are ways to find made-for-the-Web series that are worth watching. The problem, in industry parlance, is discovery, and it is a huge hurdle for Web video makers and sponsors to clear.

“There just isn’t anywhere right now that focuses on original Web series and presents them in a clean, curated, well-lit environment,” Mike Hudack, another co-founder of Blip and the company’s chief executive, said last month as he showed his solution: a new home page for Blip that is updated daily with links to new episodes of shows.

The new home page divides shows into categories like sports and comedy, ranks shows by popularity and creates what Mr. Michaud calls “real show pages” for users to visit.

YouTube, too, is trying to solve the discovery problem by programming its home page and putting a new emphasis on channels of content. In March, the company, a unit of Google, bought a Web video production company called Next New Networks, and now the employees of Next New are training other budding YouTube producers.

Like so many other Web video companies, Blip is a partner of YouTube, so it avoids any insinuation that it is a competitor. But it would clearly prefer to rack up video views on its own sites, not YouTube’s.

The audiences for most Web series are still puny by television standards, and so are the budgets for the series. Mr. Michaud, 29, who wore to breakfast a yellow shirt with the star symbol from Super Mario Bros. 3 imprinted on the front, said online video itself “still has a lot of growing up to do.”

“My company has a lot of growing up to do,” he said, “but I believe that sometime in the next one to two years someone will create that one series that gets everyone talking.”

That one show, he said, could then start pulling people from traditional television “to the endless options of online video.”

Many of Blip’s top shows are part of a network, the same way that MTV is an umbrella for all sorts of shows. Along with Channel Awesome, Blip praises Rooster Teeth, a production company based in Austin, Tex., that makes the action drama “Red vs. Blue” and “Immersion,” which tests video game tropes in real life.

Mr. Hudack’s other favorites include “Dusty Wright’s Culture Catch,” a music and culture talk show and blog, and “Aidan 5,” a black-and-white sci-fi drama produced in Columbus, Ohio, and based on a film short.

“When it comes to Web video, Hollywood could learn lessons from Illinois and Texas,” Ms. Kaplan said.

As the channel and show names imply, success often results from tackling topics that appeal to young viewers. They are some of the same people who are “watching less television,” Ms. Kaplan said, “so if advertisers want to reach them, they have to start advertising on Web series.”

Last week, Blip signed its latest content deal, with a management company called the Collective, that will steer more videos — and thus more views and ad impressions — in Blip’s direction. The Collective represents online stars like Lucas Cruikshank, who plays a helium-voiced character called Fred in a hit YouTube series. In celebration of the deal, Blip’s new office space on Broadway in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan was rearranged into a dance floor last Thursday night, where staff members at Blip, executives at the Collective and friends from YouTube all mingled. In the back, out of reach of 200-plus partygoers, an unopened bottle of Champagne sat at an employee’s desk.

To hit the million-dollar mark that Ms. Kaplan mentioned, Channel Awesome has to add new series and maintain the audiences for its current series. Mr. Michaud is now looking for warehouse space in suburban Chicago, and benefiting, he said, from the weak real estate market. He considered the vacant Circuit City building where he once worked, he said, but concluded that the space was too small.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 6, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Online Video Start-Ups Seek to Carve Out a Place Beside YouTube.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/business/media/06blip.html?pagewanted=all