Current TV has
democratized the small screen with user-generated
programming. So what's in it for us? Turns out, whatever we
make of it.
Producer-director
Dave O’Brien has already gone through the development
wringer with the Here cable network and MTV’s Logo
channel. The gay 30-year-old’s indie
documentary Hip Hop Homos and short film
Straight Boys aired on Logo, as have his
music videos for artists such as lesbian hip-hop duo God-Des
and She. But it’s the Al Gore–backed Current
TV that O’Brien says has taken the most
interest in his LGBT-themed work. While Logo and Here
program their fair share of coming-out profiles and
documentary features within the mix of reality shows
and serials, it’s Current that’s
procuring stories from the LGBT population -- in other
words, people like you. In fact, the Current is more
akin to a local film festival than a TV network in its
pursuit of the unique, less heard, and often underfunded
narratives, and it has opened up a blank canvas for gay
people to represent themselves if they simply pick up
a camera and get to work.
The channel aired
Fight for Marriage, O’Brien’s
report on last year’s referendum on an amendment to
ban civil unions and same-sex marriage in Wisconsin,
which chronicled the weeks leading up to the November
vote. Current also bought from O’Brien a
segment about young people, both straight and gay, who are
battling sexual addictions; another about the
controversy at the University of Southern
California’s campus newspaper, which had published
antigay letters to the editor; and another about a
group of die-hard “Rentheads” who give
early reviews of Rent.
“These are
the kind of authentic LGBT stories that “you
wouldn’t see anywhere else, not even on Logo or
Here,” O’Brien says. “On Current the
ideas are coming from the viewers and are being told in
their voices.”
The network,
launched in 2005 with the aim of giving the 18- to
34-year-old set a hand in generating their own news, is a
collection of short-form programs called
“pods,” many under five minutes long. These
pods run on a shuffle, like your iPod, in a loop that cycles
every couple of hours. Topics for these programs fall
under the purposely broad category of anything that
interests young people: careers, relationships,
fashion, sex, pop culture, and yes, even current events. And
the shuffle means that programming isn’t
organized by topic. One minute you could be watching
something about Britney Spears; the next, the war in Uganda.
Think of it as a think tank for the MySpace generation that
makes news palatable for an audience that shuns news
and politics on the air and often in print. According
to “Teens Tune In to News on the Internet,” a
Knight Foundation study published in 2006, 66% of U.S. high
school students get news from Google and Yahoo! while
just 34% get it from local TV or newspaper sites.
What’s more, adults younger than 30 say they spend
more than half of their Internet time with user-generated
content, according to the 2007 “State of the
Media Democracy” study conducted by Harrison
Group for Deloitte. Has Current TV seen the future of
television?
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