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?
In two
years Current has reached distribution in 41 million
households in the United States (52 million worldwide),
which makes it one of the fasting-growing networks
today. And Current is the youngest network to be
nominated for and win an Emmy -- a 2007 award for
outstanding achievement in interactive television. At the
network's Web site, Current.com, viewers can
upload news pods, video blogs, comments, and links to
stories, making Current a real-time source of news gathering
and sharing.
But YouTube
it's not. Viewers create an average of 30% of the
broadcast content, a percentage that programming
president David Neuman expects to rise to 50% over the
next year. They won't, however, green-light just
anything for television. "We're picky. We want
to put on things that are compelling," Neuman
says. For now, in-house producers are taking their
cues from the material that is being submitted by viewers as
well as their own journalistic instincts. "My
role is sort of like a therapist or a
facilitator," Neuman says. "I'm not
programming the network so much as asking 'Can
you elaborate or add some perspective to
that?' "
Though the
network has consistently been critiqued in the media for its
spastic -- executives prefer the term
"dynamic" -- playlist of programs
rotating throughout the day on shuffle mode, Current
executives say that viewers spend an average 7.5 hours
watching the channel per week. That's a
significant chunk of the average 10.6 hours college students
spent watching TV per week this past spring, according
to New Jersey-based research company Youth
Trends.
Analysts and
media buyers, meanwhile, are paying close attention to what
Current is doing in an age when the youth market has made
hits out of faux-news shows like The Daily Show
With Jon Stewart. Brad Adgate, senior vice
president of research at Horizon Media, says that the
channel is alone in its TV aim. "I don't know
if it's a must-buy for advertisers yet, but it
could just be ahead of its time," he says.
"What they're doing is unproven
ground."
Fortunately, for
us, that unproven ground leaves a lot of room at the
table for LGBT voices. Once such example is the story of
Adriana, born "Andre," a transgender
woman in her early 20s who's been living on the
streets of Hollywood ever since her stepdad kicked her out
when she was 13. Producer Derrick Shore met her as she
was lunching on Cup O' Noodles near the corner
of Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard and
produced a portrait of Adriana titled Trans in
Hollywood, and in a few days it made its way into
Current's program shuffle. This is one reason
why Shore, a former anchor for national high school
newscast Channel One, says that for all the progress made
for coverage of LGBT issues in the mainstream media,
Current still stands alone in having a transparent
approach.
"People
should have a place to debate these issues, where the
network isn't afraid to talk about it,"
he continues, "especially sexuality, which is
so pertinent to young people." Shore says after
Trans in Hollywood aired, one viewer was so
moved by Adriana's story that he wrote to Derrick
offering her a place to live.
"That's the great thing about
Current," adds O'Brian. " I feel like
I actually have an impact on whatever topic I'm
producing."
And just as the
Web is worldwide, so are the stories that flow to
Current, such as segments about the growing the gay scene in
Shanghai or gay rights rallies in Jerusalem.
"If it's well-articulated and an
authentic expression of a particular side of an issue, we
want to air it--along with opposing points of
view," explain Current's chief executive
officer, Joel Hyatt.
Current's
audience is marked by optimism, says Neuman, who spent
several years running CNN's news-gathering
operation. "The message our audience is sending
is that you can be who you want to be, which is such a big
issue for the LGBT community. They're marked by their
compassion and in many ways their lack of
cynicism."
Before the
network got off the ground, most media mavens expected an Al
Gore network to be progressive and at the very least
left-leaning. It's not overtly either, but
executives at Current admit their biggest ongoing
challenge is to diversify the lineup.
Saskia
Wilson-Brown, director of outreach for the channel, is hard
at work traveling to film festivals, conventions, and
colleges to solicit new voices for the channel. She
says Current has had no trouble pulling creative
talent from the LGBT populace. "But we're also
trying to get the broadest spectrum possible,"
she says. "People on the right wouldn't
think this is a place to get to get involved, but that
couldn't be farther from the truth.
We're all about opening a dialogue here."
"We had
one pod about gay marriage that featured the opposing
viewpoints from a Christian," Wilson-Brown
adds. "He had thought-through arguments and
strongly held beliefs. It can be hard to hear, but it had
integrity and we aired it."
O'Brien
also is doing outreach for Current on a college tour,
speaking to students about how to participate in the
channel. "This is not a traditional TV
network," he says. "The creative team will
watch every single pod that gets uploaded, and
they'll give feedback, good and bad. I look at
Current as more of a communication tool than a singular TV
network."
If Gore
hasn't already brought the channel plenty of
attention via his recent accolades, a media avalanche
may still be on the way. In October, Current spent its
first marketing dollars to launch a nationwide campaign
to further promote awareness of the channel, complete with
advertising on other channels as well as in print and
at events. In addition, Hyatt assures us that the
channel will soon be rated by Nielsen; that would
definitely make public the network's actual
viewership levels.
Whatever those
initial numbers turn out to be, Reichen Lehmkuhl says the
network has already proved it has legs. Current recruited
the gay rights activist and Amazing Race winner
to talk about his experience coming out while in the
Air Force. Between online and on-air content, Current
covers "a lot of issues that people in the LGBT
community care about, maybe more than in other
communities," he says. "Maybe the format
is still too different and new, but I think
they're going to be around for the long haul."