Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard
How “teaching” will win in the new media landscape
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If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, the possibilities are actually endless. You’ll earn his loyalty and make a new friend. If you sell fishing equipment, he’ll more likely buy from you than your competitors. He’ll be grateful you took your time to spell out the basics and wonder what else you can teach him.
Media that “teaches” is getting serious play. Video bloggers and businesses are creating content that educates - driving views and building new audiences along the way. It’s time that journalists and news platforms integrate this kind of content in a major way if they’re going to remain relevant and competitive.
In 2012, when Buzzfeed was looking to ramp up the virility of their video, they hired Ze Frank, one of the earliest pioneers of web video to lead the charge.
Ze breaks content down by three social roles, or modes of sharing: emotional sharing, identity-based sharing, and informational sharing. They map the why of viral content.
These modes of sharing aren’t a modern marvel, a feature of the internet age, or a product of the New Media Landscape. “Informational sharing,” after all, is a spiritual sibling to news media and journalism. Storytellers have always harnessed the same basics to find an audience — an audience that in the modern age is abandoning traditional news outlets for “virologists” like Ze.
“The Elements of Journalism” by Kovach and Rosenstiel opens with a story about anthropologists. They noticed that nearly every early or indigenous culture develops a “news” environment that is strikingly similar, down to how messengers and storytellers are chosen by the tribe. Why?
The answer, historians and sociologists have concluded, is that news satisfies a basic human impulse. People have an intrinsic need — an instinct — to know what is occurring beyond their direct experience. Being aware of events we cannot see for ourselves engenders a sense of security, control, and confidence. One writer has called it “a hunger for awareness.”
Call it the Awareness Instinct.
— The Elements of Journalism by Kovach & Rosenstiel
Beyond being a kind of reassurance that there will always be money in the truth-telling business, the concept of an awareness instinct outlines perfectly why informational sharing is so powerful and viral. Satisfying that hunger for awareness is as complex and nuanced as real hunger — not just anything will do.
Raw materials have to be chosen and processed skillfully in order to be both nourishing and palatable.
In the trial-by-fire reshaping of the news business, journalists have sought desperately to define the role of the professional journalist in society. The best attempts at a definition come ultimately to “sense-making”: adding meaning to experience, connecting the dots, working the raw material into a narrative — satisfying that awareness instinct.
The trouble for journalists is that those needs are being fulfilled elsewhere.
There is an old cliché in news that says stories that are most vital to our security and society often don’t get any notice. Foreign policy, defense, political reform — those topics are esoteric and boring. The audience tunes out.
Well, not always…
John Green is a best-selling novelist and a quirky web-video personality. In the above video, he lays out the essentials of American healthcare costs, and explains why the mainstream conversation has failed the healthcare debate. It’s engaging, funny, and he cites sources. It was viewed by millions. Even medical news outlets lauded his ability to break the issues down in such an accessible way.
The RSA Animate series takes TED-style lectures (the op-ed column of the modern age) and turns them into living infographics. Education reform, market psychology, economics… millions of views.
When some of these videos clock in larger audiences than major nightly network newscasts (and consider the budget disparity), the old cliché rings false: it’s not that the audience doesn’t care. They’re just talking over the audience’s heads.
Clearly there is a demand for this type of media, and news organizations are perfectly poised to take advantage.
Perhaps the most telling example is Khan Academy, the great pioneer of innovative tech solutions in education. Though Khan Academy’s main focus is K-12 education, it has more recently begun adding explainers for more contemporary issues. Many of these are in finance, a topic otherwise especially difficult to navigate.
What John Green did for Healthcare, Khan does for the mortgage crisis, quantitive easing, Bitcoin, chinese currency and U.S. debt, the crisis in Greece… Khan has utilized his teaching skills to do the “impossible”: engage his audience with current affairs.
These creatives — Khan, John Green, the RSA — met a need where traditional journalistic organizations have failed .
Some traditional outlets have dipped their toes in the waters. But still, headlines like “8 Questions About XYZ You Were Too Embarrased To Ask” implies there’s something shameful going on — that the writer deigns to stop and clarify.
Then there’s one major media example in particular…
“These are the players at the table, the real serious players, everybody else is a clown: You have George Soros, Russia, China, and Islam…” — Glenn Beck
No matter what you think of Glenn Beck’s politics or programming, he is a consummate master of cultivating an audience. Even in his earliest days, and still today at the helm of his growing media company he used familiar tropes:
Eyeglasses, erasers, bow ties. The chalkboard.
During the show Glenn Beck, viewers felt as though they were in a classroom at the hands of a caring and attentive teacher. When he speaks about breaking news issues, he’ll spend the hour teaching the basic history, civics, and moving pieces in order to ensure that his message reaches through.
Beck engages the audience by asking them questions (‘What do YOU think’), encouraging them to do their own homework (‘Look it up!’/‘Look at history’!) and creates intrigue by insisting that you’ve been left in the dark by other sources (‘Is anyone reporting? Does anyone care?’).
Many call foul or say it’s manipulative, even sinister. Regardless, Beck’s honed in on one of the most important needs the news-consumer has.
Controversial? Definitely. But there’s a lesson to be learned here about the future of news.
Even if news organizations are slow to adapt to this kind of work, smart businesses are not.
An easy example: menswear is a corner of the retail world with growing opportunity, but particularly desperate for the engagement and loyalty of the consumer’s dollar (given the modern male’s shopping habits).
Small boutiques are using web video and blogging in order to edge their way into teaching-as-marketing. New chains have built entire web video channels telling consumers not only how to buy a suit, but how to wear it, how to dress the outfit up or down, and how you should build a wardrobe. The learning experience creates accessibility and a thirst for more.
And then they close the deal.
In the fashion media, GQ has always been a major trendsetter. But now the publication looks each month like a primer full of how-to’s and buying guides. Not only does this expand its market, but it appeals to potential partnerships with retailers and advertisers.
Fine men’s retail clothing isn’t unlike major policy issues: most people have cursory interest, but find the finer details out-of-reach.
Brands know this kind of media has power, which is leading to the proliferation of “sponsored content.” It’s another threat to the market territory of traditional journalism as more businesses build out media arms. While media generated by business interests isn’t inherently sinister, many news institutions that serve a vital watchdog function in our democracy have been propped up by income from commodity news.
“We are facing the possibility that independent news will be replaced by rumor and self-interested commercialism posing as news. If that occurs, we will lose the press as an independent institution, free to monitor the other powerful forces and institutions in society.” — The Elements of Journalism by Kovach & Rosenstiel.
Journalists wonder how they can stay relevant, and for the past half a decade, the hot word has been “curation,” which nearly approaches a solution. But “curation” implies simply collecting and reframing, like hanging paintings on a gallery wall.
There’s been push back against the concept of curation as the journalist’s new role, and rightfully so. In their gut, the modern storyteller knows there’s something more to be done than aggregating and collecting fragments.
Teaching material asks for more trust and claims more authority, which requires more boldness. Whether journalists will utilize educational content or not, the race is on:
Whoever assumes that role will seize attention and develop the audience and platform.
The audience wants to be taught. For the sake of the public interest, let’s hope journalists will step into the role. It may be their modern inheritance.
