Joe Hagan in the NY Observer has the skinny on Big Weird Al's Gore-TV in Hand-Picked Gore Producer Plans Network: ‘TV Should Be Gray, Not Black and White’:
It’s easy to see why Al Gore latched onto Steve Rosenbaum, the 42-year-old president of documentary production company Camera Planet, for the TV network he’s developing. When Mr. Rosenbaum starts talking, he sounds like the sort of Starbucks-powered pitch man you found shilling "killer apps" in Silicon Valley five years ago.This guy and Big Weird Al are made for each other! As they say around here, neither of them needs to buy fertilizer.
"Imagine you were on the earth when the pencil was invented," said Mr. Rosenbaum on a recent evening. "And imagine the world pre-pencil and post-pencil. Digital video is a pencil. People always say it’s like a Xerox machine—not even close. It’s a fundamental creative tool that didn’t exist a few years ago and that exists today. It’s a big fucking deal."
If Mr. Rosenbaum’s spiel on the power of handheld cameras had a late-period dot-com flavor to it, he was speaking Mr. Gore’s language; it was just the sort of thing to win over the technophile former Vice President. Mr. Rosenbaum is now a consultant to the incipient network that Mr. Gore is building with the entrepreneur and Democratic fund-raiser Joel Hyatt. Mr. Rosenbaum’s vision is this: He believes regular people wielding digital cameras—the kind you pick up at Circuit City for $1,000—can supply great utopian television that does things like build community, foster dialogue and upend old-school media—a People’s Republic of Tubedom, in which the video viewpoints of average schlubs, packaged by producers, can tear down the battlement walls of television, topple the statue of, oh, say Fox News chief Roger Ailes and sing a Whitmanian Video Song of Themselves.
Mr. Rosenbaum calls it an "open-source framework."
I almost hate to tell them that someone already had this idea.
