What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [68]
Stern’s relationship with his audience is what set him apart. He created a collaborative product—not just because he took phone calls from listeners but because those listeners made their own entertainment, which they generously gave to the show: phony phone calls, brilliant song parodies, theme songs for hapless producer Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate, games, even movies. They gave him their creativity and loyalty. He gave them airtime and attention. This was their mutual gift economy.
Stern decided long ago that he would not push a self-serving charity as rival Don Imus had or sell tacky schwag like the Rush Limbaugh Excellence in Broadcasting mouse pad. I wouldn’t mind buying a Stern hat or jacket—I’d wear my taste proudly—but Stern won’t sell them to me. He refuses to cash in on our relationship. He knows that his value rests with his fans. Stern took a gamble on that relationship in 2006 when he moved from broadcast—chased off by the Federal Communications Commission’s harassment—to Sirius Satellite Radio. He received a reported $500 million for the move—motive enough, of course—but there was no way to be sure that the millions of fans needed to make him worth his price would follow. They did. At Sirius, Stern has handed over control to his audience; when they told him to change programming on his two 24-hour satellite channels, he obeyed.
I use Stern as a case study in Googlethink to demonstrate that you don’t need to be Google—or be on the internet or rely on technology or even be inspired by Google—to think in these new and open ways. Stern broke the control system and rules that the entertainment business holds dear and built his empire on his relationships. It’s still about relationships. The internet just makes it easier to break rules and break in. Anybody who’s any good can aspire to be a monarch of any or many media. They may not be as big as Stern, Jon Stewart, or Steven Spielberg. But in a post-blockbuster, small-is-the-new-big economy, they don’t have to be.
Now fast-forward to 2005, when geek-show host Kevin Rose left TechTV after his network merged with G4, a game channel. Instead of getting another job at another network, Rose started his own networks, because he could. First he created Digg, a collaborative news service where users suggest stories and then vote on them to create the community’s front page. It attracts more than 25 million users a month. The service was revolutionary, giving the public—rather than editors—the power to make news judgments. Of course, the public always had made its own judgments; Rose just recognized that and enabled them to do it together.
Then Rose started his video network, Revision3, and the first show on it, Diggnation, in which he and his former TechTV colleague Alex Albrecht sit on a grungy couch with a different beer in hand each week talking about some of Digg’s favorite stories for more than 30 minutes straight. If one of them has to do what one must do after drinking beer, they don’t stop the tape; Alex just gets up and goes to the bathroom. The show could not be more casual and less like TV, but that is precisely its authority. My son, Jake, is a fan—he introduced me to it—and I tried to repay the favor by sharing professional podcasts about technology from NPR and the BBC. As soon as I played them, I realized they didn’t hold the same authority as Digg because they were too packaged and plastic.
Diggnation draws an audience of 250,000 each week (a nighttime cable news show on