YakShaving

Last night I participated in a brainstorming session at Hacks & Hackers Seattle. I am extremely interested in the future of journalism and content creation/production. A huge reason is that my startup, BetterAt is focused on leveraging forms of content production to disrupt the adjacent and currently sleeping education industry.

I had a great time and learned a lot from hacks (that’s the actual slang term for a journalist, I was told) what types of things they were interested in from technologists. It was a great networking event because it wasn’t just sitting around and shooting the breeze, but we actually spent time brainstorming and defining what we thought the next phase of innovation would be in web video that could help tell stories and enlighten consumers.

Interestingly enough, the elephant in the room that there wasn’t much talk about is monetization. I was shocked that many people just weren’t as interested in figuring out a better monetization model for content other than residual forms of advertising. To me, it seems like in order for this industry to continue existing at the current level, there needs to be focus on curation, saving people time, and providing unique points of view, and getting people to pay for it will naturally follow.

Each team at #hhsea had a different “topic” to choose from — Our team focused on how using HTML5 video could improve journalism. The “winning idea” from our group was a “Ctrl+F” for video. To be certain, it’s not that video search doesn’t exist. There are great companies who are digitizing and annotating the actual “substance” of the videos to make them searchable. What we suggested is that the actual video itself be the atomic unit of production, not the article — And as easy as it is to search through an article by hitting “Ctrl+F”, one should be able to search through the video, “address it” directly so that even a tiny snippet can have a handle. Kind of like what the NYTimes Emphasis tool does, but for video.

If you’re in Seattle and want to get connected to Hacks & Hackers, check out the page here.