The Current News was one of the biggest projects I worked on as a Producer/Director for Current TV. I spent eight months creating, developing, and piloting the world's first cross-platform, open-sourced, user-generated newscast. Every hour, the most popular news stories on current.com would be packaged as a 2-minute on-air module, hosted by a text to voice robot named Vicky. This was produced every hour in both the US and the UK - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I was integral in the hiring and training of producers in the UK while coordinating and communicating with the US team to make sure this one million dollar a year product launched successfully for the channel.
Results: Current News was tremendously popular on curent.com, boosting participation by creating a fresh, new homepage always up to date on the latest news stories. It also opened up the network to innovative ways to connect the Internet with broadcast television
The Situation
In 2007, Current SVP Jason Meil assembled a small team of Erik Nordby, Phil Stuart, and myself to make a news program that was unlike any other. Here were the goals.
- make Current TV more current with lots of news break-ins
- encourage/showcase user particiaption oppurtunities
- highlight current.com
- be fast, informative, and compelling- look entirley new- be inexpensive
To us, the task seemed impossible but we knew it would be cool if we could pull it off so we called the project "Operation Flying Car" and got to work.
The Future
Current also had me building pilots for a longer 30 minute nightly news show. Here are rough sketches of those.
The Current News was an hourly news update that was broadcast in both the United Kingdom and United States 24/7 for Current TV.
NETWORK: Current TV
CREDITS:
Graphics: Micah Hahn
Manager: Erik Nordby
Producers: Thomas Eugene Green, Phil Stuart, and Kiyash Monsef