Robin Sloan is the Online Studio Futurist at Current TV, the network created by, with and for its audience. Although his position sounds made up, Sloan is responsible for plotting new products on Current’s different platforms. Before Current he worked at the Poynter Institute, where he spent two years “wishing something like Current existed.”

Amanda Michel caught up with Sloan to find out how the young station stays fresh with viewer created content and how the increase in popularity of online video has affected Current.
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How many people work at Current and how many regular contributors do you have? What about total contributors?

We have a little under 300 people in three offices: San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

We haven’t made total contributor numbers public yet, but the statistic I find most interesting is a subset of that: the number of repeat video uploaders.

Remember, when we ask for viewer created content (VC2 — I will use that acronym a lot in this interview), we’re essentially asking for mini-documentaries, often quite polished. So if somebody is uploading more than one, that translates into a lot of work and a lot of investment in what we’re doing.

Our corps of repeat video uploaders is about 500 strong — not bad when you consider that while YouTube gets videos of cats jumping, we get this. (Warning: saddest video ever.)

Who are Current’s producers; People who worked in media professionally or citizen media members with all the right skills?

Well, it should be ‘and,’ not ‘or’ — we definitely have both.

That said, people with pre-existing video skills have really come out of the woodwork for this. Turns out there are lots of people who learned video in school, or who work with video at an ad agency or even another TV network, who are looking for a serious creative outlet.

But we’re conscious of the need to expand the pool of people who can make video. So even before the channel launched, we put together some of the most in-depth video training resources anywhere — totally free and open to all.

Our notion is that even if you don’t have “all the right skills” already, we can help you develop them.

How would you describe Current’s contributors? Who are they? What skills and interests do they have? Does your contributor base change over time?

They are young — in their 20s and 30s — and savvy — as I said, almost everyone has some experience with video.

But the contributor base has definitely broadened as we’ve introduced new ways to contribute. You can submit mobile phone video now, for instance. So, this 16-year-old named Ian Magruder — definitely not a polished producer — basically spent his entire summer vacation making mobile videos and getting them aired on Current.

Another angle is our Viewer-Created Ad Message (V-CAM) program. It’s easy to assume everybody wants to make, you know, serious little mini-documentaries. Not so. The V-CAM program brought in a whole new wave of contributors — students in advertising school and producers with sensibilities that lend themselves to short, clever commercials. Here’s an example.

How has the increased popularity of video affected Current? Do more people contribute to Current?

Well, Current was ahead of the curve on Internet video, so really it just means now there’s more competition for both viewers and producers. A lot more competition.

That said, Current is really looking for a different breed of contributor than other sites. Most of them are about exactly what Current isn’t: music videos, titillation, geysers of Coke and Mentos. Our standards are higher. So in many ways the rise of YouTube and its ilk is complementary, not competitive, to what we’re doing.

I mean, bottom line, the more people producing video and strengthening that set of skills the better.

What do community members contribute to Current? Anything else other than video?

Yeah, definitely. For starters, they vote for, or ‘greenlight,’ the uploads they like for TV. Every week we take the top-greenlighted video on the site and put it on air. So that’s a kind of direct, concrete contribution.

They also contribute feedback on uploads, which can also make a pretty substantial difference: VC2 producers often upload new versions in reaction to what they hear on the site. Check out the comments on this pod (which will be on air soon) for an example.

Current weds two production processes, the bottom-up contribution process and the top-down editorial process. Would you describe how this works at Current? How do you make decisions? What goes into making a decision?

Yes, we definitely see the value in both processes. We never use the bottom-up process as an excuse for less-than-compelling content, though; it’s our challenge to harness it in a way that produces TV programming as good, or better than, what we make ourselves.

So we make decisions in a spirit of collaboration, taking cues from the greenlights on the site, but acknowledging that the responsibility for a good, informative product is ultimately ours. What that often means, practically speaking, is that our amazing VC2 team will work with a producer to polish a piece before it goes on air. A lot of what you see on TV is literally a mix of organic uploads and professional polish.

Who or what departments at Current interface directly with community members? How do they approach ‘maintaining community’?

The primary point of contact is our community team, led by Amanda Zweerink. They are on the front lines, answering questions on the site and synthesizing feedback for the rest of the company. Amanda also coordinates our blogging, and she’s done a great job getting lots of voices from within the company out there on the blog.

Just this week, we’ve got posts from producers, from hosts, from super-writer-blogger-producer Chapin Young in LA, from Vanguard Journalist Mariana Van Zeller.

After a community member has actually gotten something on TV, their point of contact is someone on our VC2 team. And then it becomes a real production relationship. That team is on the phone all day, helping people get their stuff set for TV.

So I think maintaining community comes down to this: constant communication, from real people with real responsibilities in the organization, in their own voices.

Is Current’s website the platform for most of your community engagement – could we call it a homebase? Or is there a lot of back-and-forth between Current staffers and contributors over e-mail, by phone, instant messenger, etc.?

The website is the starting point, for sure: It’s where people learn about what we’re up to and what we’re looking for. It’s where people make “first contact” — they post a comment, or they upload something.

But once a piece is chosen for air, its creator does tend to migrate into a more intimate process: the production back-and-forth that takes place via phone, IM, and email. TV is different than the web, with different standards and different requirements (as our spirited legal team will be quick to tell you); our VC2 team is absolutely great at helping VC2 producers navigate that difference. There’s no algorithm for that.

Frankly, I think it’s pretty cool for VC2 producers to get drawn into the guts of the process like that. It’s easy for a website to feel entirely remote and weightless; when you get a phone call from Josh Soskin you know something real is happening.

Bottom line: From day one we’ve thought of our site simply as an extension of our production process, so we use all the same tools with community members that we use with our colleagues.

What role does money play in your relationships with your community? Is it ever an issue that you pay your in-house producers while contributors work for free?

We actually do pay our contributors! One of our core principles is that if we’re going to ask people to produced polished pieces, we ought to pay them for it. VC2 producers get $500 for their first piece on-air and up to $1000 if they air more pieces. Producers who make V-CAMs can earn $1000, and up to $50,000 if the advertiser decides to use their ad outside the network.

We really believe we need to compensate people for their contributions, for reasons both practical (if we don’t, people will go elsewhere) and idealistic. It’s just the right thing to do.