Geekbrief TV

Travel Channel Academy grad Cali Lewis on MSNBC

About a year ago, Cali Lewis and her husband Neil showed up for the Travel Channel Academy class in Washington, DC.

Like many of the folks who take the course, they had an idea to set up an online business driven by video.

They succeeded, and today, their site, Geekbrief.tv is one of the most successful and most profitable podcast sites in the web.

Cali and Neil are on the leading edge of an entirely new model for journalism – one that is totally web based, largely video-driven, and profitable.

These are the first green shoots of a new industry that are just starting to fight their way to the sunlight through the wreckage of newspapers, magazines (with the demise of Portfolio) and the soon to come collapse of local television news.

There is a healthy appetite for good quality content and information, but it is not going to be delivered in the old way.  The paper and presses of newspapers are strangling them, and the vastly bloated staffs of television networks are going to do the same to them.

The bottom line is content.

As Michael Eisner said, “Content is King”, and that has not changed.  The content of Geekbrief is directed at a very specific niche and the combination of Cali on air (or rather on laptop and soon phone) and the quality of the content has built a solid and loyal audience, just as the way readers of newspapers used to be loyal and depend up on them for the quality of the content. Nothing has changed but the hardware and the platform.

The demise of conventional media opens great opportunities for those who can embrace the new market and do it at a price point that allows profits. That would preclude things like the New York Times’ $850 million building. But for Cali and Neil (and more to follow), there’s a whole new world out there waiting to be tapped into.

Today we are in the third day of the Travel Channel Academy in Santa Barbara.  We’re teaching 40 hopefuls here just how to do this – as well as to provide content to The Travel Channel.  The unique opportunity to have a network like Travel Channel hand-hold and nurture you is pretty remarkable, not to mention pay you for your content.

No one is going to retire on the Travel Channel’s purchase of pieces (although a few grads have gotten full time contracts to travel the world and make pieces)… but the skill sets that you will acquire here are the first steps in breaking into the new world of online video.

It’s not TV. And it’s not newspapers. It is something new.

And very exciting.