Repurposement

This is a story about Mark Cuban, which is why I needed to invent a new word for the title. For our purposes, he is not the Mavericks owner or the blog prince, but founder of HDNet and a digital cinema entrepreneur. And now, he is an investment journalist (another new term), bringing the forces of HDNet and his considerable fortune to bear on a new website that will produce multimedia investigative content about corporate malfeasance.

Why this investment? Does Cuban harbor a longstanding political conviction that he's finally at liberty to pursue? Maybe, but he didn't mention it on paidcontent.org, which first reported the story.

What he did say is really interesting food for content creation thought. People have tried to make money by repurposing content for a very long time, but no one has ever conceived of repurposing content like this. Cuban plans to use the inside information gathered in his documentaries to buy and sell stock. And why not? He invests the resources to track down the information, and feels it's entirely appropriate to use it himself (he bought it) before bestowing it on his waiting audiences.

To be fair — and journalistic — Cuban is the investor, not the editor. The editor of sharesleuth.com, veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Chris Carey, cites a more traditionally journalistic motivation for the site. That he finds himself able to fund his venture through an accident of mutual benefit with Mark Cuban is one of those places to be in life if you want to get something done.

The idea used to be that the airwaves existed to serve the public trust and that through performing that valuable service, they became a coveted environment for advertisers — that separation of church and state journalists cite (which one is the money side?). Whether those demarcations were actually true and pure or not, this was the driving idea that shaped many a career. Your purpose was to serve and to amass a trusting and captive audience and then to stand aside for a few minutes of each hour while the advertisers took the floor and paid the bills. As a broadcaster, you invested to be more competitive and more attractive to readers/advertisers. You spent as much (or as little) as it took to make irresistible content.

Repurposing was supposed to help change that equation by attributing resale value to the content assets you accumulated in your quest to attract readers and advertisers. But what if those assets represented a more entrepreneurial investment? What if content was created in the process of pursing some other agenda (gathering inside information on corporations that gave you a leg up on the stock market, for example)? How interesting, if the purpose of building content became wholly self serving, and its value to audiences was a secondary spinoff — a repurposing, if you will.