TV star Keith Olbermann will join Current.tv, the online and cable TV news media company co-founded by Al Gore, according to a report tonight by The New York Times.
Conservative critics are going to have a field day if the partnership is in fact a reality. The Times reports that Olbermann will take an equity stake in Current, likely the only way a man accustomed to contracts in the tens of millions of dollars range can be effectively compensated by a small, struggling media company. We’ve covered Current.tv’s many innovations for years here at ReadWriteWeb; Current’s Twitter annotation of the Presidential debates was incredible, for example. Launched more than 5 years ago, the company has got to be getting worried about turning tech smarts into money. Olbermann may or may not be able to help with that.
Current is best known for combining user generated content and advertising with professionally produced content. What’s Olberman’s history with that kind of content? He was a heavy contributor to liberal online blog and forum Daily Kos for years, writing 57 posts over the last 3 years. (He madea high-profile departure last Summer but then came back, with equal flourish, less than a week later.) Discussion of tonight’s report can be found on Daily Koss here.
Olbermann joined Twitter in April, 2010. He follows 361 people on Twitter, but the only Current TV team member on his list so far is Ellen Fox. (Keith, it’s @AlGore, all one word.) He may not be a digital native, nor entirely comfortable, but he’s no stranger to social media either.
No doubt it’s at least as much Olbermann the media industry professional that Current is interested in as it is Olbermann the on-camera figure. If Olberman was key in turning around MSNBC and used his huge voice there to shed light on a newscast’s worth of injustices – he’ll have all the more support for that at Current. It will certainly be in a different context, though.
