Current announced it will eliminate 80 jobs while shifting away from its trademark short-form video packages and "towards proven 30-60 minute formats" from more outside sources. This would mean less video production in Current's Bay Area home base, as reported previously by former Valleywagger Jackson West at NBC Bay Area.

Which means everything is totally awesome and on track, according to a Current press release:

This re-organization was not the result of a need to cut costs. Current Media will have its most profitable year. This financial stability will allow the company to re-allocate resources in order to put further emphasis on areas of the business believed to best position Current Media for continued long-term growth.

Financial stability leads to sad job layoffs glorious resource re-allocation, gotcha. More good news: Current journalists no longer have to travel all the way to North Korea to hear propagandist doublespeak!

UPDATE: Current COO Joanna Drake Earl said in an interview that the layoffs hit San Francisco and Los Angeles offices the hardest; and while the firings were not "driven by a need to cut costs," they will indeed result in a net reduction of costs.

She added that "It's always a very sad day to eliminate positions" but that the layoffs were "about being a good media company listening to our consumers... any media company in the business of show production is... watching the dial" in terms of results and adjusting as necessary.Indeed, it sometimes seems like Current is becoming more like the traditional media companies it was intended to serve as counterprogramming against, what with the outsourcing of production, devotion to "consumer" feedback (like ratings!) and layoff rounds.

But Earl said the company remains "very committed" to audience contributions, albeit in "different ways" than through collecting short-form videos, a format now dominated by YouTube and "somewhat confusing" to viewers anyway, according to Earl. Not all short shows have been eliminated; some, like Vanguard Journalism, have actually been lengthened.

So maybe Current TV can grow with its hippie, San Francisco soul intact. That's going to mean acting more like ruthless capitalist media barons. But it's probably the best hope for the remaining employees at the all-too-baffling (and all too obscure) cable network.

(Pic: Gore at a Current TV event last year. By Simone Brunozzi.)

Current is mulling layoffs at its San Francisco home base, a source tells former Valleywag contributor Jackson West at NBC Bay Area. The cuts would, in part, eliminate San Francisco-based video production jobs and either outsource them or relocate them to Los Angeles, where some San Francisco jobs also ended up following November layoffs of 60 Current staffers. Current hasn't aired as much cheap user-generated content as it first planned; instead that content, such as it is, has tended to flow to sites like YouTube. No one, Clinton included, has figured out how to save the network from that expensive conundrum.

(Pic: Steve Rhodes)

Not surprisingly, the ladies are using employer Current TV to channel their ordeal into an explanatory narrative. While the duo do address the importance of their initial story, call out their guide for being a total turncoat and express their deepest hopes their case didn't endanger any border-dwelling activists, the most captivating interesting part, obviously, is their recollection of the capture. From Current's website:

When we set out, we had no intention of leaving China, but when our guide beckoned for us to follow him beyond the middle of the river, we did, eventually arriving at the riverbank on the North Korean side....

Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling. We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran.

We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us. Producer Mitch Koss and our guide were both able to outrun the border guards. We were not. We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the determined soldiers. They violently dragged us back across the ice to North Korea and marched us to a nearby army base, where we were detained.

Those of you who are looking for details on their "rigorous" interrogation, sorry, the ladies aren't giving that up so easily. That's why God invented book deals.

The full story has never been told. Current TV and its staff kept a vigilant silence in the interest of protecting Ling and Lee's safety, and the press avoided aggressive coverage over the same concerns.

But some issues have bubbled to the surface. A Los Angeles-area blogger named Babamoto has taken two in-depth looks at Mitchell Koss, the Current TV producer and cameraman who managed to flee back to China at the border crossing where Ling and Lee were captured.

Koss, Babamo writes on Epicanthus.net, shephered the journalism careers of emotive CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and of View co-host Lisa Ling from their early 20s. Lisa Ling's sister Laura and fellow reporter Euna Lee would have fit neatly into Koss' stable of "young, attractive and aggressive... 'revolutionary punks.'"

But Babamo implies their aggression and risk-taking in North Korea might have been unnecessary:

Along with the obligatory gunfire, bomb blasts, drug labs and poisonous reptiles, there are homages to poverty, squalor, hunger and human suffering...Many times, Koss seems to put [reporters] in harm's way just for the heck of it on stories that had been covered before by others.

Ling and Lee's prior work certainly contained its share of fireworks. And the North Korean refugee story had been done before — by BBC, Frontline, CNN's Christiane Amanpour and National Geographic, among others, according to Babamoto. Current's Korean derring-do came as the troubled TV network was trying, against Wall Street sentiment, to mount an IPO (it was canceled shortly after Ling and Lee's capture).

Like others at Current TV, Koss has until now remained silent on the incident. Now that his reporters are free, he could shed light on the purpose of their reporting, as well as answer questions about where they were, exactly, when they were caught, and how he thinks it came to pass.

According to research by the Korea-focused website ROK Drop and its commenters, there are seven bridges between North Korea and China where the reporters might have been captured, assuming they were in fact nabbed on the Tumen River

It's not clear why they would have been on such a bridge; speculation has centered on whether the translator they'd hired in China was in cahoots with the North Koreans and misled the reporters about their location or whether they were shooting footage on what they presumed to be the Chinese side of the bridge when North Korea soldiers rushed them. One ROK Drop commenter even noted it's possible to bribe one's way across the border, but since cameras usually aren't allowed it's not clear why two journalists and a cameraman/producer would attempt this.

Only Current TV knows what's happened. Now that its journalists are, thankfully, safe, it can tell what it knows — or let others go digging for it.

(Pics via Epicanthus.net and ROK Drop)

It's a heartening bit of good journalism news.

(Photos: AP)

Calling it a "grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing," the Central Court of North Korea convicted and sentenced the two reporters in a trial that began last Thursday. The U.S. State Department said that outside observers were not allowed to witness the trial's proceedings.

Friends and family of Ling and Lee insist that their border crossing was accidental and have been publicly pleading with the North Koreans for mercy in recent days. Reports CNN:

"When the girls left the United States, they never intended to cross into North Korean soil. And if they did at any point, we apologize," Lisa Ling, Laura Ling's sister, said on "Anderson Cooper 360" on Wednesday.

"And we know that they are very, very sorry. And we ask that you show mercy today," added Lisa Ling, a special correspondent for CNN.

Despite the limited communication, the families say they've heard enough to know the women are "terrified" and "extremely scared."

Current TV employees, including company Chairman Al Gore, had been ordered by their legal team to remain quiet about the situation with Ling and Lee, a stance that they held fast to both individually and as a company, despite some public outcry.

Obviously, this whole thing is a situation fraught with horrendous peril, not only for Ling and Lee, but for the United States in general. One can't escape the feeling that the convictions of Ling and Lee are less about North Korean law and more just another example of provocation by a renegade country led by a mad man. What Kim Jong Il and North Korea hope to gain by this situation is anyone's guess, but one can only imagine what sort of horrors take place inside a North Korean labor camp, and we certainly feel that it's time for the former two-term vice president of the United States to break his silence and start throwing his weight around to crack some serious skulls if he has to in order to get Ling and Lee freed. The Current TV strategy of silence has not worked up to this point and will only continue to reflect poorly on them and Gore going forward.

In the meantime, our thoughts are with Laura Ling and Euna Lee and their traumatized families.

Reporters Get 12-Year Terms in N. Korea [CNN]
Pic via Getty

Hi Paul,

The company statement is below. For what it's worth, I'd be very appreciative if you used the entire statement:

"Current Media today announced changes to its structure and staffing. Approximately 60 positions have been eliminated in the company’s three U.S. offices and approximately 30 new positions created. Many of those whose positions were eliminated have been placed in the new positions. Current will have approximately 410 employees (after these staffing adjustments). These changes result from the development of a new, innovative programming strategy built around eight cross-platform channels, including news, comedy, music and technology, slated to premiere in the first quarter of 2009. Current’s new programming strategy expands upon its pioneering use of viewer created content to include additional opportunities for participation, creating a far more viewer-influenced network, and further unifies the Company’s online and TV platforms by having each web channel paired with a companion TV show. In addition, these changes enable Current Media to reduce its cost structure, thereby assuring that it will be comfortably profitable in 2009 regardless the depth and length of the recession."

Current and Twitter's debate stream was interesting, but not new. Mashable and VentureBeat covered the launch of Sanchez's show three weeks ago, noting that CNN's arrival had forced Twitter's management to exempt Sanchez, like Robert Scoble, from their usual limit on the number of feeds one user could follow.

If you thought Current's lazy stream of debate tweets was hot, watch the above compilation of the always-slighty-overexuberant Sanchez: "My Twitterboard's about to explode." (Video by 23/6)

YouTube was a breeze. Though they insist you should "not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts, or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself," they also explain the "fair use" exception to this rule, in detail. They do, however, leave budding filmmakers with this warning, "if the copyright owner disagrees with your interpretation of fair use, the copyright owner may choose to resolve the dispute in court". YouTube knows a thing or two about being dragged into court. But being a sport, they allowed my upload to go live.

Current.com was also a big fan of existing legal doctrine. They let me post both the video itself and a link to the YouTube video. Both show up in the first page of results when you search for "Indiana Jones". I have to remember to send Al Gore a "thank you" note.

MSN Video was not quite as kind. MSN Video would not publish the film (which includes 80 seconds of the "Indiana Jones" theme song). My guess is that they matched the audio track to a library of copyrighted material, since just five days prior someone had no problem adding "Watch Indiana Jones 4 Movie" to the site (a silent film that displays a link to a Myvix rip of the film). And there's the rub.

When automated filtering systems are created in response to the threat of copyright lawsuits the result is that good, honest people get trampled underfoot while the actual pirates simply work around the barrier. You can still find an Indiana Jones rip using MSN Video, but you cannot find my brilliant treatise on tempo as it relates to the work of John Williams. Blame Yoko Ono: Most upload sites do not have the resources to change filtering technology each time a new copyright ruling comes out. Once a draconian filtering system is put in place to please copyright owners, it will take more than imagination to get creators' "fair use" rights back.

Overheard by a reader: Outside the unfinished 170 Off Third luxury condos across from AT&T Park and next to Current TV, where construction crews have menaced the sidewalks on both sides of the block for months and traffic is now backed up for blocks.

Webster #1: Oh great, they're blocking the whole street this time.
Webster #2: Hey, it's better than when they put heavy machinery in the very fucking walkway they told us to use. Or when they swung beams and blocks over the pedestrians in the walkway they built. Or when the truck driver almost smacked me in the face opening his door into said walkway. Or when the guy dropped a hammer through the roof and almost hit that chick.
#1: Our VP of Community got splashed with wet concrete.
#2: Why am I not surprised. These guys wouldn't know safety if it fell on their heads.