Diane Moca: Welcome to our Creator Economy Entrepreneur Learning Series. Today, we're talking about why local content is important. I'm Diane Moca, reporter at Talk Lab in Aurora, Illinois, and I'm with our CEO, Jimi Allen, who created a media platform to give a voice to the community. Now, Jimi, what was the moral imperative that inspired you to create Talk Lab? Jimi Allen: So I've been saying moral imperative for a while and I had to look it up again to see, to remind myself what I mean by it so other people understand that, but it's basically something that just has to be done. It's something that's important, the right thing to do. And when we look at what happened at the beginning of the demise of newspapers and local newspapers and communities, we just lost a sense of each other. We literally lost an idea of what we were doing, what people were doing, who was coming and going. The babies, the obituaries, all that's gone. We lost a collective voice, we lost a voice of people standing up to issues, standing up to things that were right, that needed to be done in the community. And the newspaper at that time was really a lot like traffic signals, if you will. They're there to keep everybody safe. There's a green, there's yield, there's a stop, but all of that was known by the whole community. And when you live and work together like that, then you have every possibility of being on the same page and communicating well and all those things. And I think probably the biggest problem that we have right now in culture today is, certainly, we have generational knowledge gaps. Where there's a young generation doing things that the older generation doesn't know what's going on. The older generation doesn't even know what kind of communications younger people are using. I mean, TikTok's owned by a Chinese company and kids are sharing data and walking around with their phones. All of this is happening and all of that came out of the vacuum of losing local journalism. And it's not just technology that makes this an issue. It's not like we went away from sheets of newspaper and got to a digital platform. It's also the integrity of journalism. It's the ethics of journalism. It's the idea that young people think that news is entirely subjective. And that's crazy. That's a crazy, crazy proposition, but it was coming. It was inevitable. And right now, that's why I believe it's a moral imperative that the older generation that are still in control take a really, really considerate look at how important it's to stand up some of these community access points and give people a democratic voice back. Diane Moca: Bring back local news. And it helps the local economy, right? How can Talk Lab help a local economy by delivering local community news? Jimi Allen: Well, I think, in the spectrum, right? So there's a continuum to it. So there's the youngest person in the community right now that is going to learn to be in the production of things online or part of the knowledge economy. So how old is that person? Maybe six years old or not even really born yet. If we got started today and really started as a community, if we had the city of Aurora, the council members, and very powerful people in the community, and then the creatives and the people that are working on ... We all got together, it would take a year, year and a half, to get something solid to go. But a young person could get into that knowledge economy by ... My kids are creating things online right now, playing Minecraft, wanting to do YouTube channels themselves. We went to the United Center to see one of my daughter's favorite groups that 30,000 kids were sitting in the United Center watching a YouTube group. So it's happening. They're on board. We need to prepare to give them a place to build their new city. And that isn't just a smart city concept, that is a moral imperative. That we have to prepare that and how that's going to grow the local economy is that they're going to be the workforce that's going to make, not just the news happen, but everything online. I mean, so many young people are working in the digital economy now, and again, maybe not super visible to everybody, but there is a large portion of the population as it relates to work that are doing that. And not without irony, I went through Wendy's last night and the lobby was closed. And the reason it was closed is because they can't find enough workers. Diane Moca: Still. Jimi Allen: They can't find enough workers still. But in the digital economy, there's a need for workers and it's being supplied because the globe can fill some of those. So the Philippines can fill some of those. Outside countries can fill some of those. But you can't be in a Wendy's if you're in the Philippines, so that's a little bit of macro on that. But really where it then comes down into some of more of the basic things is businesses need to get the word out. They need to communicate what they do. Not-for-profits need to communicate what they do. And so the way that the new streaming news could really become a part of the economy is that eventually that becomes your digital economy locally. So our news channel has an applied, and when that app is downloaded by somebody, and we have a reason to continue to invest in it, we'll be able to add all kinds of services to that app that the community can use. They could pay their bills online. They could find out things that are happening locally. They could communicate back and forth. I mean, you could put a sort of a Snapchat function into that app where people are communicating just locally within it. So there's so many ways to monetize the internet and this is just the very ... Literally it's like day one, because we're just entering into this reality that the internet isn't just a place to park signs. It's a place to be active and engaged because streaming now is up to par. Diane Moca: And create that dialogue that we've talked about. And how do you think that kind of dialogue through Talk Lab can help contribute to solving community problems? Because every community faces them. Right here in Aurora, they face a lot of them. Jimi Allen: Well, it goes to the idea of learning. So the biggest issue is that ... There's a guy named Edward DeBono that was a thought leader in how people work through a problem, a creative problem. And one of his stories was, if you have a person tied up with a rope around him in a chair, and you put a violin next to that person, you look at that situation and you might think, gosh, we got to get that guy untied so that he can get to the violin. The problem is, is even after he's untied, he doesn't know how to play the violin. So we have a platform and we are in a moment in the time that we're in is, everything's available to everybody. You can produce your own show. You can have your own channels. I mean, I just talked to a group today that has fintech.tv, fantastic vertical. There's freightwave.tv, that's in the logistics industry. So it's coming. It's coming fast and there's going to be a lot of groups or streaming channels that are going to evolve. The problem is, locally, how are people going to learn to use production and strategy, online media buying, and all the things that go into it to their advantage? And that's why it's important for me to continue to lobby people in power here in the local area to say, these are things that we should be absolutely investigating. Not just investigating, exercising, because we're here exercising it right now. We're ready to go. And the question becomes, who are those thought partners that want to come alongside us and say, let's really get down to how we can affect our local community to learn the power of what is ultimately going to be the future industry for most people. For Americans, it's going to be a lot of designing ideas forward. And the internet is a great place to do that, demonstrate it, communicate about it, share it. X, Y, all the underlying issues with that. Diane Moca: And a lot of people think the way to access that is through social media. They can put their message out there, but the problem is, the gatekeeper. I know friends who have businesses that got their Facebook page shut down and they lost a ton of money. They could see no apparent reason why it was shut down and they had a fight for months to get it back. So how is Talk Lab different, that doesn't have that gatekeeper? Jimi Allen: Well, that's the story we just told with Edward DeBono. Everybody's looking at the guy tied up in the chair. I mean, the problem isn't what we need to focus on. It's the opportunity. How to learn to play the violin. So if you want to play the violin and be in the A chair and to be the violinist, you have to really get good at what you're doing online. What your digital presence is and what your digital strategy is and how you're going to monetize all of that as it relates to whatever business passion you have. And you have to learn to do that. That's not something you just pick up one of the tools. You don't just pick up a camera or pick up a switch gear or lighting or online media buying. You don't just pick those things up. You have to learn them. And what we're here to do, what Talk Lab is really here to do, the idea of Talk Lab, was that we could get into a room together and workshop and train people. Allow them to learn the production that isn't even the same production that was going on 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Diane Moca: How's it different? Jimi Allen: It's very different now because we're not broadcasting. There are just a few places where you can broadcast the signal. And certainly public access was really set up that way. Years ago in American cities there would've been public access channels, but today it's public access streaming. And that's really what Talking Cities and Talk Lab are geared for. We're hoping and we're praying that we get a connection to be the public access in the community. Because if we can be public access, we solve all the problems instantaneously. We get to the training so anybody in the community can come in and use the systems to publish a story that they want or a series of stories in the news. But it also, it doesn't have to be built. It's ready to go. They can walk in, they can train, most of our personnel is involved in all of the things that we do every day and is ready to really just engage with the community to develop that. But it's a brand new thing. It's literally, we've been up for now almost a year, and it's been a very challenging year to learn so many things that needed to integrate to get this system up and running the way it is. Diane Moca: So you talk about that we're early in this evolution, but what about far in the future? Is there a vision that you have? What is that vision 10 years down the road? Jimi Allen: 10 years from now, I said this today, we are in the stages of people standing up the first streaming channels. The very first streaming channels. 10 years, 30 years from now, there'll be millions, maybe billions of channels. Billion sounds like a lot, but there'll be a lot of channels. Everyone will want to bring the cannon of whatever interests them into some vertical and be in what would've been considered a chat room back in the day. Now you're going to go to wherever is your interest level. And you're doing that on YouTube already, but again, YouTube isn't community focused. It's a much bigger operation. It's a search engine for videos. Diane Moca: And there's a lot of rules. Jimi Allen: Yeah. There's a lot of rules, there's pros and cons both ways, but the future is going to be corporations, individuals, communities, setting up broadcast spaces. Broadcast over streaming to get to the rest of their audience globally. And you're just going to have a much more active internet. Diane Moca: Oh, wow. I'm excited for that future. Jimi Allen: Yeah, yeah. Diane Moca: And as always, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Jimi, and we are so glad you are educating yourself about our evolving media landscape in this edition of the Creator Economy Entrepreneur Learning Series. For Talking Cities, I'm Diane Moca.