Commentary

Longer Is Better: 'Great Big Story' Expands

CNN’s separately operated Great Big Story for the last year has lived on showing artful videos that are decidedly un-CNNish. There’s no news, no blitzers and the wolves, if there are any, would be found in beautifully packaged feature pieces not shouting out the headlines.

And just around two minutes long.

It’s an app made for mobile devices, though often accessed via Facebook and YouTube. And as OTT has grown, Great Big Story fans have realized, those gorgeously photographed pieces look great on bigger screens. 

Those big screen viewers are part of the reason behind special longer pieces now in the pipeline, in series of videos that fall under the title “Really Great Big Story.” The second one, of a dozen planned in the next year, is called “Hard Ship.” It just debuted, and at 23 minutes or so, is far longer than the typical “Big Story.” It was produced by GBS and CNN Films.
"Hard Ship" tells the story of three severely paralyzed men, adventurers all, who met as on  “adaptive” surfing circuit and decided to enter a sailboat competition called Race to Alaska. It ought to have “grueling” in its official title because it’s always the adjective used to describe it. The race is 750 miles long, from Washington State, past the entire coast of British Columbia and ending in Ketchikan, Alaska, through frigid, lonely waters, so far from anything that help from the Coast Guard, we’re told, is at least a half day away.

They’re more than paraplegic, these three. Their bodies have been mangled by accidents. “It would be awesome if we were just paraplegic,” says the skipper of the three-man crew, Spike Cain, in a Liverpool accent. But they’re tough as nails and they’re in it to win it. “We’re not a novelty act,” Cain tells the camera. “We’re far from a novelty act.”

If “Hard Ship” was a typical reality show event, you’d know how it all ends. It’s enough to say things don’t go quite as envisioned, even by the Really Great Big Story producers. It’s a remarkable piece of work, especially given the usually sparse video quality of a lot of streaming content, and because “Hard Ship” avoids most of the cliches of adventure/reality  videos like these. (To give away a little bit of what doesn't happen, there’s no instance in which the crew faces gale force winds, killer whales, starvation or madness.)

Matt Drake, the director of content and development at Great Big Story, brags that GBS video project “doesn’t have to pander” to the conventions of the feature genre. There’s no formula, per se. “If it doesn’t resonate with interest within our own walls, we don’t think it will with our viewers,” he says. “We haven’t found any special recipe.”

GBS’s main distribution place is YouTube, but Drake says viewers via Roku and Apple TV apps constitute an important audience. According to one published report, GBS videos, fortified by some advertising supported content, received 65 million Facebook views in October alone. Drake says the average viewer is 25 to 35 with 27 as the sweet spot, and viewership is pretty much divided down the middle male/female.

The YouTube and Facebook comments for many GBS videos are ridiculously positive. Comments for “Hard Ship” are over the moon. Like this: “Awesome video! I admire your work, GBS! Putting out such content without a big subscriber base is really courageous and just plain awesome!”
Not surprisingly Drake says  “Reading those have become one of the most edifying things in my career. I look at them and think, ‘Oh, wow, we’re not all horrible people trolling out there.’ “

(The first of the Really Great Big Story videos, “The Last Steps” will get a wider audience on parent CNN on Dec. 8.It’s a video about the Dec. 7, 1972 launch of Apollo 17, crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt and the last time time man went to the moon. Surprising, given the excitement of Neil Armstrong’s first giant steps for mankind  how much those last footprints have been forgotten.)

pj@mediapost.com

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About the Author

P.J. Bednarski has written for MediaPost since 2012 on media and marketing topics. He can be reached at pj@mediapost.com