You Discover A World Beyond Wikipedia

The Discovery "Cannon Challenge" for the iPhone

Your retirement portfolio just sank another $50,000, in one hour.  Time to take out your non-line-of-sight artillery and blast a target off a mountain top and figure out how credit default swaps work, which were supposed to guard against risks in mortgage markets, have wiped out so much of your wealth in the first place.

So, at first, it’s hard to figure out how you make exploring the pain of the credit derivative mess entertaining. But, if you look at how HowStuffWorks works, you get an idea of how Discovery Communications is trying to outdo Wikipedia, by bringing professional eyes and creativity to technical subjects of all types. The goal: Make information entertaining.

It’s an approach that has worked well on multichannel TV, with such fare as “Deadliest Catch,’’ about the dangers of fishing for King Crab, or “Destroyed in Seconds,’’ which shows just how many ways there are to execute mid-air collisions and other mayhem.

Discovery paid $250 million a year ago for HowStuffWorks and has been spending time (and money) since integrating video into what had been a text-based site explaining how to cut chili peppers or how to draw objects. Now, the HowStuffWorks home page looks like a Discovery channel lineup, with such fare as “5 Largest Diamond Heists,” “5 Heaviest Buildings Ever Moved" and “5 Ideas for Alternative Fuel That Never Made It Out of the Lab."

And it’s loaded with short clips on just about every page, from “The Ultimate Geeked-Out Home” on the home page to "How long would it take for your house to fall apart?" and “ Top 10 Wacky Inventions for the Home “ in the Home and Garden section.

This is how Discovery hopes to get ahead in the online game, after years of being behind. According to Josh Freeman, the executive vice president of its digital strategy, Discovery is taking what it does best – video on nonfiction subjects – and integrating it into all its sites and two of its acquired online ventures, HowStuffWorks and TreeHugger.com. (No video gallery yet on Petfinder.com)

The approach is to: 1. Focus on video; 2. Improve the experience at each site; 3. Home in on what users want; and, 4. Syndicate.

Prime example:  There are now 9 Discovery channels on YouTube. These include Discovery Channel (youtube.com/discoverychannel); TLC (youtube.com/tlc); Animal Planet (youtube.com/animalplanet); Planet Green (youtube.com/planetgreen); Discovery Health (youtube.com/discoveryhealth); Science Channel (youtube.com/sciencechannel); Military Channel (youtube.com/militarychannel); Investigation Discovery (youtube.com/discoveryid); and TURBO (youtube.com/turbochannel).

And this is where Discovery is taking its stab at adding professional review to the contributions of users who aren’t on its payroll. The kind of folks who contribute mightily to YouTube or Wikipedia.

Discovery is encouraging YouTube visitors to suggest new myths to bust, whose telling may end up on its “Mythbusters” series, examined by professional reporters and producers. So far, it’s pulled in more than 4,000 suggestions and about 400 videos. None has yet made air, but it’s coming.

At some point, don’t be surprised if Discovery one-ups Al Gore, whose Current TV venture first tapped into the idea that viewers could be content creators, not just content watchers.

A YouDiscover channel on YouTube is not out of the question, Freeman says, as Discovery learns how to review, fact-check and present user-generated ideas and content on its sites and in syndication.

Of course, Wikipedia has information. And facts, of any media type, are nonfiction. But "just the facts, Ma'am" may not suffice much longer, even online. Today,  it has to shake, rattle or roll to be Discovery.