I agree with your comments. I’m just glad they bothered to focus on this aspect of the black experience AT ALL, instead of sticking to their normal topics of poverty, crime, and other bullshit that actually plagues *ANY* community with low income, not much opportunity for self-improvement, and a general lack of hope.

Hopefully, the people that recognize that CNN only scratched the surface will create a budget to get way more of this story told, instead of letting it be some kind of anomaly that occurred one time in 2011.

I hadn’t really thought about what you bring up, because there’s so much that CNN left out of the experience of the actual NewME housemates that I never really got to think about the surrounding community, socially or business-wise.

Something I found extremely strange about the show was that CNN didn’t bother to explain how the Google “Dragon’s Den” or whatever it was called happened to be a panel of four obvious minorities. o_O

It’s like “Where did they come from?” “Were they imported for the documentary?” “Do *THEY* live and work in Silicon Valley?” “What do *THEY* think about the racial climate, etc?”

I wrote the article the way I did because CNN did a VERY SHALLOW job of explaining what the NewME group was doing in Silicon Valley in the first place, like the underlying technology and requirements.

For instance, I’m writing this reply to you at 4:40am on a Tuesday.

People don’t realize how much you have to sacrifice if you want to have a successful social media presence, much less think up and attempt to implement a startup, gain traction, and then pitch to investors.

They would have been better off introducing the members of the house and then going IN-DEPTH into one of their presentations, preferably one that got funded, like becouply.com.

But yeah.. I hear you. There’s A LOT that CNN didn’t bother to cover or discuss in this show, and there’s a lot that they mentioned in passing that someone like myself that’s involved in the internet community will catch and understand, or someone like you that’s involved in the Silicon Valley community will recognize, but most people will just look at the show and not really get the importance of what they’re seeing.

The good thing is that they bothered to focus on black tech people AT ALL, so I have to give CNN credit for deviating from the common topics and scenarios.

Like I said above.. It doesn’t take 9 weeks to videotape 44 minutes’ worth of footage. There’s A TON of that story left to tell, if Angela can get the raw footage.

Like I said in the article, this is what I do, edit television shows.

SOOOOO many times, I watch the majority of the content get left on the cutting room floor (meaning that none of it is used in the final edit) that I’m very sensitive to flash-edited sound bites that are used to craft narratives, like when they were talking about giving dude’s girlfriend a ride to the house.

So when they had just finished setting up the house members and the scenario and I looked at the time and it was about 22 minutes into the hour-long (including commercials) presentation, I knew they were either going to skim over EVERYTHING and end the show after one hour, or they were going to have to do at least two hours and maybe three.

I’m glad they did what they did, and it was nice to see people I know and know of on television, but if you think about it, they said they were at the house for 9 weeks.

9 weeks is about the amount of time that MTV films JERSEY SHORE, and then that becomes a full 11-episode season.. More than TEN TIMES the final output of this one show.

There’s no way AT ALL that CNN could have gone in-depth into this situation in 44 minutes. It’s too intricate a situation to talk about all the aspects decently.

That’s why I’m hoping that Angela can get the raw footage from CNN, because there have to be HOURS and HOURS and HOURS and HOURS and HOURS of content that’s relevant to NewME and useful, but CNN’s never going to do anything with it.

Cheers, Tanaya! :D