Al Gore, Businessman

By KAREN TUMULTY, Laura Locke

Though politics had been the family business, Al Gore's friends have always traced the awakening of his own interest in it to his senior thesis at Harvard: "The Impact of Television on the Presidency, 1947-1969." The small screen had created a new, unforgiving standard in politics, the young Gore wrote, one that rewards the smooth performer and dooms the stilted one. His 99-page paper turned out to be a prescient analysis of some of the forces that would conspire to deny him the White House three decades later. But while Gore's political career may be over, his fascination with television is taking a new turn. Gore has reincarnated himself as an activist entrepreneur and is about to mount what could be his most ambitious campaign yet: to transform the medium itself.

"I've never been particularly motivated by money," Gore told TIME last week, "but, you know, I like to make a good living, and I truly believe you can do well and do good at the same time." This week's launch of Current TV, his new 24-hour youth cable network, will test that proposition. The cable channel claims it will do nothing less than democratize television, giving anyone with a digital camera and a computer the kind of power that used to be enjoyed only by the mainstream media. Current TV will invite a young army of "citizen journalists" to submit edgy 15-second-to-15-minute video segments that the network is calling "pods." The idea is that no one knows better than young people what will hold the attention of the elusive, tech-savvy 18-to-34-year-old demographic.

In Gore's new office at the network's quasi-industrial San Francisco studio, there are no photos or other White House mementos to suggest that this is the man who, as he likes to put it, "used to be the next President of the United States." But anyone who knew him then would recognize the giant whiteboards he always kept handy for scrawling his inspirations on. Those much remarked-upon earth tones of his presidential campaign have been traded for the head-to-toe man-in-black look that passes for the uniform of the new media executive. But the Treo 650 still hangs at his belt in the fashion statement of the incorrigible techno-geek that he has always admitted to being.

Current TV is only one of the ventures that Gore has undertaken in the afterlife he created for himself as a businessman who is out to change the world. The former Vice President, 57, is chairman of Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm that he started last year with former Goldman Sachs Asset Management CEO David Blood. For a partnership that no one seems able to resist calling Blood & Gore, they have a serious and high-minded investment philosophy. Generation aims to find and invest in companies that will pay off by virtue of enlightened approaches on energy, the environment, employee relations and other policies that will benefit society as well as their bottom lines.

Blood is not specific about where they will invest but theorizes, for instance, that BP might have an edge over other oil companies, thanks to its interest in green technologies; Costco would be a better long-term bet than Wal-Mart because it keeps its workers happier. He and Gore even see potential for making money fighting international scourges like AIDS and malaria. "There are risks associated with these issues," says Blood, "but they are also opportunities if businesses can think about them."

Gore estimates he spends about three-quarters of his workweek on Current TV and most of the rest of his time on Generation Investment, where he helps the firm's stock pickers identify long-term issues that could drive the markets. He also serves as an adviser to Google--he "has helped us understand the geopolitical role we play, the importance of building community," says CEO Eric Schmidt--and sits on the board of Apple Computer. At Apple's last quarterly meeting, the former Vice President led a discussion on stock-option "burn rates" and other esoterica of employee compensation. He keeps all those commitments alongside a busy schedule of speaking engagements, often about one of his greatest passions: the environment. His hour-long multimedia presentation on climate change is being translated into Chinese so that he can present it in Beijing later this summer.

It's clear to see in Gore's business ventures some of the same instincts that, for better or worse, shaped his political career: an ability to discern the future, an appetite for complexity, a faith in the egalitarian forces of technology--and an impulse to take a big risk. Those traits are what had Gore worried about global warming decades ahead of almost everyone else and running for President before his 40th birthday. Under Bill Clinton, he pushed to reinvent the massive federal bureaucracy and wire every classroom to the Internet. In his unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign, Gore once even considered bypassing his high-priced consultants and enlisting ordinary voters to make his campaign commercials--an approach that looks very much like the cable network he is about to launch. "He's a visionary," says Joel Hyatt, the attorney-entrepreneur who is his partner in the cable venture. "He's doing things that are new, daring, difficult, just as he tried to do as a public servant."

But will they work? "We want to be the 'television home page' for the Internet generation," Gore has said. But there's no small amount of skepticism that his cable channel will be able to break out of the pack. If Gore is on to something with this idea of turning consumers into media programmers, so are a lot of other people. Korea's Ohmynews boasts a stable of 38,000 "citizen journalists." Pictures and video from bystanders' cell phones played a starring role in the mainstream media coverage of the terrorist bombings in London. There are already 70 million blogs around the world, 500 video logs, up to 10,000 podcasts.

Hyatt insists that Current will make its mark in a 500-channel cable universe as "the brand identified as the leader of citizen journalism," but the sample content featured on its website suggests it has a way to go. There is a gripping, sensitively shot video of Indian families cremating their loved ones on the Ganges but also one of a rapper who dresses as a jelly doughnut--which is funny for the first 40 seconds or so of its four minutes. A video account of the experiences of Current's executive director, Evan Stone, as a new parent (complete with a close-up of a dirty diaper) gives the feeling of being forced to watch a home movie.

For all of Current's promises to offer consumers of television more control in its creation--"to give young people a voice," Gore declared at the network's prelaunch in April--some young content creators are already questioning its openness. A lively blog on which aspiring video makers swapped ideas about the network's mission, recruitment process, video postings and politics cropped up on Current's website in its early days. But after would-be correspondents started criticizing management's policies and unresponsiveness, the blog was shut down.

The video makers are especially put off by the network's requirement that anyone who submits digital content must hand over most rights to Current--a major disappointment to aspiring artists who want to make money off their work elsewhere or share it with friends via video logs or at film festivals. And although Current promised to hire hundreds of digital correspondents, contributors must now sign on as free-lancers, who get neither salary nor benefits. In frustration with Current's tight controls, Josh Wolf, 23, a filmmaker and volunteer organizer for Current's San Francisco "meet-up group," at which digital artists view and critique one another's videos, launched his own alternative to Current. Called the Rise Up Network, the collective of video makers is creating a website on which anyone can feature his or her own videos. "A lot of people feel disaffected," he says.

But Gore insists that Current TV has, if anything, become more open. "Our vision was then, and is now, to go from the old studio-based production model that is still used by everybody else out there, where a small group of people in a television studio makes the programming that everybody else watches, and go to a democratized medium where everybody has a chance to learn how to make television," he says. The network will even teach people how, with free online media training by veteran journalists, educators from journalism and film schools, and celebrities.

The concept for Current TV has evolved substantially since Gore and Hyatt, an old friend and political ally, started talking in December 2001 about developing a new way of delivering the news. They thought of creating a left-leaning political website or a liberal alternative to Fox News. Ultimately, Gore and Hyatt assembled 21 investors who put up a reported $70 million with which they last year bought Newsworld International (NWI), an international news channel, from Vivendi. The fact that nearly all of them are also big Democratic contributors (including Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, MTV creator and former America Online exec Bob Pittman and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein's financier husband Richard Blum) has raised questions about whether they are investing in Gore's business plan--or doing him a favor. "There may be a mixture of motives," concedes Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a board member of Current TV.

That's why it's no small irony that the biggest boon to the venture came from none other than media baron Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News Channel Gore once called a "fifth column" that has turned "daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective." Chances are, Current TV would never have got even this far had Murdoch not given it NWI's existing slot on his DirecTV satellite system, which accounts for 14.5 million of the nearly 20 million households Current reaches. It's a big start toward the 50 million Gore hopes to attain in five years. "Rupert Murdoch right now is the biggest contributor to the possible success of Current," says John Higgins, business editor of Broadcasting and Cable magazine.

There are those who say if Current TV does succeed, it could help pave the way for Gore's re-entry into politics. But Gore, who so long ago studied television as a means to a political end, is not among them. There is "close to a zero-percent chance," he insists, that he would ever run for office again. "I feel liberated by not being a candidate ... I'm learning on the job every day, and that is so much fun. It really is." And it sounds as if he means it. --With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/London

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/London