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Thursday, March 12, 2009
Regional News Across The Pond
And the consolidation of news operations is happening in Great Britain as well. According to Broadcastnow, ITV and the BBC have published a roadmap for a regional news partnership.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Broadcast Sweatshops
As broadcast news attempts to reinvent itself with "produce once, run everywhere" utilizing the same or smaller staffs, it suddenly dawned on me that some of creature comforts that once graced our crazy business have fallen by the wayside: edit cubicles that once turned into edit rooms have returned to being cubicles; hourly-paid staff jobs have become flat rate daily-hire freelancers and dinner reimbursements for non-union workers have all but disappeared.
Young people entering the business today are working in a sweatshop, it's just that sewing machines have been replaced with computers. There is nothing wrong with expecting somone to produce content for all the news platforms, there is only something wrong asking them to do it for 60 hours a week without throwing in a free dinner here or there.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
New York Nonstop
WNBC launched NY Nonstop yesterday (3-09-09) on its digital tier and on Cablevision (Ch 109) & Time Warner (Ch 161).
Billed as being "geared toward a city-minded audience", I had it on most of the day in my office (and I have it on as I write). It's definitely geared toward an under-30 audience and I'm not impressed.(B&C says it's pushing itself to be "relevant with those much more familiar with Chuck D than star anchor Chuck Scarborough".)
Over-30 me would rather watch NY1.