Broadcast Paradox

Across The Pond: End of Beeb's Teletext Service

 The grandmother to the internet, the UK's Teletext service was mostly shut down this week due to lack of advert revenue. (Only the racing & bookmaking, chat and dating services will remain open - can you guess why ?)

Teletext never caught on here, but across the pond it was quite popular in the 1980s and 1990's and it had some success in France (Antiope) and in the Netherlands (Prestel). It was worked in a similar fashion to the US Closed Captioning system, but I guess us Yanks wanted two-way communication, so we got MCI Mail, then Delphi, Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie and finally AOL.

What Does the J-School of the Future Look Like ?

Dave Winer in a blogpost in Rebooting the News suggests that a semester of journalism in college (or high school) should be a requirement, just like history, math and science.

Some necessary training for all those future “i-Reporters”. (And thanks to Michi Valeriano.)

Part-Time Is The New Full-Time

As advertising revenue at the broadcast nets continues to shrink, and more daily hires are doing the work that used be be done by staff employees, I continue to hear stories along the lines of "No you can't work with so-and-so tomorrow. They have already worked their 24 hours for the week."

Sad, but part of a rising trend nationwide.

From Economist David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff on June 9, 2009: "It may be true that companies are not cutting back on bodies as much as they were earlier this year because nobody wants to let their skilled staff go despite the lingering weakness in sales. So the strategy remains one of cutting back on hours worked at the same time — not as many layoffs but the effort to economize on the wage bill remains intact. What has happened this cycle is that the shift towards part-time and away from full-time has led to a dramatic reduction in the average workweek to a record low 33.1 hours."

Almost Everybody Into the Pool

And the number one market bows to the inevitable. From Broadcasting & Cable:

“The pool will open just in time for the sticky New York summer, as WNYW, WNBC, WPIX and WCBS commence a video-sharing local news service June 22…”

Land of the Lost

I have often (well not that often) blogged about the sad state of television news. My own twenty-something daughter gets all the news she needs from cnn.com, PerezHilton.com and The Daily Show. (In spite of the fact that I am working for a CNN competitor.) The day of the 6 PM local news and the 6:30 network news is waning rapidly, along with a parallel decline in viewing of the "big four" English language networks in general.

The dire longterm prognosis has filtered down to (or hit over the head) the troops at the local level as this post by Lenslinger in his Viewfinder Blues blog attests:

"...the economy could correct itself overnight and the broadcast landscape would still buckle under the weight of new expectations. Sure, magic laptops and boned-up telephones play a part but all the gizmos in the universe fail in the face of human nature. Take my oldest daughter (Pease - she’s FIFTEEN!). I’ve yet to buy her one of those cell phones that comes with its very own flux capacitator, but that hasn’t stopped her from consuming news the way her better-equipped peers do. Al A Freakin’ Cart. ...When she wants to learn about the world she knows the libraries of the globe are just a Google or two away."

Take the time to read his whole post, it's pretty much what I've been thinking (except that I work at the national level and am watching the network crumble around me.)

And Henry Blodget says all is lost. DuMont, anyone?

"Live. Local. BROKEN News."

Lost Remote's Cory Bergman takes the opportunity of the release of AR&D's book “Live. Local. BROKEN News. The Re-engineering of Local TV” to comment on the sad state of the network/affilate relationship.

For example: "Networks and studios increasingly taking their video content directly to users. It’s only a matter of time before the network-affiliate model evaporates."

A blog post worh reading. (And read the comments as well.)

My Dream Job Doesn't Exist Anymore

A thought provoking commentary by Shelly Palmer on MediaBizBloggers.com

Newspapers vs. The News

In today's MediaBizBloggers, Steve Rosenbaum writes how News will survive the demise of the Newspaper. (And provides a cautionary tale for the Network News business.)

Thought provoking reading.

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.

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.

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.

This Too Is Past

Broadcast Engineering Editorial Director Brad Dick waxes positive about the future of local television stations in his January '09 editorial "This too shall pass".

While those of us who toil at the network or station group level mourn the thinning of our ranks over the past two months - to see your future, just look at the local radio business today. Enough said.

Media Cutbacks

Enough said...

Praying for... a Job

With recent layoffs oops.. downsizing at Media General, the CBS owned stations, ABC News, the Washington Post and dozens of other journalistic places, thank G-d that there is a place where there is hope for all my under-employed news brothers and sisters. And thanks to Lost Remote for pointing it out.

The End of Network News ?

What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't have a couppla links to the downfall of Rome, uh network newsgathering. Yes, years ago there was all kinds of talk about ABC & CBS merging their newsgathering operations with CNN. It appears what's old is new again:

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/04/08/cbs-is-leaving-the-news-business/

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/cbs/cbs_cnn_in_talksagain_81839.asp

Not Heading for NAB...

It's my own fault, I guess. I made a decision to move from engineering to production management. Now a victim of corporate belt tightening, I know that if I want to go to NAB in the future - it will be on my own dime & on my own time.

So I'll be sitting here in New York reading everyone else's NAB blog. Check back daily for links to the most interesting items for my fellow news junkies.

Here's one for starters:
http://blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/nab/

The Hockenberry Invention

The GE / Bill O'Reilly fallout from John Hockenberry's article in MIT's Technology Review continues to simmer. The pertinent infomation and background links are contained in this update from TVNewser.

Poilce In Persuit (of Ratings)

It's been 19 months since I ranted and raved about car chases and airplane landings as breaking news. I was going to do it again, but Don Day of Lost Remote said it much better.

Pretty As A Peacock

I hope no one outside the media biz read this...

Variety broke the story of how NBC is combining its long-form, Dateline, NBC News Productions and NBC Media units into Peacock Productions. Says the article: "Peacock Prods. will apply NBC News' journalistic standards when clients ask for them. Or, in the case of... (one show produced by NBC News Productions)... news standards aren't necessarily applied." Wow, Ed Murrow & Fred Friendly must be writhing in their graves! No wonder people, especially in the blogsphere, don't trust the MSM (mainstream media).

Until recently, if one of the Net News orgs wanted to violate its "journalistic standards", they would farm the show out to their "arms length" production company: Lincoln Square, EyeTwo or Media Productions. After all - in this brave new media world - who cares if the Next Food Network Star embelished his resume a little bit - no one put a second Eye on it.

But now it's looking like it's the client's choice to have journalistic standards a la carte, not the Networks choice. Gee, anything can be bought for a price these days, even the cachet of NBC News.

Don't Forget What Business You're In

Just like the people who ran the great railroads at the beginning of the 20th Century forgot that they were really in the transportation business and not the railroad business - don't forget you're in the news business (not the TV news business.)

Keep in mind that Yahoo (a company that gathers no news of its own,) is still the number one source of news on the net, and the net's where under 30's go to get their news.*

So when you're asked to file a web or digital subchannel story - do it or you'll become an over-the-air dinosaur.

Still don't get it? Read Jeff Jarvis' blog entry "TV is dead; long live reinvented TV."

(And just to emphasize how important Yahoo News is - just follow the lead of ABC News.)