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Categories: State of the News
When did the recap from ESPN replace the WABC-TV produced sports segment on Eyewitness News This Morning?
(First they came for the sportscaster, then they came for the weatherman…)
Categories: State of the News
TV Engineering
It looks like this morning’s America This Morning was the first “broadcast” network news show to be aired using an “automated control room”, in this case a Ross OverDrive system. More details as they become available.
UPDATE: World News Tonight officially began using the ACR on Wednesday, July 20th. Former ABC News Senior Broadcast Producer Stu Schwartz said “From my experience, the humans are usually better than the machines…but we’ll see. Too bad technology has trumped the human factor.”
I can’t wait to see what happens 15 years down the road. Will there be anyone left that could direct, switch or mix a major live breaking news special report? Maybe ABC will have to hire Joel Almeida !
Categories: State of the News
According to the the eighth annual State of the News Media report, more money was spent on online advertising than on newspaper advertising in 2010. This correlates with the fact [from the same report] that more people (46%) now get their news online at least three times a week, versus newspapers (40 percent) for the first time. “Only local TV news is a more popular platform in America now (50%),” says the Pew Study.
Another key finding in this year’s report was that “nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device.”
Categories: State of the News
If you’re a news junkie like me, you’re not watching a US broadcast or cable net, you’re watching the NHK World TV feed; either on the net [in English] or on cable/satellite [in Japanese].
* On Cablevision, there is often English on the SAP (Secondary Audio Program) channel. On your cable remote hit the Settings button, scroll up to “Choose SAP Language” item, use the right selection arrow to change “Japanese” to “Spanish” and hit “SEL”.
UPDATE: The Washington Post comments on NHK’s coverage.
Categories: State of the News
In the November 19th issue of Time, James Poniewozik writes that news oganizations should loose their outdated definition of “objectivity” (which is more like neutrality), and hone to a more (excuse the expression) liberal definition of the term, one where journalists are “up-front about their predilections and prejudices.”
Would this work? Just look at Fox News and MSNBC and let me know.
Categories: Net-Working
State of the News
Jon Picoult, founder of Watermark Consulting, wrote an interesting article in the Jobs section of Sunday’s New York Times. Picoult predicts that there is an impending “storm” of turnover of employees in downsized companies who were left “holding the bag” – shouldering the burden of short-staffing.
Picoult goes on to say: “People are not equipment… Companies that recognize this fact will … become more communicative, more appreciative, more connected and more civil. In a word, they become more human.”
There are many different management philosophies. There is the military model and the “warm and fuzzy” model, for example. I work better, faster, harder under the “warm and fuzzy.” How about you?
Categories: State of the News
Quite a little debate going on between Jeff Jarvis, Marc Reeves and Roy Greenslade on whether there should be a wall between editorial and sales. In college and in the real world where I worked, I had always thought that there should be a wall. Jarvis says that the old model is broken and we need to go back to the older model; like that of a small town newspaper, where the owner both sells the ads and writes the articles.
Click on the three names above. Read their posts and comment on their stands.
Categories: State of the News
Broadcasting & Cable interviewed Richard Engel and Nic Robertson on bringing back the news from a war zone in their 9/20 issue.
Robertson, who joined CNN as an engineer in 1990, has seen the size of portable uplinks go from several hundred pounds down to the size of two briefcases. Engel, whose first overseas assignment was as a print reporter in Cairo in 1996, comments on how the now ubiquitous cell phone has improved access to sources, pictures and even video.
Categories: State of the News
Longtime NBC newsman Edwin Newman died on September 13th at the age of 91.
Obit (with video) on MSNBC.com.
New York Times Obit.
(Thanks to LB’s Rambles.)
Categories: State of the News
All week I’ve been watching from the sidelines the fallout from the resignation of ABC News David Westin. I’ll have some choice commentary of my own in a few days as I continue to touch base with my friends who were or still are employed there.
In the meantime, below are some links worth reading (in no particular order):
Can Anything Save ABC News from Extinction?
‘Extinction?’ Prediction ‘Belongs at the Bottom of the Birdcage’
Categories: State of the News
TV Engineering
I very seldom watch the 10 PM news on the Fox New York O&O (WYNY – aka “Fox 5 NY”), but tonight my wife and I were watching “Glee” and I hung around for the newscast. At the end of one of the live field reports on Hurricane Earl (at the Jersey shore, in the dark, in front of a snow fence), up comes the two-box and away goes the field reporter audio (cutting off the sig-out and eliminating any chance of 2-way banter.) I guess that’s what happens when you use an automated system instead of an audio person…
(I’m not even going to comment on how instead of doing a live shot where you can’t see anything – the truck operator would have been better used as an audio board operator in the studio. It’s the news, stupid and the reporter HAS to be LIVE on the scene even though there is NOTHING TO SEE.)
Categories: State of the News
ABC News has further reduced its London bureau staffing to a single 9 hour shift on weekdays. This comes just days after ABC News President David Westin announced reporting changes at the organization’s NY headquarters.
The staff at World News Now said goodbye, but you will have had to go to Google’s cached version of the show’s Facebook page to tell, as the post was deleted later in the day.
Sad times at the house that Roone built.
Categories: State of the News
I’m glad that Steve Rosenbaum noticed (and the Huffington Post picked-up on) the growing use of Skype at ABC News that Andrew Tyndall and I first blogged about in early February.
Rosenbaum correctly notes that the increasing use of Skype is not to get the story on the air faster, but to save money – lots of money.
You can read my original blog post here.
Categories: State of the News
You would think that having worked in the news business that I would have known sooner about this ten show series produced by the Newseum and currently running on some PBS stations. Unfortunately I just discovered it a few days ago.
You can find the show synopsis here and the Future of News blog here.
(Shown: John King of CNN and Steve Grove of YouTube from Episode 10.)
Categories: State of the News
Is Skype as good as shoe-leather on the ground? Andrew Tyndall, in his Tyndall Report blog raised an interesting point in his commentary on Diane Sawyer’s Journalistic Ethos.
Tyndall comments on ABC’s recent reliance on the high-tech but dirt cheap alternative to utilizing stringers or sending producers in the field to report a story. Tyndall says: “The visuals viewers see consist of reporters working the telephone; interviewing sources via speakerphone and Skype; quoting from e-mails and chatrooms and social networking sites; performing Google searches and showing Website screen grabs.”
There’s nothing wrong with using social media to help report the news, but there is still nothing better than an on the scene presence at a breaking news story. And it becomes almost laughable when a network does a Skype interview with someone who is just a ten dollar cab ride away from their headquarters. Yes, times are tough for the networks, but penny wise and pound foolish will come back to bite them again. (Just remember the Atlanta park bombing and Space Shuttle Columbia stories.)
Categories: State of the News
Mallary Jean Tenore blogs in Poynter Online on how The Austin American-Statesman, The Huffington Post and The New York Times are experimenting with ways to generate ad dollars using Twitter and Facebook.
Categories: State of the News
The roundup blog post I was meaning to write:
Categories: State of the News
Andria Krewson in MediaShift writes that big changes have been happening in the online hyper-local news world. Here are the five biggest:
Categories: State of the News
Even I had to turn off the TV yesterday when CNN repeatedly showed pictures of an eleven year old girl trapped in the rubble in Haiti.
Newsday’s Verne Gay wrote: “If any individual story set the tone – and established a threshold of horror – for TV’s coverage of the Haitian disaster, it may have been one by CNN’s Ivan Watson Thursday afternoon. Reporting the rescue effort of an 11-year-old girl trapped in the rubble, her cries of agony clearly audible, he paused and suggested that even his own network might want to bail out at that point: A man had just pulled the body part of a person who was right next to the girl.”
Just because we have anchors and BGANs and Skype doesn’t mean that we have to show all of the horror that is this quake.
Categories: State of the News
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 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.
Categories: State of the News
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.)
Categories: State of the News
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.”
Categories: State of the News
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…”
Categories: State of the News
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.)
Categories: State of the 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.)