Comments on the state of network television and other things media related.
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.)
Categories: Net-Working
State of the News
A thought provoking commentary by Shelly Palmer on MediaBizBloggers.com
Categories: State of 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.
Categories: State of the News
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.
Categories: State of the News
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.
Categories: State of the News
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.
Categories: State of the News
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.
Categories: State of the News
Categories: State of the News
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.
Categories: State of the 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
Categories: State of the News
TV Engineering
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/
Categories: State of the News
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.
Categories: State of the News
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.
Categories: State of the News
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.
