Broadcast Paradox » State of the News

Audio Follows Video, Right?

techmanager — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:59:10 +0000

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.)

ABC News Reduces London Staffing Again

techmanager — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:15:03 +0000

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 to go to Google’s cached version of the show’s Facebook page to tell.

Sad times at the house that Roone built.

ABC Phones-In The News With Skype

techmanager — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:31:05 +0000

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.

The Future of News

techmanager — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:17:31 +0000

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.)

Skype Journalism

techmanager — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:12:45 +0000

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.)

News Orgs Tap into Twitter to Make Ad $

techmanager — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:37:34 +0000

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.

FOR THE COMPLETE POYNTER ONLINE BLOG POST CLICK HERE

Will the iPad Save the News Business?

techmanager — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:35:54 +0000

The roundup blog post I was meaning to write:

FOR THE COMPLETE CYBERJOURNALIST.NET POST CLICK HERE

5 Big Moves In Hyper-Local News

techmanager — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:17:13 +0000

Andria Krewson in MediaShift writes that big changes have been happening in the online hyper-local news world. Here are the five biggest:

Datasphere Raised $10.8 Million
Outside.In Raised $7 Million
U.S. Local Partnered With L.A. Times
The New York Times Partnered With CUNY
Patch.Com Expanded Their Recruiting

CNN: Do You Have a Picture of the Pain ?

techmanager — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:02:05 +0000

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.

Across The Pond: End of Beeb’s Teletext Service

techmanager — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:47:15 +0000

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.