Passages: My daughter, Miss to Mrs.

January 5th, 2009

My second daughter, Brittany, got married this weekend here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it was a cultural experience, to say the least. The mother and grandmother of the bride were late to the rehearsal dinner Friday night, and the situation was made worse, because her mother had accidentally left her Blackberry at the Country Club, where we were all waiting.

I stood outside on the front steps with the pastor who would turn my beautiful daughter into a married lady the next day, and we were talking about the situation. “What did we ever do,” he asked, “before cell phones?” Indeed. This event was one of continuous SMS and MMS messaging between all parties, even though one might be in the next room.

We are so connected, aren’t we? What DID we do before these devices changed everything? Well, planning was more important. You couldn’t fly by the seat of your pants the way you can with a portable connection device. Things took longer, too, I think. You just had to allow time for human error, but now it’s possible for people gang up on a problem and resolve it quickly.

The pastor had to ask people to turn their devices off prior to the wedding. There are times when the physical connection beats the electronic connection, and a private ceremony like a wedding is one of them.

I suppose we should have put the event on a Web camera for the whole world to see. It wouldn’t have been a ratings winner, but that’s not the objective anymore.

Despite all the technology, weddings are still bound in tradition. The most memorable for me was my dance with Brittany during the reception. She bawled like a baby, but it was really wonderful, and I think such things will always be so.

After all, nothing could ever take the place of a father holding his little girl.

Posted in Personal, Passages | 4 Comments »

It’s twenty oh nine, people

January 1st, 2009

So here we are into our tenth year of the new millennium, and we still can’t get it right.

I was born in nineteen forty six, not one thousand nine hundred and forty six.

It is twenty oh nine, people, not two thousand nine.

The next millennium will be twenty one hundred, not two thousand one hundred.

Why can’t we get this right? I realize that the year 2000 was a bit odd. It was hard to say twenty hundred, but that’s what she should have been saying.

Come on broadcast and cable networks. Help us out.

Posted in Just Plain Fun Stuff | 5 Comments »

Why media companies are hosed

December 31st, 2008

I hate to keep pounding on this, but the essential problem for media companies is that we just aren’t special anymore. The Web views every site the same, and despite efforts by media companies to express their uniqueness, it just doesn’t work.

And the problem here is that advertisers don’t need media companies anymore. Take a look at Wal-Mart’s home page:

Note the ads from Vonage and Chevrolet, but here’s where it gets really interesting. Below is data from Compete.com that shows that the Wal-Mart site crushes the New York Times and the Washington Post in terms of unique visitors.

The point is that Wal-Mart is a media site in that it sells its reach to advertisers, a reach that vastly exceeds two of the top newspaper sites in the world. This is why I keep harping on everybody that the future for local media companies lies beyond their own walled garden websites, and those who refuse to hear that (like, everybody) are sprinting to the tar pits.

Posted in Media 2.0, Advertising, Disruptions | 4 Comments »

The return of the pop-up ad (when will they ever learn?)

December 31st, 2008

Behold, a rant.

I just “visited” an internal page on the website TVNewsday.com, the link of which came from the site’s newsletter. After reading the story, I decided to click on the site’s logo to navigate to the home page, rather than return to the newsletter. On its journey from the scroll bar to the logo, my mouse passed over the leaderboard ad for Sony at the top of the page. The ad was one of those time bombs that goes off with a mouseover, because some marketing guru thinks I’ve given it permission to do so by deliberately passing my mouse over the bloody ad.

So the ad expanded like the pop-ups of old, only unlike the “the good old days,” I couldn’t reduce the thing by clicking on the “close” button. Nope. It just sat there yelling at me that I needed to buy Sony broadcast gear. I did what anybody would do. I closed the browser window and growled under my breath that this is not a site I want to visit with regularity.

It’s called the price of interaction, folks, and these kinds of ads fall into the category of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” The problem here is that the Web isn’t kind to “regular” display ads, and it abhors interruptions, because people like me would rather abandon the search for content than be insulted by technology in the wrong hands.

Now perhaps TVNewsday.com doesn’t think anybody’s going to move their mouse to their logo (or anything else above the ad), but this is just silly. Can anybody show me the obvious path to get to the logo without crossing the ad, which beckons goodies if I but pass my mouse over it? And why is this ad a rollover, when the other Sony ad on the page requires a click?

I’m sure that TVNewsday.com got a nice CPM for this ad and that some guy or gal at Sony’s agency is smiling, because, well, it’s just such a cool ad, eh? He or she is looking at metrics that include my mouseover and is passing that data along to another marketing guru at Sony that PROVES people are expanding the ad, because they want to play with it.

Do these people have a clue? I think not.

Posted in Advertising | 3 Comments »

Online breaking news is the key for 2009

December 30th, 2008

The ability of news organizations to focus on breaking news will increasingly determine their relevancy in 2009 and beyond. Just as cable news brought about the creation of the artificial news blockbuster, so will online news develop strategies and tactics that will focus on that which is breaking. I view this as a good thing.

At the time that I published “News is a Process, Not a Finished Product,” I had been thinking about the concept of what I call “Continuous News” for many months. Make no mistake — Continuous News (CN) IS the model for sustainable online news in the future. It is fresh and compelling; it meets the needs of the online audience for news (M-F 8am-5pm); and it’s sold by daypart. Nothing can compete with the concept.

Borrowing freely from my essay, the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Fifth Annual State of the News Media report captured the essence of the model:

News consumption has become continual, with news morphing from a “finished” product - a newspaper, a newscast, even a Web site - to a service that helps consumers “find what they are looking for [and] react to it.”

And what is CN, if not an ongoing series of breaking news events and stories?

I was with executives from IBS years ago, and the discussion was about why people use local websites for news. Their research (and other’s) revealed that people go online for breaking news and the weather. This should come as a surprise to no one.

So the operational mandate for local media companies is the publishing of breaking news, but here’s the key difference in new and old thinking. In the traditional media world, the term “breaking news” was reserved for big stories, those that, in the judgment of the editor(s), warranted the use of the term based on criteria that included such things as importance or impact on a large scale. In the new world, however, the people formerly known as the audience are in charge, and our job is to let them make the determination as to what is or isn’t important. Hence, everything is breaking news, and this is our online mission as journalists.

In the mass marketing world, the ultimate award goes to the blockbuster. This is true whether it’s Hollywood or a best seller. In the news business, blockbusters are major events, often disastrous and life-threatening and always significant in their appeal to a wide audience. Nothing beats a hurricane to drive ratings for the cable news channels.

Blockbusters don’t occur every day, and this is a problem for mass media, especially the cable nets. Over the years, we’ve developed marketing strategies and tactics to make everything appear to be a blockbuster, although we know good and well that they’re not. Hyperbole is the defining principle of manufactured blockbusters, and the audience is sick of it.

Turning a ribbon-cutting ceremony into a breaking news item, however, is not the artificial manufacturing of a breaking news event, for it is, to at least a portion of the community, an event that belongs in the ongoing chronicle of the day in the life of that community. There is nothing artificial about treating such an event as an item in a CN stream. In fact, such a mention delivers points for authenticity, because we’re letting people decide for themselves if they wish to read about it beyond a headline. Authenticity trumps editorial judgment in the online news world.

We’re at the dawn of the CN or “unfinished” news model, and I believe the extent to which local media companies embrace it will determine their place at the table in a “news as a conversation” paradigm.

Posted in Journalism, Continuous News | 1 Comment »

Quote of the day

December 30th, 2008

Slate’s Jack Shafer writes “Not Just Another Column About Blogging.”

If newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters don’t produce spectacular news coverage no blogger can match, they have no right to survive.

Amen to that, and I should add that this column is an extremely worthwhile read, an excellent summary of how personal media’s Gutenberg moment has disrupted the status quo of professional media.

Posted in Journalism, Blogging, Citizens Media | No Comments »

It’s all in the price of gas

December 29th, 2008

One of my Sunday errands yesterday was to get a fill-up at the neighborhood Chevron station, and it was one of those experiences in nostalgia. The price for a gallon of regular was $1.37. The total price for my tank of gas was $17.28, something I hadn’t seen in many, many years.

I remember writing about gas prices in July when a fill-up at this same station cost me $50, and the price-per-gallon was nearly $4. That’s when I said we were in a recession, although the government didn’t announce it until many months later. Stories on the price of gas dominated the news, and it impacted every segment of the economy. Airlines went into a panic and started charging fees for baggage to make up the losses they were experiencing. SUV sales sank. Any business that required fuel viewed the steadily rising price of gas as catastrophic.

And now, as if by magic, the price of a gallon of gas is so low that it’s taking me back to the 20th Century. And in just six months! A CNN story quotes AAA as saying the average price is at a 5-year low, but that’s $1.62. The story found the lowest price was $1.44 in Missouri, but that’s seven cents above my neighborhood in Grapevine, Texas.

I don’t know about you, but this puzzles me. I’m sure there are dozens of explanations and more than a few conspiracy theories, but if our economy is so driven by the price of fuel, how can this be a bad thing? I fill up twice a month, so I have $60 more in my pocket this month than I did just six months ago. I don’t “feel” recession’s pain like I did this summer, and this is multiplied by every person who owns a car in the U.S. What will people do with that extra cash? And when will that show up statistically?

We’ll hear reports about retail prices dropping and fears of deflation, but the truth is it’s all driven by the price of oil. Take that out of the equation, and everything looks different.

2009 looks remarkably different to me than it did a year ago, and I think we’re in for one of the most interesting years in the history of the West — a time of incredible opportunity for those who keep their eyes focused on the horizon and not on the waves that are buffeting our boat. Cowering from the waves is a habit of ours, driven by a media industry that’s very good at providing a magnifying glass for ripples.

In the 1980 film “The Formula,” George C. Scott plays a detective who uncovers a plot to kill anybody with knowledge of a secret Nazi formula for a synthetic fuel. The bad guy in the film is Adam Steiffel, the Chairman of Titan Oil, played by Marlon Brando. The two meet on Steiffel’s patio, where the oil mogul is enjoying breakfast, and the scene produces a couple of memorable lines in a case of art imitating life. “You’re not in the oil business; you’re in the oil shortage business,” Scott says to Brando. An aide to Brando’s character races to the table with news of price activity by the Arab states, to which Brando’s character responds, “You idiot, we ARE the Arabs!”

The price of gas at my neighborhood Chevron station is as real as it gets in determining my economic well-being, and it gives me pause at the end of 2008. What’s going on here?

Posted in Economy | No Comments »

Pew: young people signal an online news future

December 26th, 2008

This week’s stunning Pew Research report “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Source” is a wake-up call for the broadcast industry.

The Pew Research Center for the Public and the Press has been tracking media usage since the turn of the century, and for the first time ever, the Internet has surpassed newspapers as the main source of national and international news for people overall, but the big story, in my opinion, is what’s happening with young people.

According to Pew, as many people aged 18-29 cite the Internet as their main source of news as they do television. This is the canary in the coal mine for broadcasters, who, like newspapers, have been struggling with an aging mass audience for years. No longer is it a guess that the Web is the future for news and information (although it never really was a guess, the handwriting being obvious for over a decade).

Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).
Figure

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently.

The spike in the use of the Web for news by young people is truly remarkable, and it mirrors a previous study by Pew during the Presidential campaign.

One caveat for this study is that it only looks at national and international news. Newspapers and television stations still dominate local news, but it would be foolish to assume safety in any mass marketing incumbent. There are plenty of online local news efforts underway, and it’s just a matter of time before the Web dominates at the local level as well.

Posted in Newspapers, Broadcasting, Research, Culture | 4 Comments »

Survival isn’t a strategy

December 24th, 2008

In the paradoxical world of addiction recovery, the word “survive” is seen as a block to progress. One doesn’t survive cocaine, oxycontin or alcohol; recovery begins by admitting complete defeat, and this is a very hard concept to swallow, for who wants to be defeated? Surviving is all about winning. It’s about being tough, gritting your teeth in the face of adversity and coming out on top.

Ego, the experts say, is the problem when it comes to self-destructive behavior, and it must be crushed before recovery is possible.

In the CBS reality show “Survivor,” the aim of the game is to “outwit, outplay and outlast” competitors, and those are appropriate goals for any survivor. In the world of local media today, we have strong and talented managers trying to outwit, outplay and outlast disruptive innovations, when it might be better just to admit defeat. But we’re addicted to power and success, and our ego tells us that we can beat this thing. We can win. We think. We hope.

I was talking with an industry colleague the other day about the state of local television companies and stations. “Most people I talk with,” he told me, “are just hunkering down and trying to wait it out.” Waiting it out is a form of surviving. Diane Mermigas wrote similarly in her excellent predictions for 2009 that “all media will hang on (in 2009).” Hanging on is another form of surviving. In a tvnewsday.com article last week by Mary Collins called “Communication Is Key To Surviving 2009,” she wrote: “As the old saying goes, we are all in the same boat; and…we’ll only get to shore safely by rowing together.” Pulling together is another survival skill, as is the notion of “we gotta just keep rowing.”

This theme of surviving 2009 is everywhere, but I’d like to pose an important question for anybody so hunkered, hanging, waiting or rowing, because waiting it out assumes “it” will end and that there will be a reward for those who are still standing when “it” is over. I’m not so sure, so here’s the question: What if the old model is gone for good and it doesn’t come back?

This is an important question, because the downward slide for media companies began long before the economy went south. This is hidden in the complexity of the recession, and the economy is being blamed for all the layoffs, bankruptcies and other unpleasantries. There’s no doubt the economy is exacerbating things, but it’s extremely dangerous to ignore the possibility that it’s masking other, more permanent problems.

Umair Haque, the brilliant London Business School economist who has since taken up residence at Harvard, has been sounding warnings about the economy for years. One of his themes is that the problem with this particular recession (or whatever you wish to call it) is decay in the DNA of the whole economic system. That’s a lot different than a “correction,” regardless of its depth. Haque relentlessly points to systemic problems in examining why this or that happened.

We cannot organize tomorrow’s businesses - or economy - like yesterday’s. What do I mean? Simple. How should we organize and manage how firms interact with consumers? The Economist thinks it’s “creepy” but cool to trick consumers, because it’s profitable.

Is it?

Not a chance - as our research at the Lab notes, the fact is: companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.

True power isn’t the power to manipulate. It’s the power to create. There is a world of difference between the two - that orthodox economics has yet to understand.

This is tremendous wisdom for media companies, who have been treating the people formerly known as the audience with manipulative disdain for years. It has to stop, for we live in a networked world now, one that rejects the platforms of mass marketing. It is an era in which consumers are god-like in their information choices. Now is a time for leadership in our industry, and what better place to begin than with consumers, our customers.

So rather than hanging on in survivor mode, perhaps we need to just get out of our own way and let the innovators at every level of our companies do their thing. Let’s support their efforts, rather than wrestle them to the ground in the name of hunkering down or surviving. Let’s think strategically about how to approach this new world.

This is a time of incredible opportunity, if we are willing to admit defeat to an enemy we never had a chance against in the first place. Rather than fighting it, we need to embrace it, and that’s hard to do when your strategy is survival.

(Originally published in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

Posted in Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment »

Arianna Huffington gets it wrong

December 23rd, 2008

I’m a great admirer of The Huffington Post, but not always of its founder and her views of life. Arianna got it really wrong this weekend in an interview with the LATimes. Now, I’m willing to let others be wrong (after all, I need to be able to let myself be wrong, too), but this one is really a biggie.

Now that the Bush administration is closing up shop, do you think that the hatred of the media that they’ve inflamed will finally cool?

I don’t really think it’s the Bush administration that’s fueled the hatred of the media. I think it was the media’s complicity in the lead-up to the war in Iraq that has been one of the darkest moments of American media — and that helped fuel a lot of the dissatisfaction with the traditional media.

Penalty flag.

She’s right that the press needs a smackdown, but both Arianna and the questioner from the LATimes need a reality check, for the “hatred of the media” has been going on a lot longer than the last five years. This is a nice attempt to re-write history in a way that favors the professional press, but take a look below at the graph from the folks at Gallup from their annual governance poll. Only 9% of Americans say they have a great deal of trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly,” and the slide didn’t begin with Bush’s war.

Where DID the slide begin? Oh my, that can’t be! The professional press wants so badly to believe its own hype that it refuses (is unable) to acknowledge the truth, that the slide in press trust in the U.S. began atop professional journalism’s Watergate mountain. Of course, the pros will argue that this is when spin doctors began their assault on the press, but that’s just hubris.

The problem with elitist pedestals, as I have often noted, is oxygen deprivation. Now is not the time to cling to the stage, for the action is down here, among the people. If we can get down here, and the trust will come back, Arianna, but if we stay where we are, it’s gone for good.

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment »

Another reason to like Barack Obama

December 22nd, 2008

The President-Elect arrived on Oahu for a vacation while I was there. I spent Sunday talking with my old friends Chuck and Patt, and they filled me in on how proud the people are of their native son (Obama’s known locally as “Obomber” for his penchant for shooting 3-pointers on his high school basketball team). Chuck and Patt live down the road from the Obama’s rental house in Kailua.

The fact of Obama’s youth in Hawaii — and what that means in how he’ll govern — is missed by the press, because they don’t understand life in the islands.

Of all of the many peoples of the world, no group is like island people. On a piece of land where the roads don’t go very far, there exists a deep respect for each other, one that is born of the knowledge that your neighbor is a person you need.

In the Governor’s office in Hawaii sits a statue called “Island People.” It’s a wood carving with several humans sticking out of a small, mounded base. Its deep meaning is evident in the connectivity between the humans and the land.

The earth is an island, so we are all island people, although the size of our globe makes that hard to see.

Obama’s Hawaii is a collection of every size, shape, race and creed. I’ve often said that every Caucasian should live in Hawaii for awhile to get a glimpse of life without a “majority” race.

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and lived formative years in the midst of island people. To Hawaiians, he’s just another hapa haoli, a mixed breed, just like nearly everybody else. The extent to which this cultural grounding influences his decision-making is significant, because we have never known it before. One tends to view the world differently as an island person, and this will escape the notice of the press, except, of course, in Hawaii, where they’re proud as hell that a keiki o’ka aina (child of the land) is bound for the White House.

Everybody here may think that the story of his being a man of African descent is the history being made with Barack Obama, but his internal governor is more that of an island person than anything else.

It will be fascinating to watch.

Posted in Politics, Hawaii | 2 Comments »

Mele Kalikimaka

December 20th, 2008

From beneath the aged banyon tree on the beach at Waikiki, Merry Christmas to all my friends and readers everywhere.

Posted in Personal, Hawaii | No Comments »

Let’s put the RIAA in jail instead

December 20th, 2008

By now, you’ve all heard about the latest fun from the whale turds, formerly known as the lawyers representing the recording industry. Instead of suing music customers, they’re switching to a very sneaky arrangement with ISPs in what’s being spun as an “abrupt shift of strategy” by an industry bleeding from public relations problems (oops) over certain helpless people they’ve sued.

The plan uses the ever-popular “three strikes” theme. The lawyers tell the ISPs when they think you’ve been bad; the ISP sends you a love note. Three times, and they cut you off. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch notes that it’s what’s beneath the surface that matters.

This approach is certainly better than threatening jail time, but it raises a whole host of new issues. For one thing, what happens when someone is wrongly accused? At least before they had recourse to a court of law. ISPs are not equipped to set up quasi-legal proceedings or hear appeals. It will be much easier for them to simply send out notices and turn off service, and that is what will happen.

Much has been written in the tech press about this shifting of responsibility, and all of it rightly notes that legal actions have not done a thing to help with the industry’s real problem — declining CD sales. Many of us wrote YEARS ago that this was a foolish gesture by a hopelessly antiquated business model, and there have been signs recently that at least some in the industry are making progress. However, that hasn’t stopped the copyright police from making themselves look bad.

But this action — and the agreement by the ISPs to participate — is an incredibly dangerous precedent for the Web and anybody who views it as more than a pipe for content (see Doc). The phone company isn’t used as a police department that sends out notices in your bill that, OMG, say “you’ve just done something you can’t do, and if you don’t stop, we’ll cut off your phone.” This will end up in the courts, where it will be trounced, and the RIAA lawyers will go back to their posh offices and send out their bills.

I am so happy the law isn’t God. Imagine how bad off we’d be if that were the case.

And for the RIAA? When do we start putting them in jail for being the pathetic nuisance they’ve become?

Posted in Disruptions, Legal, Culture | No Comments »

Somebody please tell me what a vacation is

December 19th, 2008

This is now officially a vacation for me. I finished a presentation at KGMB-TV this morning, did a little shopping at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, and now I’m just relaxing at Waikiki. I don’t do vacations very well. Never have. As my friend Karen says, “there’s a lot going on” in my mind.

Take this trip. I was surprised that the jet from L.A. was packed. I guess I thought travel to and from the islands would have been reduced, due to the recession. Wrong. Long flights aren’t so bad, if you’ve been upgraded to First Class, which I enjoyed. I could plug in my computer, write and watch movies. Just like home.

The queen stewardess, also known as the chief flight attendant, made an announcement that I’d never heard before, and it said a lot about how much the world has changed. “Our flight attendants,” she said, “are here primarily for your safety, but if you have something you need, just press the call button, and we’ll be happy to see what we can do.” This caught my attention, because I’d never heard it put so bluntly. “We’re not here to serve you; we’re here to do our jobs, which we hide in the name of protecting you.” Like so many other occupations, it seems, being a flight attendant has shifted from being customer service to company service.

Walking around the beach here, I’m convinced once again that I’m on the wrong mailing lists. Who knew, for example, that thong bikinis were out — replaced by the old fashioned bottoms that go straight across the hips. I feel SO uninformed about these important things.

I saw a sign in customer service at the Ala Moana Shopping Center that said, “Effective January 9, we will no longer accept cash for gift certificates.” I wondered how long it would take before cash became a net liability. Plastic’s where it’s at, I guess. Reminds me of that scene from “The Graduate.”

See what I mean about vacations? Probing social analysis from a guy just enjoying the sights and sounds of my old friend, Hawaii.

Posted in Personal, Hawaii | 1 Comment »

Life’s a beach

December 19th, 2008

My sentiments exactly:

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

Wish you were here

December 19th, 2008

But you’re not, so here’s a fragment of my morning:

Sunrise over Diamond Head

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

A few days away from everybody (or not)

December 17th, 2008

I board a “big old jet airliner” early in the morning to visit old stomping grounds in Honolulu. It’s mostly a vacation, but I’ll be doing some workshops for a client. I need this time. Hawaii brings peace to my soul, and there’s no place like it on earth.

I’ll be visiting with old friends, hanging out and shopping. It’s a short trip; I’ll return on Monday. I hope to post a little bit, so keep in touch.

The weather’s pretty crappy, but I don’t care a bit. I’m long past the sun tanning days, and I’ll be very happy with a plate lunch, a cup of Kona coffee, and the spectacular views.

When I worked out there (KGMB-TV 89&90), I got to know Governor John Waihee a bit and asked him, as a native Hawaiian, how he managed to not take all that beauty for granted. “I take dignitaries around,” he told me, “and see the amazement in their eyes.”

These old eyes are looking forward to it.

Aloha for now.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

2009: The Great Beginning

December 15th, 2008

Here’s the latest in my ongoing essay series about reinventing local media, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

2009: The Great Beginning

Unlike previous years, where I’ve set down my thoughts about what the year ahead will be like - with specificity - I’ve chosen this year to look at a much bigger picture. Consequently, you won’t find dire predictions from me. I’m leaving that to everybody else, for I think 2009 will be remembered as a year when real change blossomed, and I view that with only positive eyes. So I think it’s more important that we look farther downstream than the year ahead, for if 2009 is truly the great beginning, then what’s beyond next year, and what are the foundational elements that we need to be considering for sustainable growth? This, it seems to me, is what demands our attention, not dwelling on what has transpired or doom and gloom prophecies.

Posted in Essays, Reinventing Local Media | No Comments »

WUSA-TV’s “multimedia journalists”

December 14th, 2008

Warning: rant follows. I don’t get this mad very often, but this has been building for a long time.

WUSA-TV in Washington D.C. is in the news this week, because they’ve made the decision to go the video journalist route for their news department. That means the shop becomes mostly people who shoot, write and edit stories instead of the “specialists” of the good old days. It’s a budgetary move; the “multimedia journalists” will make less than the specialists did. Given what’s happening to local media companies these days, this is increasingly going to become the norm.

But you knew that.

Those of you who’ve been with me for awhile know that I was involved in the first attempt by a local station to do this — at WKRN-TV in Nashville. In the years that have followed, many stations have adopted some version of what we did back then. There are “backpack journalists,” “video journalists,” “multimedia journalists,” “MoJos,” mobile journalists, and more. Most stations have equipped at least some staff to cover the news this way, although not until the announcement from Washington this week have I heard of another station going “all the way” with VJs. In its article on the switch, The Washington Post quotes WUSA competitor WJLA-TV news director Bill Lord:

Lord says stations in Nashville and San Francisco have used multimedia journalists on an experimental basis in recent years but have backed away because of “falling quality” and declining ratings.

Failing quality? Declining ratings? Says who? With respect to you, Mr. Lord, you weren’t there. You know nothing, and you — and all the others who think they know anything about this — need to be corrected, and it is to this group that my anger is directed.

San Francisco got a lot of publicity, because it’s a big market, and the travails of KRON-TV had already been well-chronicled. But the only connections between what we did at WKRN and what was done at KRON are that both were owned by the same company and that the training was done by Michael Rosenblum. WKRN’s move was not done for financial reasons; KRON’s most certainly was. It wasn’t ratings or quality that doomed either; it was the financial struggles of the stations’ owner.

I’m mighty damned sick of and disappointed in certain elements within the industry for their relentless and automatic dissing of what was clearly a prescient and necessary move by a group of people with the stones to stand up and say, “We can’t keep doing things the way they’ve always been done and expect different results.” The handwriting was clearly on the wall back then about what was happening in the industry, and while many people talked about doing something different, few people had the courage to break the mold.

Under the leadership of Mike Sechrist and Steve Sabato, WKRN-TV blazed the trail that everyone will eventually have to follow, and while it may not have been — or be — popular with the people who like things the way they’ve always been done, we all need to wake up and smell the friggin’ coffee. Over and over again, I’ve seen well-intentioned professionals make fools of themselves in arguing why the VJ model cannot and will not “work,” when those views are completely — and I mean completely — irrelevant. The economy doesn’t care what you think. The forces of disruptive innovations don’t care what you think. Technological advances don’t care what you think. Rather than seize the inevitable, these people have set the industry back with pejorative references to “one-man bands.” Shame on you!

If you ever chose to actually examine how this is being done around the world, you’d understand that there will always be certain types of stories and events that require two (or more) people. Read the interview I did in the summer of ‘05 with Lisa Lambden about how the BBC made the switch. For sure there were problems, and there still are, but where the industry could use the expertise and wisdom of its professionals in overcoming those problems, you have chosen instead to cast stones and treat with great disrespect those who were trying to make a difference ahead of the coming storm.

Now that storm is upon us all, and what can I say?

You can bet that the young people coming up in the industry will be trained with multimedia, VJ skills. Then, too, there’s the matter of a generation of video journalists who are growing up around you in your own communities. They didn’t go to school for it. They didn’t work in smaller markets and march their way to the top. But they’re getting better at what they do, and one day, their skills will match or exceed even yours, for they are not bound by the chains of nostalgia.

So when the economic forces of reality eventually rip that job from your narrow-minded grip, I will wish you well, but I will not feel one bit sorry for you. Michael Rosenblum has been vilified by an industry he has been trying to save, and the bullshit coming from the mouths of professional news people over the years since WKRN’s pioneering move is exceeded only by the arrogance with which it has been spread.

Posted in Broadcasting, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media | 2 Comments »

The evolving world of television

December 14th, 2008

Like most people, I suppose, my television viewing habits are eclectic, brewed in the chaotic vat of channel surfing. I have my favorites, but I’ll watch anything, if it grabs my attention. If anything could be described as regular fare for me, it would be reruns of network dramas, especially crime dramas. They’re everywhere. I also love “House,” and USA has decided that hour upon hour of the medical drama will satisfy viewers, for a few months anyway.

And so this headline in Broadcasting & Cable caught my attention:

Scripted Series Scarce on Nielsen’s 2008 Top Tens
Reality, sports dominate TV lists in Nielsen’s year-end rankings

Only three of the top ten regularly scheduled shows this year were scripted series, CSI, NCIS and The Mentalist. What’s cable going to do for reruns in the future? But wait! Seven of the top ten time-shifted programs are scripted series, and what is a rerun, if not a “time-shifted” TV show?

But there’s a real kick-in-the-teeth in the numbers.

The results also suggest an age factor, as the top three time-shifted programs—NBC’s Heroes, Fox’s Fringe and ABC’s Lost—are aimed squarely at the 18-49 demo. Meanwhile, audiences for the top scripted shows on the regularly-scheduled program list all have median ages above 50—54 for CSI, 56 for The Mentalist and 58 for NCIS.

You see, local news programs are never going to be high on anybody’s time-shifted list, so the age issue is a serious problem for local broadcast companies, who make much of their money from news programming. It’s the candle burning at both ends (see: The Demographic Candle). The more scripted producers target younger people, the fewer viewers there will be for anything delivered in “real time,” and the more scripted producers target an older audience, the quicker that universe shrinks, despite the higher ratings. People do die, you know.

In its heyday, broadcasting produced a kind of “community” that current and future generations will never know. I’m always drawn to the mini-series Roots and how that programming brought people together. But the people of tomorrow will know another kind of “community,” one that doesn’t require a single, powerful message to momentarily unite. In a truly networked world, unity is possible beyond rallying cries.

I certainly hope so.

Posted in Broadcasting, Culture | 1 Comment »