R.I.P. Real News

At the risk of being a little too "inside baseball", I'm going to write today about the pending demise of real news. Whether you knew it or not, "real news" has been on life support for quite some time, but with the continuing collapse of newspapers, there is little reason to believe there will be anyone left within a few years to actually COVER the news.

You see, there is a very real food chain in the news business, and for the most part, that chain begins with newspapers. What starts as an item in a community paper gets picked up by the Washington Post, then makes it onto the Associated Press wire, and eventually onto radio, TV and the internet. Despite what all of those TV promos tell you, there's actually very little actual reporting going on - at least in local TV and radio news. It's the newspapers that are setting the news budgets in most cities, and for the msot part, what you see on TV at 6 pm was in the newspaper earlier that morning.

Now, with newspapers cutting staff left and right, there's less content being fed to the wires, and lower quality showing up on your TV and radio. This is all have a self-destructive effect. As time goes on, there are fewer jobs for journalists, and fewer resources for investigative reporting. Fewer people with lesser skills are ending up editing wire copy, making the AP less of a value for newspapers, which are now starting to drop the AP as a whole. The AP, meanwhile, is turning more and more of its news efforts away from print coverage to television and internet news instead. This is not good news.

Love it or hate it, the Associated Press has been the standard for American journalism for more than a hundred years. The AP has largely been "vanilla", but at least it has been reliable. Now, that reliability is turning instead into a liability. The AP's quality, especially at the local level, has really tanked in recent years, and the piranhas at CNN are smelling blood, launching their own wire service to rival the AP. No offense to CNN, but there is no way it can build a cost-efficient wire service to rival the AP. It will be able to sell print versions of some of its excellent international and national political coverage, but trying to build a wire that includes local news - especially at a time when local newspapers (remember the food chain) are closing in droves - will just not work.

So - what does this mean for you - the consumer? Sadly, I think it means you'll soon be on your own in terms of knowing what is really going on in your local communities. The local paper here, the Gazette, has been an excellent source for community news, but it has already gone through significant cutbacks and consolidation. If and when the Gazette goes, I don't know what we'll be left with... But I think you may be counting on bloggers to deliver what passes for local news in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime - with apologies to Heroes on NBC - SAVE YOUR LOCAL NEWSPAPER, SAVE THE WORLD!

Doing The Work Of The People - Election Edition!

Some miscellaneous observations after working election night at ABC News in downtown DC.

• The most asinine thing I saw on TV was CNN having reporters reporting via hologram. I saw Jessica Yellin chatting with Wolf Blitzer from Chicago, with this strange blue haze around her. And the camera was careful to pan around Wolf Blitzer's studio, just to prove to the audience that Yellin was really a hologram. To bring home the point, CNN put up a chyron on the screen that read "Jessica Yellin reporting live via hologram". It did look cool - like Princess Leia giving election results. But what did it add to CNN's coverage? Absolutely nothing. A standard split screen would have done the job just as - NO - more effectively, because the audience would have heard what Yellin had to say instead of focusing on watching her glow.
  
  

• The most presidential thing of John McCain's campaign was the last thing he did - give a brilliant concession speech... And does anyone really doubt he'll follow through with his promise to support President Obama?


• With 2008 out of the way, there's no time like the present to start on 2010. One of the many interviews I edited during the evening was with Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), who chairs the GOP's House campaign committee. Even in defeat, Cole focused on the silver lining for Republicans, and pointed out that Democrats will now be held responsible for everything that happens in Washington, and he boldly (and correctly, I think) predicted that if the Democrats don't move to the center and work with Republicans, that the GOP will pick up a lot of seats two years from now.


• When I walked out of ABC at 1:30 this morning, I could hear people shouting and car horns honking as they left the White House. There were people all over the place - this being about 5 blocks north of the White House, where crowds had gathered. I could not help but smile at the young people's youthful exuberance, and feel a bit sad for them that what they had just lived through was the easy part. Campaigning is one thing - leading is another... and even in a best-case scenario, this 21st Century Camelot is going to be severely tested from day one.


• I got home at 2:30, and to bed around 3 am. I thought surely that my hard day's work would merit me the opportunity to sleep in, right? Wrong. The Empress bellowed at about 7:15. She was racing to get ready for work, and needed her coffee. She needed HER coffee. I'm telling you.... Daddy's been home too long, cuz Mama is getting spoiled!