Another Bump On The Road To Hell

You've seen plenty of entries on this blog fretting about how newspapers and radio are dying a slow and painful death. Well, let's not leave out the third sign of the apocalypse, OK? The Washington Post reported today that Channels 4, 5 and 9 here in the DC area have formed a cooperative TV pool service, so that when mundane news conferences or ribbon-cuttings are held, just one station can bother to send a camera, with all three stations sharing the video from the event.

Won't this further homogenize the news and make all three stations look alike? Yes. With only one station in attendance, won't that discourage the gathering of sidebar stories, and won't the discovery of news stories suffer because only one reporter might be on hand to ask questions? Yes. Won't this just give the stations even more of an excuse to watch the bottom line instead of focusing on creating better TV news? Yes it will.

It is jaw dropping to consider how quickly local journalism in this country is going to hell. Even just a couple of years ago, being a major market counted for something. TV reporters had camera operators to work with. Radio stations had real news staffs. Newspapers had real beat reporters. And consumers received actual news. All of that is going, or is already gone - even in the Nation's Capital.

I am not looking to point fingers, and it's pointless to blame the economy. The news business was heading in a downward spiral long before the stock market tanked. The Internet has changed the world in far more many ways than I could begin to discuss here, but somehow, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Demand for information is at an all-time high, while the consumers making those demands are also demanding to get all of this information for free.

Push is going to HAVE to come to shove at some point, people. TV and Radio news stations are not really gathering news any more - They are regurgitating what the read in the papers. And the papers have cut their staffs so thin that they are only covering a fraction of what they used to cover.

There is no corporate financial incentive right now for station owners to crank out expensive news product when they can rely on other sources to do investigative work and enterprise reporting, then steal it for themselves. As long as the stations can throw something up on the air that resembles news, that's really all they care about.

But mark my words... The day is coming when there will be another Katrina, or God forbid - another September 11th. People are going to need more information than the crippled TV and radio and newspapers can deliver. And very suddenly, there will be an outcry that will get some newsrooms rescued from mothballs. I truly believe it will take that kind of need to pull the news business out of this decline.

The young adults who are really just now getting married, having families and getting mortgages - in other words, becoming news consumers - are the same people who grew up as teenagers getting all of their music for free on Napster. They are the same people who feel they have the God-given right to receive whatever media they want - and to get it for free.

They say the customer is always right. But they also say you get what you pay for.

Oh, How The Mighty Have Fallen!

When I was growing up, the TV news leader in Washington was unquestionably Channel 9, then WTOP-TV. The anchor team of Gordon Peterson and Max Robinson was backed by an impressive team of top-flight journalists, the best weather guy in town and Warner Wolf, a favorite DC son and sportscasting legend. But a recent glimpse of the Channel 9 morning product shows now just how far TV news has fallen.

Let me start with the good news. Andrea Roane is the morning anchor at WUSA, and that's a big plus. I have always liked Roane. She's always perky, and she seems unflappable, which is important given what she's left to work with.



Channel 9 has dropped all pretense, really, of being an actual news-gathering operation. They do have a morning street reporter, but the several times I've seen him, he's been doing standups in front of a public building, telling us about meetings that will happen many hours in the future. He would be just as useful reporting from the newsroom.. Speaking of which...



Channel 9 no longer has a newsroom - It's an "information center". And they no longer have reporters - they are "digital correspondents" instead. "Digital correspondents" are what used to be entry-level reporters, except these people not only report on scene - they also shoot their own video and edit their own packages in the field. One-man bands in a top-10 market... and unfortunately, this appears to be the norm going forward.



The lead digital correspondent during channel 9's morning news appears to be a woman named Kristin Fisher. Her job appears to be two-fold. In one segment, she surfs the Internet to show you what you'll be surfing about when you get to the office. That's right... she shows you what's on the Drudge Report. Why spend time actually reporting the news, when you can show other people what other people are reporting?



Fisher's other segment involves taking requests from listeners. She has them e-mail her with stories they would like to see reported. One of the stories was from a woman who's been trying to collect child support from her deadbeat ex for a year and a half now! Fisher says she will go out and cover some of these "news stories" herself... Maybe she'll hunt down the deadbeat ex!



Fisher's stories, as well as the ubiquitous traffic and weather together, movie reviews, pitches for USA Today (owned by Channel 9's parent, Gannett) and other trivial non-stories dominate Channel 9's morning product. And oh, yes - There are a few news headlines as well. Just headlines. No reporter packages... and no sports guy, either. Poor Andrea has to handle that chore herself.



News on the cheap. But not really news at all.

The Media's Dirty Little Secret...

Most people who don't work in the news business have no idea where the stories they read/hear/see come from... Perhaps you assume the stories come from a wire service, like the Associated Press. OK, but where does the AP get its stories? The answer, mostly, is from newspapers.

That's bad news, because newspapers are dying, and many are on life support... The internet is largely responsible for the dead-tree demise, and how's that for irony? Once the papers go, news sites and blogs around the world are going to have to come up with another way to get content, because on the media food chain, newspapers feed all of us... There would be no Drudge Report without newspapers. No NBC Nightly News. No Paul Harvey. No "Life On The Beach".

If newspapers cease to provide news content, it's possible that broadcast journalism could make a comeback, although I'm not holding my breath. TV and Radio news outlets have become dependent on ripping and reading stories that other companies have paid to produce, and a business model based on actually producing news does not jibe with the bottom line. This kind of thinking is what left me "on the beach" to begin with.

This article from Variety does a great job of explaining how the news business works, and I highly recommend you read it. After all - who knows how much longer Variety will be around?