alonglens

This is my take on the question posed by Ryan Squire.

Can television news be saved?

Quick answer: I don’t care.

I say that not because I wish to see television stations fail and the people that work for them without a job.  I say that because I don’t look at television as anything more than a method of distribution.  As a journalist, it is my job to tell a story.  How that story is distributed does not particularly concern me.  The invisible hand of economics will determine how we distribute our content.  As long as there are stories to tell and a demand, they will be told whether it be over the air, through a series of tubes, or with a tin can and a piece of string.

To see the exact same information again, please check us out online. Keyword: repeat.  NBC4 has two of the hardest working web editors I’ve seen.  We post breaking news as it happens, we alert people to road closures, and we preview our stories for the day.  At the end of the day though, most of the content online is the same as what we put on air.  Without the help of the entire newsroom, there is not a damned thing the web staff can do about it.  Databases and other special features enhance some of our stories, but I can only imagine how time consuming they are.  Only so much can be said in the 1:15 a typical news story runs.  There are countless stories that I wished could have been more.  With the website, the tools are there and there are no time limits.  We need to use them.

Done correctly, blogging is a fantastic start.  We need to do more of it, a lot more.  The biggest problems I see with tv station blogs right now is the target audience.  We use our on air signal to plug our blog, and we use our blog to further plug our on air signal.  If they’re watching our newscast already, we already have that viewer.  Our blogs need to join the “blogosphere.”  It is only by interacting with other bloggers that our blogs will gain an audience that is significantly different from our viewing audience.  Keeping the conversation going with the audience, both old and new is key to surviving as a news organization.

In 2005, the KABC consumer reporter Ric Romero did a story about a new phenomenon called blogging.  The only problem, 2005 was well after blogging became mainstream and even farther away from when it started.  Fark.com ridiculed the man.  Ric Romero is now a cliche on fark that refers to someone that reports the blatantly obvious.  We need to learn from the mistakes of Romero and get ahead of the technology curve, not report on it five years too late.  Just say no to Romero.

Embracing new technology is exactly what we are doing by embracing things like Twitter, Brightkite, and others.  These are tools that may very well be part of the future of how we communicate.  They are just another way to tell a story, in 140 characters or less.  The potential to reach new people is there, we just need to use it.

I suggest reading some of what Michael Rosenblum has to say.  He is a very polarizing figure in the world of television photographers.  He is the driving force behind the surge in the VJ model.  The use of a one person crew is nothing new.  Small markets have been using them for years.  The difference is in the focus and the technology.  A VJ uses a small camera, edits in the field with a laptop, and files stories through the Internet.  A one man band uses a full size camera, and tries to emulate the result of a two person news crew.  I love being a photographer, but I reluctantly agree with the model that Rosenblum preaches.  No amount of arguing over picture quality can stem the economic tide for long.  If the invisible hand pushes me in that direction, I won’t fight it.  No matter the shakeups in the industry, I intend on working as hard as need to not only survive, but thrive.

I don’t care about the future of television news, I care about the future of my news organization’s ability to tell stories.  Television will work as a medium as long as there is an audience to support it, and we need to work as hard as we can to broadcast the best on air product possible.  As that audience grows smaller however, we should not be looking for new ways to reach people.  We need to have already found them.