State of News Media 2009

Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism released its 2009 State of the News Media report on Sunday (if printed it would be 700 pages long).

The center's take is that journalism isn't dying and newspapers are going to be around for a while too. But the sharp drop in revenues (23% in two years for newspapers and 7% last year - an election year! -- and possibly 11% this year for local TV) and employment (a quarter of all newsroom jobs that existed in 2001 could be gone by the end of this year), along with readers' migration online make it rough going and a race to find a way to pay for it all.

Here's the rest of the news release.

Wasserman's elitism

Ed Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington & Lee, dishes out a healthy dose of elitism in his latest broadside against the FCC and the nation's sometimes incoherent information and communication policy (what, we have a policy?).

Wasserman's right in his conclusion that the FCC is largely toothless when it comes to the evolving media landscape, But instead of a thoughtful discussion of useful alternatives, he offers this dollop:

[W]e're on the cusp of a new era when localism will be all that's left for local TV stations anyway. That's because the national networks are eager to get around those local stations altogether and channel their shows directly to audiences via cable, Internet, mobile phones, molar implants -- telepathy, soon enough -- anything that will save them having to share ad revenues.

Plus, local stations are about to get even more channels to fill once they make the long-awaited move to the digital spectrum next year. What will they fill it with? Cheap, hyper-local programming, tailored to intensely local advertisers and interests, whether neighborhood sound-offs, Pop Warner football or peewee soccer. Broadcasting is about to launch into a craven new world of localism, with programs of unimagined triviality.

Well, yes, Ed. It's precisely that kind of elitism that got much of the mainstream media into this mess in the first place. They became estranged from their audiences for which such things often are not trivial (trust me on this; I've coached youth baseball). Why do you think things like YouTube and Vimeo and Flickr and Photobucket and any number of social networking sites are so popular? Oh, yes, those millions really should be watching TV and reading their local newspaper.

But they aren't! And you aren't getting them back, at least not with those kinds of attitudes.

These sorts of things are not trivial, but they can be trivialized. Wasserman and others continue to show how effortless it is to do so.

(However, on one level I do agree with him -- given broadcasting's track record, I expect to see substantial amounts of schlock. It need not be that way, however, as some online sites and show.)

Local TV news - NBC sees the future and doesn't like it much

Most interesting announcement this week from NBC about how it is redoing its news operation out of WNBC in New York -- and it's hardly a ringing endorsement for local TV as we now know it.

According to the New York Times article, NBC is shifting the station's resources, de-emphasizing the station (WNBC is coming off the Web site and it will just be called NBC New York) to be part of a "content center" that will feed a 24-hour cable channel as well as gas pumps, taxi cab screens, etc. In that, it's smart. "Convergence" means a lot more than just print, broadcast and online.

But a few bon mots from John Wallace, NBC's new president for "local media" (again, de-emphasizing the "station" aspect).

Mr. Wallace said that local television “has a perception issue right now as to whether it is a sustainable business long term.” Once a huge generator of cash for media companies, local stations now have an “eroding and aging” audience and have become “slow-growth business,” Mr. Wallace said, adding that their revenue growth averages between 1 percent and 3 percent.

“We look at our content, and we believe it’s relevant content,” Mr. Wallace said. “It’s just not convenient because of the way people’s lives have changed with technology.” ...

Providing round-the-clock live news will not require NBC to hire more employees for the new channel; it plans to rely instead on expanding the duties of its present staff members, which Mr. Wallace called “a work-flow change.” He said, “There will be no added staff. We’ll just use them differently.”

Producers, for example, whose previous focus had been “getting the show on the air at the assigned time,” will be retrained to produce video segments instead of shows, with the goal being to spread the segments across various local NBC platforms, be they the news channel, the Web site or the taxis.

He said he expected "some natural resistance." Well, at least he's not laying it between the lines, huh? I wonder if broadcast journalism programs across the country are paying attention.

If it works in New York, NBC plans to expand it to its other large-market stations. I doubt this would work the same way in smaller markets (not enough taxis after all {grin}). But, of course, if NBC pulls this off with the same (I'm betting eventually smaller) staff in the larger markets, then we all know others will be watching and we know what rolls downhill ...

Chuck Fadley of the Miami Herald and proprietor of the Yahoo newspaper video group had insightful comments, noting that this could also be a direct competitor to newspaper Web sites during the office day when a lot of people go to local news sites for breaking news. In response, Bill Dunphy warned that if it becomes a head-to-head situation, newspapers could be the ones that eventually suffer -- while they are better staffed, it's hard to compete with that much additional overhead.

Stay tuned.

A sign of (TV news) things to come?

Word from Canada today is that the new owner of French-language network TQS is eliminating its news department and 270 jobs. Remstar is trying to revive the insolvnt network. It say it will pay creditors only 20 cents on the dollar. It also needs Canadian federal approval to cut the news. (And needless to say, the union is not happy.)

There's always danger in extrapolating any situation, but it makes one wonder if we are beginning to see the tattered edges of an economic slap down for broadcast news akin to what newspapers are going through. TQS, for instance, cited too much news being produced in Quebec -- but the digital age is exactly that, the economy of abundance.

With the talk of a possible CBS-CNN partnership -- later denied by CBS -- and NBC's brass saying the future of news is on cable, not on the network, It makes one wonder ...

Cable TV a la carte

Q: What is the most feared phrase at both the wire services and the cable companies?
A: A la carte.

OK, we can't do much about the wires but watch that potential economic train wreck -- and it's insider baseball anyhow.

But check out this site about cable: http://www.howcableshouldbe.com/
It's set up to allow you to deselect the channels you don't want from a long list and then tell you what your bill savings purportedly would be. Of course, it assumes that either the cost savings would be passed along penny for penny, or that other fees wouldn't be raised.

Both are simplistic, since the company will charge you for the capacity, whether it is used or not. (Although there should be some savings.)

More useful to the consumer would be a push to require cable companies to structure bills as public utilities must -- with a base capacity charge and then the programming charges on top of that (even better, of course, would be to break out those programming charges by channel, but the base+programming might be more politically possible initially).

That way, customers would begin to get the idea of the true cost. Then watch the fun begin.

"Howcablshouldbe.com is run by the Parents' Television Council and does require you to enter personal information to actually "vote." But you can get the estimate without that.

Scripps considers splitting off newspapers?

That's what the Wall Street Journal reports that Joseph NeCastro, Scripps' chief financial officer, told an analysts' conference.

He said management had spent "a fair amount of time with the board and with the members of the trust talking about options for the newspaper side," adding that separating the newspapers would be "clearly the most advantageous route" to improve the company's share price.

The newspapers can't be sold because of the terms of a trust governing Scripps' ownership, however.

Scripps, of course, is filling its coffers off its cable networks like the Food Network, DIY, HGTV and others.

Does it surprise me? Yes, a little, because newspapers still provide pretty good cash flow, not an insignificant thing when paired with broadcasting that can sometimes need that cash flow to deal with the ups and downs of the market and of producing programming. Still, everyone who owns newspapers right now has to be looking at ways of slicing and dicing them into parts that can be jettisoned, if needed. The trick is figuring out what is likely to be viable going forward and what is truly dead or dying wood.

Quick thoughts: Centralcasting, crowdsourcing and silencing gangs

Centralcasting, Telemundo style

With some of the discussion we've had here lately about changes likely coming to copy desks, universal desks, etc., it's worth noting our broadcast bretheren are struggling with some of the same issues. The latest reminder is the word that Telemundo is centralizing much of its newscast production at a studio near Fort Worth. Meg James brings the details in an L.A. Times story:

As part of a companywide, $750-million restructuring by parent NBC Universal, Telemundo TV stations in markets including San Jose, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston will no longer produce their own newscasts.

Instead, beginning early next year, local news for seven Telemundo stations will originate near Fort Worth. There, anchors and editors will produce three live regionalized newscasts using feeds from reporters and camera operators in the field.

Expect to see more of this. TV studios and newsrooms are expensive operations. The more you can keep them running, the better the margins. NBC's also doing it by bringing MSNBC in-house at Rockefeller Center.

Tvtechnology.com has a good archive article on "centralcasting," including the human toll involved when Sinclair centralized its news. And from that article, a thought:

"Until now, centralcasting has been an unqualified failure because most broadcasters went in with the primary motivation to save money. To be successful, centralcasting has to result in a better local on-air product, not just a cheaper one," said Steven L'Heureux, president of Denver-based automation provider Encoda Systems.

Another article, this one originally from American Journalism Review in 1993, touches on the centralcasting experiment tried here in Columbia. That station (WOLO) gave it up about a year ago and now has a small downtown studio and staff. The newscasts from Charlotte were so bad they were painful to watch. On the other hand, the move might have kept that news operation from going dark.

Election Day Crowdsourcing

Gannett followed its announcement of a week ago that it was blowing up its newsrooms, with a new emphasis on "crowdsourcing," with some examples in action on Election Day. I especially like the Cincinnati Enquirer's site for reporting voting problems. Nice Google map mashup, too, to make it easier to interpret. Other big-G papers had similar things, some linked to Gannett's national round-up site.

Yet, as I look at Cincinnati's offering, for instance, I find something missing. I find myself staring at all the blog posts and the neat map and muttering "what does it mean"? And that's the downside of this newfound enthusiasm for crowdsourcing (using the wisdom and expertise of a mass of people outside the newsroom to help ferret out information). The word is drowdsourcing, and we should't forget that. It's not "crowdjournalism," and that's why we have journalists -- to take disparate posts like those on the election-problem site and provide broader meaning and context.

Where is the story that tells me whether all these posts represented a real problem in Cincinnati and surrounding areas, or whether they were a random set of relatively insignificant things (not insignificant to those who had trouble voting, but still ...)? Ask an epidemeologist about the dangers that lurk in drawing conclusions from what appear to be clusters. (Clustering can apply to time as well as geography, and of course the concentrated nature of Election Day would tend to promote that.) And if a story was done, my apologies, but why is it not linked from this page?

While we are all agog about crowdsourcing, let's not lose sight of the journalism that's still needed.

Ganging up on Gangs

One of our local TV stations, a Gannett outfit, is trumpeting the fact that it no longer will "knowingly" show gang symbols or colors or gang members themselves. The station says it doesn't want to glorify gang members and wants to be "part of the solution."

Pardon me. If children are in the room hold their ears. This is a ^&#$%^*&(%*& STUPID MOVE that smacks of trying to grab brownie points rather than do journalism. Sure, gang members may be slimeballs, but you don't cut yourself off from any source in a story that is of central interest to a wide swath of your community. Of course you don't glorify them, but there will be journalistic moments when you simply can't tell a full, accurate story without them. They are a voice -- now silenced on your station, for good or evil. What is the next voice you're willing to ignore when the guv'ment suggests it might not be prudent? Got a mirror ...