The signs have been adding up: CBSNews.com did major layoffs and an aggressive retreat from news online. CBS stations made news layoffs aplenty. And now CBS is said to be talking with CNN — again — about outsourcing news to CNN. One imagines a one-woman-thick news operation: Katie Couric reading intros to CNN reports. The pressure of being the Tiffany network is long over. I’ll bet they will finally have the guts to go out of the news business, apart from 60 Minutes. And if that happens, others will get the courage to do likewise. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Oh, we’ll hear wailing about public service and the public airwaves — that and a damned expensive contract is why they’ll keep Couric in a storefront operation. But what we have now is not public service. We don’t need three evening newscasts exactly alike except as a repository for erectile dysfunction commercials. So let one or two networks win the ratings. Let CBS put more resources into investigations on 60 Minutes. Let CNN cover breaking news — with more help from witnesses with cameras. I hope they let others take that news and curate it in different ways with different perspectives. There’ll be a new ecology of news on video and it’s about time.
Let’s hope that one result of the crash of two news helicopters chasing the cops chasing a bad guy is that local TV — and cable — news give up their addiction to this nonstory. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
And we know what will happen with TV news and helicopters: They’ll keep doing it. See earlier journalism-review fretting about chopper chases in 2006, 2003, 2002 and 1997 — and, of course, after the O.J. Simpson chase in 1994. It will never change.
Is it really the proper duty of ABC News to look up the phone numbers of the alleged Washington madam’s clients to expose them? Is that journalism? Is that news? Is that their proper role? Oh, it’s certainly gossip. It’s entertainment. It’s comedy (see Jon Stewart tonight). But news that affects our lives? Oh, come now. I guess ABC News was just jealous of NBC News catching/entrapping all those predators, even getting a book deal out of it. Where will this escalation end? Will CBS be forced to hunt down foot-fetishistic cross-dressing boy-loving porn-downloading judges or football players or anchors and get a CSI out of it? Seriously, I wonder about the propriety of ABC News taking this active role in helping the reputed Madam out her clients to save her skin. And I wonder whether this is the best use of their investigative resources. No, I know it’s not. It’s pandering, pure and simple.
After returning from the National Association of Broadcasters/Radio Television News Directors Association convention in Vegas, I have been haunted by the size of the infrastructure of the industry. The convention center was packed — blimp hangar after blimp hangar and the lots inbetween and meeting rooms all around — with salaries and equipment devoted just to filling a little screen a few minutes a day. Look at the video below — not yet; wait until I tell you — and you will see thousands of salaries walking around — and, of course, they represent a tiny fraction of a percent of the people who work in TV, just those who are sent to conventions in Vegas. There are thousands more like them at home. That will be the death of TV: the unbearable weight of its infrastructure. (I talked about the media infrastructure implosion here and I calculated the savings of a new world of TV practically free of infrastructure here.)
At an RTNDA panel, my pal, panel star Michael Rosenblum, lectured executives and stars of local TV news about this implosion. There was no lighting and so my video of him sucked even more than my usual video (proving the point of the pros, I suppose, and making them smug in their belief that better pixels equal lifetime jobs). And so I put his words on top of random images from the floor of the convention, just to show the number of people, the salaries, the weight of it. Over to you, Michael:
But, of course, it’s not just about the infrastructure of staff and equipment but of culture. Now see a San Francisco anchorman from WPIX TV complain, predictably, about quality and hear Michael’s response (again there was no lighting — as the anchorman pointed out — and my video sucks, but you can get the substance of it; think of this as a transcript with sound, a podcast with wallpaper):
Now go to Michael’s blog as he reacts to my wishful and surely and sadly wrong suggestion that the end of the age of the anchor may be at hand — anchors like that guy. He calculates the real cost of Katie Couric’s $14-million-per-year salary:
The whole concept of ‘anchor’ is a complete waste of time and money.
Where did this come from, this notion of the ‘anchor’?
People seem to believe that the ‘anchor’ gives the newscast some kind of credibility.
After all, we call it, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.
Credible?
Yet…
We don’t call it, The New York Times with Tom Friedman, but the New York Times still seems to be pretty credible. And we certainly don’t pay Tom Friedman $14 million a year!
That is a nice sum, $14 million (let the number roll around your tongue for a minute), a year, to work 22 minutes a night, reading what someone else has written for you. By the way, in every other journalistic endeavor we would call that plagiarism. Only in television do we deign to call it ‘journalism’.
There is a rationale that these people somehow earn their pornographic salaries.
Bullcrap!
What they do instead is strip the true journalistic assets of any newsroom, whether it is local news or network, because that $14 million has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the budget of the news division. How many local news operations work with old equipment, broken vans, ancient editing decks and a skeleton staff so that they can pay the ‘anchors’ their insane salaries?
In short, Katie is infrastructure. Along with all that equipment and those executives and those studios. Michael suggests a better use for the money that buys all that infrastructure: reporting.
Newspapers are fairly simple. You get a bunch of reporters. Pay them a decent salary. You give them pads and pencils. You say, ‘here’s your pencil, there’s the door, see you at 6′and they go off and find stories. Works pretty well. (That is why TV news gets its stories from the newspapers, and not the other way round).
We could build a TV newsroom based on a newspaper. We could, for argument’s sake, take 100 great journalists, give them small HD camcorders and laptops and say ‘here’s your camera, there’s the door, see you at 6, and send them all over the world. They could upload their stories and feed them to a web site, 24 hours a day. Refreshing all the time. With text and video and sound… Live and podcast and VOD.
Pretty cool.
Really kind of a digital model for journalism for the future, don’t you think?
And it would not cost all that much.
Let’s say we paid each of our 100 reporters, $140,000 a year. That’s a pretty good salary. You would attract a lot of talent. Real reporting talent.
Where would you get the money from?
Well, let’s take the $14 million you’re paying Katie Couric and guess what… you’re there.
What, really, do you think gives you better journalism?
And then get rid of some of that unnecessary equipment and layers of production and management and imagine how much more you could spend on journalism. Of course, it wouldn’t all fit in 22 minutes a day. But to hell with those 22 minutes. Feed the web with reporting.
If you get rid of the presses and the trucks and the broadcast towers and the headquarters buildings and the fancy equipment and the old-time stars, if you kill the infrastructure, you are left with more resources for journalism — and savings in the face of reduced revenue in a suddenly competitive marketplace — and the bottom line is a and more efficient and sustainable business.
Infrastructure is the enemy of journalism.
Ah, but you say, what about editors and correspondents? If they’re vital, they’re not infrastructure. If they are not vital, then they are merely expenses and you must get rid of them.
At this morning’s panel at the RTNDA conference, someone asked Sandy Malcolm of CNN whether they paid Jamal Albaughouti for his video from the Virginia shooting. She said that he just uploaded it. But then they contacted him and negotiated exclusivity and, it seems, payment. I criticized the notion of exclusivity and argued that they’d be better off putting the video out there with a CNN ID to take credit for having gotten it and to get the idea across that one can submit news video to them. I also argued that they should give their videos permalinks and allow them to be embedded (she said they’re working on such things). This video has set a record for CNN, Malcolm said, with more than 2 million views. It could have even more. And by the way, of course, the video is up on YouTube. The value of an exclusive today lasts about 30 seconds.
Zadi Diaz of JetSet doesn’t want to be a journalist. She doesn’t want to be called a journalist. Neither does Amanda Congdon, who says she never called herself a journalist but a video blogger and actress and producer. They each said that last night at the opening panel for the Radio Television News Directors Association. We journalists keep thinking that everybody wants to be a journalist and that it is our precious title to mete out. But these talented, creative, popular women want none of it. Terry Heaton said he considered them journalists anyway and so do I. But note again that they don’t want our label. Which says something about the label and what we’ve done to it, eh? We’ve made it exclusive. We’ve weighed it down with pretense and presumptions and rules. We’ve made these women assume that being a journalists stops you from doing what they do. Beware.
The panel was filled with some of my very favorite people in this world: Terry Heaton, a leader in getting TV into the next generation; Michael Rosenblum, who among many things has started the VJ movement; Elizabeth Osder, a friend with whom I worked lo 12 years ago and who became a leader in this world (she just left Yahoo to get her hands dirty again); the amazing Zadi; and Amanda Congdon, who needs no intro. They were here to blow the minds of the TV establishment and I think they did; I saw shaking heads and tsk-tsks next to me. These guys are behind newspapers in getting to the climax of the scary movie that is their industry. I was going to live-blog, but the damned Vegas Hilton has no wi-fi or electric plugs. So I shot some snippets (badly) which I’ll upload (but the network in the room is slow as hell . . . so more later). Here’s one with Michael Rosenblum answering the question: what should TV stations do?
(If you don’t see the video, wait a few minutes. It’s going through the YouTube machine. Meant to use Blip.)
Miles O’Brien of CNN, the moderator, had video chats with his charming 13- and 14-year-old daughter and son back at home, asking them how they get the news. They agreed that TV nows just covers murders and stuff and that it’s scary. At the end, Rosenblum said: “You just did a live remote and what did it cost you?… That’s the future, babe.” A few other notes:
Terry showed WKRN’s site and how they have 23 blogs that each have their own brands. That is viral architecture. He later scolded the crowd for teasing their audiences; nobody wants to be teased. Later, he really scolded a journalism student who came up to the microphone with the usual MSM cant. He said he’s sick of people coming into the business worrying about where there next job is going to be. Stations are going to see, as they get more local, that they need to work with local people who are rooted in the community, not dying to move on.
Elizabeth then lectured the students and told them to make sure their schools teach them entrepreneurship. Amen. (I’m teaching a course in entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY in the fall. More on that later.)
Zadi said, “I live online. There’s never an offline.” She said that people on TV “seem to be so animated and fake.” We just want to connect with real people, she argued.
“I think in some ways we owed it to the industry to try new things,” CBS News President Sean McManus told Eric Deggans. “But we found at 6:30 with only 22 minutes of programming time, people basically want you to tell them what happened in the world that day . . . That’s probably the biggest lesson we learned.”
(via Adrian Monck… Eric Deggans didn the reporting… and credit Public Eye for covering it’s own tripping)
Think Progress puts together a brilliant compilation of the humiliating hype of cable news over the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Larry King: “The Number 1 story around the world tonight.”
Scarborough: “For better or worse, would you call Anna Nicole Smith an American icon of the early 21st century?”
Anderson Cooper asks about her Playboy mansion days: “What was she like then?”
MSNBC: Why was she so intriguing to so many people?”
Larry King: “This story will have a lot of legs.” [Cue drums]
Scarborough: “Why the obsession with Anna Nicole Smith?”
Jack Caferty (bless him) to Wolf Blitzer: “Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead?”
Says Think Progress:
NBC’s Nightly News devoted 14 seconds to Iraq compared to 3 minutes and 13 seconds to Anna Nicole. CNN referenced Anna Nicole 522% more frequently than it did Iraq. MSNBC was even worse — 708% more references to Anna Nicole than Iraq.
And big, old MSM says they know how to do journalism and nobody else could do it as well, certainly not us, the unwashed.
Watching the coverage certainly makes me want to wash it off me.
Well, for once, I agree with Times TV writer Alessandra Stanley. I wish her column on undue worship of Walter Cronkite and the breed he represented were better focused and better written. Still, her lead in a piece pegged to tonight’s PBS lionizing of Cronkite could not be clearer:
Never again will there be an anchor like Walter Cronkite.
After a network anchor was nearly killed in the Middle East, we still have the networks sending their talking heads there, in hopes they won’t be blown off. Why? All they do is stand and read the Teleprompter, the same as they do back in the studio. What do they add?
ABC’s Charlie Gibson was humble enough to say:
“Just because the guy who anchors flies in doesn’t mean he knows it better than the people who are on the ground,” said Gibson.
“If I come in, or Katie comes in or Brian comes in, does that necessarily increase how good the coverage is?” asked Gibson. “Does it necessarily mean it’s going to be better because you have an anchor there?”
I agree. So why does he go?
“I think probably it calls more attention to the story. But I’m very mindful of the fact that the people who regularly cover the beat know it best, and I don’t want to do anything in terms of anchor travel to preempt the prerogatives of those who really know the stories best.”
I think Gibson’s attitude about what the stars add or don’t add to coverage is exactly right. But I also think that the idea that sending an anchor alone brings more attention to a story is sadly egotistical and not just of Gibson but of the networks and the profession.
This is ego as journalism. It’s no different, at its heart, than my favorite hobby horse about journalistic oversupply: Sending 15,000 journalists to the political conventions just so you can have a byline. It says the story is important. It says we’re important. It’s ego.
After the attack on Bob Woodruf, there is, of course, another angle to this story: Networks putting anchors, their crews and their families at risk. I salute Katie Couric for saying straight out that she will not go to a war zone because she should not make her children orphans. Eat the Press disagrees, at first, saying this will affect her gravitas (they then have second thoughts).
Gravitas, my ass. They read Teleprompters. And they look silly doing it in safari gear.
: UPDATE: Well, so much for my praise of Couric. Page 6 at the NY Post says that Access Hollywood has corrected its Couric quotes.
: LATER: E-the-P’s Rachel Sklar emails to say that she wasn’t playing the gravitas card herself but was predicting what the gravitasmongers would do this with… if, in fact, Couric had really said it. Rachel and I agree about Couric’s family obligations and the need for good sense.
