| Topic Name: |
TV NEWS IS DYING |
| Message Name: |
Lots of blame to go around... |
| Date Posted: |
05/18/2005 |
| In Reply To: |
... the tv news biz is poised to start a period of contraction. Blame it on a number of things--more competition from cable and the internet, poor quality of on air content, overhype, etc. The bottom line is, surveys show journalists have lost a great deal of credibility with the public, and viewership and readership are on a steady decline. Let's face it folks--this is a free fall, and there's no end in sight to the downward slide. Sure, folks may still tune in for major local disasters, but daily coverage has growing increasingly irrelevant and is getting less and less attention. |
| Message: |
..and some of it is the viewer.
Look, I agree that the news media gets obsessed with frivolous crap. We do the runaway bride to death and devote several minutes to the inane intricacies of the Michael Jackson trial while devoting little attention to major issues. But guess what? The viewer want to hear about the runaway bride, Jackson, Laci Peterson, OJ, etc.. etc.. etc.. They tune out when we talk social security, Iraq or terrorism.
When there were only 3 choices for news, it was far easier to force feed the viewers a news diet that included talk of important issues. Now they have plenty of options to tune to if you aren't giving them what they want.
Local TV news can survive and prosper by providing local information that can't be found anywhere else. Ultimately that means that stations will have to increase the number of reporters on the street, not increase the amount of local time wasted on "national" stories like Michael Jackson. Those local reporters have to be good journalists willing to dig for a story. The stations that do this well will survive.
The stations that keep adding feed packages to their local shows (or worse, pull a sinclair) will continue to free fall in the ratings.
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