I have always been
a news junkie. I regularly read, albeit
on line, two newspapers most every day, drive to and from work listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and, with my wife, watch the TV evening news,
usually while washing dishes. Recently I
have found the latter less than informative. This got me to thinking that the TV Network
news model is really obsolete and nobody bothered to tell the networks.
All the commercial
TV networks have similar formats and cover about the same content. Most often that content consist of
information that I already know having learned it from non-stop sources throughout
the day. So any given evening about 90%
of the reporting is not news to me and the remaining 10% of little or no
interest. I really don’t care how much
money Kim Kardashian was paid for her Super Bowl commercial. That report belongs in Entertainment Tonight not in David Muir’s news script.
Perhaps it is my
advancing age that has changed me. But I
would rather believe that the format for these programs is no longer relevant
to most viewers. The news program model we have today goes back to the early
50’s, with programs like the Camel
Caravan of News, a 15-minute summary of the day’s happenings hosted by John
Cameron Swayze.
That was a much
different time when an important happening in the next city might take hours to
be reported locally and news events around the world might be unknown for days
or even weeks. Reporting the news was
very expensive and time consuming. Even
in my early years in TV, the equipment was expensive and complex. The process of capturing, editing and
transmitting news stories was mostly vested in the hands of a few at TV
stations and networks.
How things have
changed as most anyone with a mobile phone has the capacity to record and
transmit video from most anywhere. So
rather than having to wait till 6:00 PM to see the 13 inches of snow on the
Harrison streets, before the last flake dropped, I could view on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram more snow that I care to
see. On a more serious note, we all saw
first-hand the impact of social media during the Arab Spring.
Seems to me that
the news operations need a major change in format and emphasis to serve changing
audience needs. That audience has more
options for getting late breaking events.
What is lacking is a concentration on the “Why.” Most vexing issues today are very
complex. If they were simple, we would
have speedy resolution. It seems to me
that the role of news programs in today’s world is to help us understand what
we see and hear and not to provide a litany of short vignettes and reports
telling us things we already know.
This kind of news
reporting is hard. It is difficult to
explain the complex without losing the audience. But it is precisely what is needed and what
is not now being provided. Perhaps the
shrinking audiences for these programs will compel change for the better or
perhaps we will see more of a nightly caravan of trivia.
If the news
programs do go away, how will I keep up with all these new drugs
that I need to ask my doctor about?
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