Blog - Sunday March 1, 2009 - 6 Comments
Broadcast News Vs. Information: An Unfair Fight
I have been thinking a lot lately about the future of newspapers and radio and television broadcast news; to put it another way, traditional media vs. new media. So, just for fun, I decided to see how my week would go if I didn’t get any news from traditional media. Would I be better served or, would I miss it. I suggest you give it a try. No matter how well I craft the following paragraphs, I will not be able to help you emotionalize what I experienced. You must do it for yourself.
The Experiment
· Spend one week without newspaper, radio or television news.
The Hardware
· A PDA (I carry a BlackBerry Curve from Verizon)
· A WiFi equipped laptop, with wireless card (I used a MacBook Pro with a Verizon Wireless EVDO Rev A. Express Card)
The Software
· iGoogle (www.google/ig)
· Google Email Alerts
· Wall Street Journal Email Alerts
· New York Times Email Alerts
· Stock Quotes from Yahoo Finance via SMS and Email
· TweetLater.com Twitter Keyword Digests
· Google Reader with assorted RSS Feeds
· Google Calendar with weather overlay
· Google Sync for Mobile
· Sports Alerts from various sites
The Methodology
The first thing I did was to configure iGoogle to display all of the things I care about. Weather, sports scores, game times, movie info, highlights, news topics, and the blogs I follow. It took about an hour to get it perfect, but iGoogle is now a dynamic dashboard so customized to my news and information needs, I can’t imagine why I would ever leave the screen.
Next I visited all of my favorite online news sources and set up email alerts based upon my specific requirements. As you know, I follow technology, media and entertainment in a rather disciplined way, so off I went to WSJ.com for tech alerts and NYT.com for their deal book, etc.
Next I set up SMS (text message) alerts for the things that I wanted to have instantly. Breaking news against my keywords, real-time sports scores, stock prices, etc.
Next I spent some quality time with Google alerts and TweetLater setting up key phrases for all of the companies I follow, all of the subjects that matter to me and every brand and product that I am truly interested in.
Next I subscribed to some video feeds on YouTube, Veoh and some other sites.
Finally, I spent time really weeding through my RSS feeds and culling them down to the ones that really matter. Feeds from trusted sources of news and opinion.
The Results
Having spent the better part of a day setting up my automated news gathering team you’d think I would have gotten it right. I didn’t. I got it super-right! What I experienced (and continue to experience) is a remarkable world of instant contextual information programmed exactly as I need it. I get it in advance of my competitors (they could do this, but they haven’t yet). I get it ahead of my ability to receive it from traditional news platforms. And, far more importantly, I get it WiwWiwWiw (What I want, Where I want, When I want).
Here’s the crazy part. There’s not that much advertising attached to it. Sure there are a few lines of text here and there. I do see “traditional” Internet display ads and an occasional video pre-roll, but it’s far from over the top.
My Conclusions
Putting this together was about as difficult as programming the “favorites” on a television remote control. That is to say, “child’s play.” The hardest part was deciding what I really cared to know about on a regular basis. Not only did I “not” miss my traditional media news, I was thrilled to live in an almost commercial-free, hype-free, sensationalist-free world. Sure there were conflicting political points of view, but I got both sides in a fair and balanced way because that’s how I set it up.
Having spent the time setting up my automated news team, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to traditional media for my daily news. Of course, I’m interested in what some of the true experts have to say about things that are happening. But they all have a presence online and, in many ways, they are more accessible and more interesting when they are unabridged.
When Google, Yahoo! or someone else makes this exercise in personal news aggregation just a little easier, it is going to become extremely difficult for traditional news organizations to maintain any kind of educated audience at scale. If I were a traditional news outlet (print or broadcast) I’d be spending my time and my money investing in creating “iTunes for News.” It seems like the only logical path to the future. 
Shelly Palmer is a consultant and the host of MediaBytes a daily show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press) and the upcoming, Get Digital: Reinventing Yourself and Your Career for the 21st Century Economy (2009, Lake House Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy Awards). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.netFor information about Get Digital Classes, visit www.shellypalmer.com/seminars
Comments
6 Responses to “Broadcast News Vs. Information: An Unfair Fight”mikehihz March 2nd, 2009 8:48 am
Great experiment. While I work in the film and TV industry, I’ve
spent the better part of the last two years not watching TV news
regularly and agonized over my decision to stop the weekly, then
weekend, dead tree edition of the NY Times. Then I agonized some
more as I stopped the E-edition and then didn’t even consider the
Silverlight-driven Times Reader edition. (The last thing I want is
to be dependent on Microsoft for anything.) I moved just to
web-based news. I get most of my linear news from NPR, but split
with my local station and one across the country. More internet
news. The problem with our approach is that the CPMs for TV and web
are still vastly different. And web CPMs will never pay the bills
like TV CPMs and newspaper classifieds. Our approach simply greases
the skids to the decline of broadcast news and the newspaper
business. We’ve already seen the death of the Rocky Mountain News
and dozens of other smaller papers around the country. We
freeloaders don’t contribute enough to keep the business afloat.
Your said, “Here’s the crazy part. There’s not that much
advertising attached to it. Sure there are a few lines of text here
and there. I do see ‘traditional’ Internet display ads and an
occasional video pre-roll, but it’s far from over the top.” This is
very telling. Very soon our online advertising experience will have
to be over the top, or else we’ll have fewer and fewer news sources
to choose from and we’ll all be poorer for it.
Dave Davis March 2nd, 2009 12:52 pm
The problem with this approach is you don’t know what you don’t
know (to paraphrase Rummy!). In other words, it restricts access to
real novelty. For instance, you might have an iPhone, but never
discover iApps if articles and feeds refering to them don’t drop
into your predefined categories. Think of shows like CBS Sunday
Morning, or the NYT Magazine - they’re so eclectic many pieces
don’t easily fit categories. The value of the program is that it
brings you novelty and unexpected things. These pieces aren’t
really predictable. Human editorial, as diverse and broad as the
staff, remains a good way to focus or report passion.
Paula Lynn March 2nd, 2009 1:15 pm
ahhhhhh, Shelly, you know you know you know. Digital news media is
dependent upon traditional media that actually pays journalists an
income. It can be double u’ed, double u’ed ad infinitum and until
the digitus’s investments for news contributes to paying people a
“fair market value” for their services, well…you’ll get what you
pay for. Newspapers and other print media are quoted as
genuosities. Next are the other ol’ reliables. It’s gonna’ cost
more either your time through more ads or for direct info for
wiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwi…………………………………………..Reporting
factual (the goal to) news is not the same as aggregating,
relating, commenting, opining, or posting.
Old Media vs. New Media Continued | MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer March 7th, 2009 9:52 pm
[...] week I wrote an article entitled, Broadcast News Vs.
Information: An Unfair Fight which outlined an experiment: my goal
was to see how my week would go if I didn’t get any [...]
The Farm Report › March 8th, 2009 2:36 pm
[...] media pro cuts off the old media (i.e. the Mainstream Media)
and finds out that he doesn’t miss it all. The old [...]
Jan Simmonds March 8th, 2009 7:39 pm
http://tinyurl.com/bclno7 - Attn: Jeffrey Bewkes @ Time Warner -
The answer is right under your nose! http://tinyurl.com/dn7rmg -
Newpapers/ Magazines - How to mend what isn’t really broken! Hope
you don’t mind the links instead of reams of text Shelly! - Jan
Simmonds