Politico has a story today (I was made hip to it by the now invaluable Dan Rather FB Page) that the Washington Post is adding more than 60 newsroom jobs to start 2017 - an 8% increase. They are also adding "product" specialists (I gather this means people who place WaPo stories on various mass media platforms), and it is not clear to me yet the extent to which this kind of approach shapes the journalism produced by the WaPo. Still, whatever suspicious we might still have about Bezos, it is by now beyond reasonable suspicion that actual journalism at the paper is on the rise since he bought it. They did the best job covering the recent presidential campaign of any other news organization. It appears much of the increase news staff will be in investigative reporting, and my sense from reading the paper is that most of this is not of the TMZ variety, though I suppose some fraction of it must be. Still, the problem has never really been the presence of popular crap in either news papers or news television (as we know, horoscopes were long the most popular part of the US newspaper); the problem has been packaging popular crap as news. I don't object to a gossip column in the daily paper, as long as for the most part it is not on the front page, and does not take the place of actual news. And if the revenue generated by the gossip column and the horoscope and the classifides and the comics underwrites more serious journalism, then all the better. Politico says Bezos' model is to get most of his revenue from affordable subscriptions ($36/year) which is a serious bargain compared to when I used to spend 25 cents a day to buy the LA Times Mon-Sat ($78/year). If he can turn out high quality journalism along with viral gossip that makes people want to pay for the subscription, I am all for it.
What makes this relevant to our list is, can such a model be applied to television news? In some respects this is what the asshole has been trying to do at CNN, and if the implementation can be trusted I am supportive. There is no reason that CNN should be serious news 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - that is an expectation we have never had for even the best newspapers. What I expect from CNN is a first-class news operation, which can both provide substantive instant coverage of important breaking events anywhere in the world, and regular, substantive hourly newscasts two or three times a day, supplemented by reliable news summaries every couple of hours. If they fill in the rest of their schedule with opinion and infotainment programming that generates the revenue that pays for the news, that would be great, and no different from when Paley paid for Walter Cronkite with the Beverly Hillbillies. The problem has been that CNN has 1) not been that succesful at putting on revenue-generating fluff and 2) not been able or willing to put on enough quality or even credible news to justify its name. Something is seriously wrong when PBS can produce more and better news programming every single day than CNN. Perhaps though Bezos can point the way for other news providers to do both good and well. I hope so - in the coming Age we will need quality news operations. http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/12/the-profitable-washington-post-adding-more-than-five-dozen-journalists-004900 -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
