On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 2:27 PM, PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 >
The problem with newspapers is not a simple one of the quality of news. In other words, consumers looking for news do not weigh if the news they get from a newspaper is more worth their money than news from a different source and spend accordingly. The legacy newspaper model is built on advertising, which means getting papers in front of the most people, and so a paper had to appeal to as big an audience as possible. Two disruptions: advertising fell off a cliff as classified ads went to the internet and traditional advertisers like department stores either went out of business or stopped buying full page ads. The second disruption is that national and international stories are now available for free online as well as movie and TV reviews. In order to survive, a newspaper has to either keep local and give news not available elsewhere or scale up to go national and compete with the New York Times, The Guardian, the WSJ, etc. Bezos is scaling the Washington Post up to national/international and he has pockets deep enough to take the chance. He also has the advantage of not being a news syndicate so he does not have to figure out how to use the profits of his high performing papers to prop up the failing ones. That is what keeps other papers from scaling up. Could CNN follow the Bezos model? An independent CNN perhaps, but currently CNN is a small part of Time Warner and the channel's business goals, dictated from outside, would keep it from making that kind of change. -- -- 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.
