Other Crap

What's wrong with the TV news: You Don't Understand Our Audience

Frankly, this article is a lot of hullabaloo about nothing. It misses the real point. There is an obvious reason why broadcast TV is losing ratings in the fields of national and international news. It simply has no niche to fill. Twenty to fifty years ago, it was competing only against newspapers. It had the advantages of immediacy and identification. It had the stories in the moment, and they were delivered by our trusted friends. Today, broadcast TV news has no remaining niche to fill. The internet is instantaneous. It is in-depth. It offers multiple viewpoints. It is everywhere. And it is interactive. It fills all the roles TV used to fill, and adds many more layers as well.

And the remaining people who want talking heads can dial up cable TV or talk radio just about 24 hours a day, while the broadcast channels are delivering news only when they feel like delivering it. National broadcast TV news is already extinct. It just doesn't know it yet, because there are still consumers whose habits were formed in earlier times and are slow to adapt.

Note that there is still a market for local news, and the network affiliates will continue to fill that for some time, simply because the battle in that arena is still basically newspapers vs. television, and television still has some competitive advantages.

Newspapers have the same problem as TV. In the battle twenty years ago, newspapers had the advantage of depth of coverage - more stories, and each story in more depth than TV. But it does not have those advantages in comparison to the internet. In fact, it has a disadvantage in those very arenas it used to dominate. The internet has hundreds of sources reporting from all over the world, many of them offering far more depth than a newspaper, and in the aggregate offering hundreds of times more depth on far more stories than any single newspaper can offer. And it does so almost instantaneously, rather than a day or two days later. I used to be a newspaper junkie and now I've stopped reading newspapers altogether. Every national or international story in a newspapers is something I have already read many hours earlier in far more depth.

Again, newspapers still have a niche to fill in reporting local news. I would still read the paper if I were living in the town where I grew up, but I've spent my life as a gypsy and I don't care about local news.