12 Comments Add your own

• 1. Dan  |  August 23rd, 2006 at 7:29 pm

  From what my friends in Nashville tell me, WKRN is less than a respected news org. The one-man-band reporter-shooter-producer-editor combo promoted by your buddy may not be the holy grail you and he seem to think it is. Is he making gobs of money as a consultant?, probably. So did Magid, the organization that basically ended any credible local news as we remember it. They wanted to make sure your local female anchor had the proper hair style as did the
  suit your sports guy was wearing. OH, and the set
  better be fancy too.

  Let’s put it in perspective.
  A reporter has skills in that very area.
  A shooter or photog has their own set of skill base.
  An editor, another pair of eyes.
  A producer, someone to bring all the elements together.

  If you remove all but one of these people and make
  one person’s job the responsibility to do all of the above, while you will occasionally end up with a great
  story, most of the time it will be just material to fill up
  your newscast between commercials, kinda what
  local news is right now anyway.

  There are many ways to run a more efficient station
  and newscast, but eliminating eyes, ears and brains
  is short sighted. If it’s breaking news, two people at the scene, one reporting and one getting great pictures…this is best.

  If it’s a story you are working up back at the station, one person on the phone hustling up a story, one person figuring out where the story is going, one person figuring out what video is needed….
  this makes a good presentation.

  Just one man’s opinion.
  Dan

• 2. Safran  |  August 23rd, 2006 at 8:06 pm

  Dan:

  You present a side of the argument very well, candidly and thoughtfully. I respect your opinion completely. And I have written before about supporting specialism. The bloggers over at the Photogs Lounge and Lenslinger will back me up on that. You can\’t tell a good story without good pictures. I do not - and have never - believed the one man band is the Holy Grail. Far from it. But it is not a pariah either. It is one piece of an overall evolving news model. It is not the whole puzzle. My respect in these pages for photogs is well-documented. And I dare say I know a few who think there is a place for one man bands.

  But that\’s not my focus (or, frankly, expertise). I point to WKRN as a place that\’s experimenting. People don\’t always like experiments. But we need to try new ways to make local news relevant and, yes, profitable. Things do change. Just ask the tape ops being phased out by digital playback.

  I will say that Terry is not a \”consultant\” in the bad-reputation sense of the word it unfortunately has become. I recommend a beer with the guy - it\’s easy to dismiss consultants as \”bad for news,\” but Heaton dislikes that kind of consulting as much as the rest of us.

  There are new realities about TV news, the budgets we face, and how our roles are changing, and I can assure you Terry is first and foremost on the side of journalism. There is always discomfort in change. That\’s why we need guys like Heaton leading the way from a practical and journalistic perspective and not just a \”let\’s fool the audience into watching five minutes longer for another tenth of a Nielsen point\” perspective.

  Thank you for sharing your thoughts here, and lending your insight. Excellent perspective.

• 3. Jason  |  August 23rd, 2006 at 8:34 pm

  As a reporter, I never thought I’d be writing web versions of my work, blogging, and experimenting with video e-mail. But I am, and all of us have to try new things to see what sticks. I think the VJ thing is a good idea for a number 3 or 4 station with nothing to lose. Why not try it?

  My worry is you end up with MORE stories that no one cares about. If you end up with better, more deeply researched and relevant stories– you’re getting somewhere.

• 4. Dan  |  August 23rd, 2006 at 11:21 pm

  Steve,
  I’m always the guy who wants to try a new way or new
  equipment that could save time and/or money. I’m the
  disruptive one in the organization that many people get
  pissed at. So don’t take my comments as meaning
  I don’t like change. Far from it.
  My question is about basic needs for doing good work.
  Even supermen/women can’t do it all, all the time.

  As far as stations being profitable, they are far from
  going broke. Commercial rates are still going up,
  cash flow up year over year. But they have so much debt from all the buyouts, it’s all about squeezing as many dollars as they can. They are still seeing hefty margins and that’s part of why they haven’t been reacting very quickly to changes all around them.
  Maybe the downward slide is happening faster now.
  But I still think, if you put out a product that people find useful, they will buy it-watch it-read it..whatever.

  Dan

• 5. thedetroitchannel  |  August 24th, 2006 at 5:57 am

  they got tv in nashville?

• 6. Alyssa  |  August 24th, 2006 at 7:59 am

  “watch this or die” status –> this is a reeason most of my friends (age range 23-35) don’t watch local news. My roommate (who is a h.s. teacher of broadcast jourrnalism and media production) once saw a local news tease that said “Could handwashing be dangerous?” Saddest part- it wasn’t even sweeps month.

  Local news can be a turn off b/c it’s TOO local. Every fire doesn’t need to be breaking news, unless it impacts traffic, transit, schools, etc., is a string of fires that might be arson. Or is something as horrific as the Station Nightclub fire (which also made national news, but that’s not the point).

• 7. Terry Heaton  |  August 24th, 2006 at 10:30 am

  Thanks for the props, Steve. I wanted to leave a note for Dan to an entry I put together earlier this month that shows the problem. It’s not about money or margins; it’s about growth. Public companies live or die based on growth, so to use the making-money-hand-over-fist argument is specious and irrelevant. What’s happening in broadcasting is all about the lack of solid growth. That makes investors nervous, and the stock prices fall. If they fall low enough, perhaps some companies will buy back their stock and go private, which would be the best thing that could happen to the industry. Will that happen? Don’t hold your breath.

  On a newsgathering level, it isn’t about specialization or whether two people can do a better job than one. I think we can all agree that teams are generally better than individuals. But, see, that’s irrelevant too, because the fiscal squeeze will eventually force this on everybody, and would you rather have it happen that way or go into it with a modicum of control? Moreover, technology is challenging all the assumptions about what can and cannot be done, and sooner or later, the web will take center stage in the workflow process. This simply will not happen without streamlining, and the problem if you don’t is that entrepreneurial folks — backed by venture or angel capital — will eat your lunch with their own version of online local news. What will you do then?

  You know, folks, I really think it’s time we stopped fighting each other and begin to accept certain realities of media life, circa 2006. Your brand won’t save you. And Google wants all the ad revenue there is. This isn’t about being right or wrong or keeping score anymore. It’s about bloody survival.

  And yes again, Detroit, they do have TV in Nashville.

• 8. thedetroitchannel  |  August 24th, 2006 at 1:00 pm

  you know i was just ke-e-e-e-ding, right?

• 9. Mitch  |  August 28th, 2006 at 9:32 am

  Terry refers to a show called The Daily News with Jon Stewart. Not familiar with that one.

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