Your newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2007

Steve Safran January 2nd, 2007

BY STEVE SAFRAN
MANAGING EDITOR
LOST REMOTE
mail@stevesafran.com

It’s always so hard to come up with New Year resolutions, so I’ve done them for you. That’s right – everything you need to change for 2007 is right here, courtesy of Lost Remote. Your station or media outlet just needs to resolve to make the following changes for a prosperous New Year. Unlike most resolutions, however, these come with a warning: These resolutions are mandatory. There’s no excuse for breaking these resolutions. These resolutions learn from the mistakes of the past year or two, and they’ll even make you money (also a resolution) if you stick to ‘em. Happy New Year. Now then, repeat after me: “I resolve to…”

STOP THINKING OF OUR WEBSITE AS AN EXPENSE CENTER: TV and radio stations are not used to being entrepreneurial. They don’t really think about investments in the long term. They understand if they buy a certain syndicated program for $X it will make $X+$Y immediately. News directors often have 12-18 months to improve ratings, so they’re not in a rush to improve the web. Many station managers have the same immediate pressures. Three-five year investment plans are great in theory, but at the local level they don’t play well yet. And they must.

There is no business that starts up that expects to make money immediately. Media outlets need to come up with longer-term business plans for their digital media initiatives. Simply saying “If I add a $30,000 web producer, that means I will lose $30,000” is silly and shortsighted. Did you build a TV station and then say “But if I start a newscast, I will lose money?”

START THINKING OF THE WEB AS MORE THAN OUR NEWSCAST ONLINE: Your website is a new channel, not just a new way of repurposing your news. If you were magically given a new TV channel, you wouldn’t populate it with your newscast over and over, would you? So why are you doing that online?

Think of the website as a new channel instead of a news site. How can you create cool new blogs about niches in your community that will draw new visitors? The website is not a way to draw people to your television station. It’s a way to draw people to your website. Create more original content. Take advantage of the new technologies and efficiencies and start pumping out shows about your community. Marketing 101: Differentiate the Product.

INTEGRATE BLOGGING INTO OUR NEWSROOM: I know, change is painful. Every time I bring up “Your reporters and anchors need to blog,” it starts with a huge backlash. After about an hour, people come around. Then they start sharing wonderful ideas. It’s additional work, yes. Not a ton, but some. Get over it. Workflows change. Everyone has time to write one or two blog entries per day. They’re three or four sentences long. And once you have added 15 blogs to your site, you have a whole new set of programming. (see above) that is very attractive to local sponsors.

LOSE THE OLD SUPERSTITIONS: Every news director and station GM knows by now what they need to do to improve their online presence. They need to make better use of the staff they already have. Newsrooms need to change workflows, not add work. They need to break news online. They have to stop fearing the unproven superstitions of “cannibalizing ourselves” or “diluting our brand,” whatever that means. Seriously, I don’t know what that means. If your brand is NBC9 or ABC52 or CBS19 or FOX192 – well, how the hell can you get any more diluted than that?

Sometimes I hear excuses that simply sound like what you’re “supposed to say.” People take great comfort in these, because nobody argues with them. It doesn’t matter that they’re wrong. They just sound good, like the ones I used to give when I was a producer. And here, I confess: When I didn’t feel like adding a story to my newscast, all I had to say was “It will ruin the flow,” and for some reason nobody ever debated that.

We also don’t get to ignore the web anymore because it’s “not our core business identity.” Ick.

HOLD BLOGGER MEETUPS AT MY STATION: Stop ignoring the blogs. Sticking your head in the sand does you no good. Quite the opposite, in fact – it proves your ctitics’ point about you not listening to your audience. Identify the 10-15 leading bloggers in your community and have them come to your station. Win them over. Let the sun shine in. Terry Heaton preaches this over and over, and he’s right.

QUESTION EVERY OLD ASSUMPTION: Take a look at the old assumptions that were proven wrong in 2006. Assumption: “Putting our shows online will cannibalize from ourselves.” Wrong. ABC is pleased with its experiment putting its shows online. CBS says it saw ratings bumps after reaching a deal with YouTube. Start using the George Costanza Plan: Do Everything Different. Assume your site has to look exactly like your TV newscast? Uh… why? How about making the best local website you can, no matter what it looks like? Worst assumption ever? “Nobody is buying web advertising.” I have plenty of evidence and research to the contrary. What’s up your sleeve?

PREPARE MY SITE FOR THE 2008 ELECTIONS: Now’s your chance. There will be a lot of money going into online advertising for the election. And you can get it. But only if you can make a compelling case that your site deserves it. Political ad buyers will love it if you can tell them how your county-by-county ad tracking will allow them to buy exactly where they need to focus their efforts.

The pollsters know where they want to focus their money. And they want to spend a lot of it. This resolution is simple: your pocketbook should be ready to receive this nice, fat check with the kind of geo-targeted, demographic-specific information for which campaigns are willing to pay a premium.

NEVER ALLOW THE WORDS “ADDED VALUE” IN MY SHOP AGAIN: I have been known to jump up and down in meetings and scream – actually scream – “Added value on the web site stops NOW!” As long as you are training your advertisers that the web is added value, you are telling them it is NO value. Look at it another way: If I sold some web ads would you allow me to throw in TV time as “added value?” QED.

RIP OFF THE BAND-AID OF RESISTANCE IN MY NEWSROOM: Right now, there are journalism students who are learning how to do more with less. They will shoot their own stories, edit them, write them, present them on-air, blog them and even post a still picture on the site. Then they’ll write about it on MySpace. Do you think newsrooms are going to look at these multi-talented and say “That’s all well and good, but we just want to take advantage of ten percent of your skills?”

Existing newsies need to know the painful truth: we have to work on more platforms as part of our jobs now. If we don’t want to, that’s fine. Younger people who will work for less will be graduating this June. And next June. And the following June…

GET STORY IDEAS FROM MY VIEWERS, NOT THE NEWSPAPERS: Have a site with open comments, message boards and local blogs, and you’ll never need to scour the morning paper for old story ideas again. They’ll be watching you to figure out what to write about. What are we accused of most? Not reflecting the community. So – what does the community actually care about? Listen, and you will find out.

MANDATE MY WEB PRODUCERS SIT IN THE NEWSROOM: Web journalists are journalists. Journalists do journalism from a newsroom. And I don’t want to hear “there aren’t enough desks.” I’ll argue you can find people sitting in the newsroom who need a desk there less than your web news producers. So move ‘em. The news will go online faster and it will be more accurate. People will trust your site more and visit more.

INSIST EVERYONE IN THE NEWSROOM UNDERSTAND BASIC ECONOMICS: This is a Cory-ism. Several years ago, Cory put forward the revolutionary idea that everyone in the newsroom should know Econ 101. Journalists can no longer pretend that what we do is divorced from the money side of our – gasp – business. We should never tailor what we cover to the advertisers’ concerns. But we need to understand that when we call our company “cheap,” (and I have yet to find a newsroom that doesn’t), there are reasons.

Some of those reasons are to save our jobs. Some of those reasons are responsibilities to stockholders. You may not like those reasons, but we’re grownups now. And nobody has ever taken a job and then found out what they got paid after they opened their first paycheck.

END ANY TEASE WRITING STRATEGY THAT RELIES ON FOOLING MY AUDIENCE OR EXAGGERATING DANGERS FOR EFFECT: There are ways to write a great tease. And we’re not anti-tease here at Lost Remote. We’re anti-fear, anti-shock and anti-misleading teases. (You know – pro-journalism.)

Did you know you that sometimes you can write a better tease by telling people exactly what the story is? That’s right – if you treat the audience as intelligent and tell them simply what’s coming up, they may want to stay tuned to learn more. Someone recently asked me “what if the next story needs a good tease because it’s a lousy story?” Simple answer: “Why the hell did you cover it in the first place?” Scare teases are (maybe) short-term gains with (definitely) long-term damage.

The same goes for story leads. Cliches are so cliché. I’ve heard so many stories that begin with how something is supposed to be my “worst nightmare.” Well, my worst nightmare has to do with being naked and tongue-tied in front of a bunch of Trinity College sophomore women on final exam day without having studied or taken the class while possessed of the same basic anatomy as a G.I. Joe doll. So unless you’re going to deliver on THAT lead, knock it off.

REPORT RESULTS OF INVESTIGATIONS THAT ONLY RESULT IN ACTUAL NEWS: Some times you spend months looking into a story with your investigative unit, and it just doesn’t pan out. Does that stop some stations? Heck, no! They go with what they have, and wrap it around a lot of hype and a lot of lines like “Some people say,” and “It could still be dangerous.”

I saw a report in the past sweeps month that was so unbelievably irresponsible, I actually refrained from writing about it on LR. Why? I couldn’t think of any positive lessons to learn from it and it would have been stupid and obvious to point out how wrong it was. Let’s just say that if you have one teenager claiming something “shocking” that your own investigative unit found no evidence of, you don’t go ahead and ”Special Report” it as “every parent’s nightmare” as though it’s fact. (And let’s just further say based upon this girl’s testimony, not only wasn’t I, a parent, scared, but I wished I were back in high school. That takes some doing.)

ENCOURAGE AND REWARD CREATIVE THINKING: One client of mine showed me a promo reel that was, unquestionably, the best I had ever seen. Why? It was creative, clever, funny when appropriate, and occasionally over-the-top. The station is taking risks. None of that “Serious Anchor Looking Serious While Talking Seriously” crap. I should care that your news team “really likes” each other? I should care that you’re LIVE? In 2007? I should care about how large a number follows your Doppler thingy? As though I woke up and my wife asked me “Honey? What’s the Doppler going to be like today?” ARE YOU SERIOUS? PEOPLE DON’T TALK LIKE THIS! STOP IT. Sorry. New Year holiday stress. You get the point.

If you want people to “Trust our news,” give them trustworthy news. If you want to impress them with your weather forecast, hire good meteorologists who will provide accurate information without a lot of hijinks. If you want the audience to like your morning team, then for God’s sake, have a likeable morning team that knows something about your community and doesn’t seem as though they could be planted in any town in America.

Oddly, newsrooms are allowing more creativity online than they will on-air. I don’t get this – unless I do. The sentiment is “Sure, let them be fun and interesting and creative on the web. Just don’t do any of that crap on television or people won’t take us seriously.” The best and most interesting local news is online right now. That is no accident.

DECIDE WHAT BUSINESS WE ARE IN: I always like to start meetings by asking this question: “What business are you in?” Are you in the TV business? The news business? The communications business? What, exactly, do you do?

When I was growing up, my Dad worked at Polaroid. The company thought it was in the silver-based film business. They sold cameras at a loss so you’d buy SX-70 film at a premium. That was, pretty much, the business model. It’s not a bad business model, per se. Gillette still follows it today, with razors. Ditto the Playstation 3 if you can find one. The only problem was that Polaroid was not in the silver film business – they were in the instant imaging business. So when digital cameras started to come along – what proper noun should have been associated with the instant pictures that come out? “Polaroid” could have been like “Xerox,” “Kleenex” and “Band-Aid” today. Xerox realized they were in the “document” business, not the photocopier business, so they adapted and went on. Polaroid never developed (sorry) a good digital camera and printer of its own. Now someone owns their brand and slaps it on batteries and televisions. A Polaroid television. I keep expecting to have to peel off the front and shake it to watch a show.

So, is your business a “television station?” No. You are in the information business. Specifically, you are in the local information business. With that as your core, now you are well-positioned. As long as you keep thinking you’re in the business of television, you won’t be looking ahead at the guy waiting to buy your place for peanuts because you didn’t see the hundreds of competitors in your city gathering and distributing local information faster and better than you.

Break these resolutions at your own risk. Just like the “I will lose weight and get in shape” vows, your health depends upon them. But unlike those vows, there’s no postponing these.

There you have it: open source consulting. Maybe I should make this stuff shareware. Everyone who uses this advice, send me $20…