The web is not the TV minor leagues
Steve Safran March 16th, 2007
BY STEVE SAFRAN
MANAGING EDITOR
LOST REMOTE
steviesaf@gmail.com
(This originally appeared in this week’s AR&D Media 2.0 Intel Newsletter.)
Baseball season! It’s back, and along with it, lots of bad baseball metaphors. Who am I to resist? Here’s mine: your website is not your TV newscast’s minor league.
Most newsrooms have had websites for a few years now. But they’re still used to thinking of them as second-class citizens. Accordingly, material gets put on the site without regard for whether it is best serving its audience by being there.
Some stations will dip a toe into original content. But what is it so far? Scraps, mostly. Leftovers that didn’t make air. Sometimes, that’s useful - there are, indeed, full interviews that should be put on the web. But often, they’re put on the web for the sake of saying “we have exclusive web content.” You do not. You have leftovers. You have shells and you’re hawking them as peanuts. There is an easy way to generate exclusive web content while you’re in the field - shoot an interview exclusively for the web audience.
Another trap: stations will put people “on camera” for web-only video when those people are absolutely not ready to be on camera. Sometimes, that’s charming. The wonderful thing about the web is that we don’t demand perfection. We don’t even want it. We like quirky. We like real. But there is a difference between “real and quirky” and “bad delivery.” A person is either ready for an audience or they’re not. I find that some people who are uncomfortable doing web video are charming people who are smart about the web - but they’re trying too much to be like television people. Tell them to be themselves and that may help.
There’s a different audience online, to be sure - but your online audience deserves great stuff too, not the stuff that wasn’t good enough for the “real” audience in the real stadium downtown.
And then there’s the human resources matter: two practices that make me scream are 1. Turfing people to the web who are riding out the string of their employment and 2. Deciding someone is such a good writer that they should be “in the newsroom” and not “just on the web.” Really - what are the messages you’re sending in both scenarios? The messages are that : TV is the big leagues, veterans who have lost their fastball go to the web, and the up-and-coming kids practice on the web until they’re ready for The Show.
Strike Three.
So play ball, everyone. But recognize you’re in a much bigger stadium than you used to be and your fans want a whole lot more than fastballs and strikeouts. And, as that great philosopher “Crash” Davis said in Bull Durham, “Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls - it’s more democratic.”
10 Comments Add your own
1. thewashingtonchannel | March 16th, 2007 at 5:55 am
yes, but if you dressed your anchors up in uniforms and showed their crotches more guys would visit your lame web channel.
2. Rob | March 16th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Is there a general assumption that all stations, regardless of market size or broadcast group affiliation, have the resources in salary, infrastructure, technology and knowledge that will help them succeed in making their web properties more than just second-class citizens?
I use a lot of your guys’ suggestions and comments in helping tweak my station’s online presence but time and again I see suggestions that fly in the face of the small and medium market reality, that the majority of the news sites don’t have the resources I mentioned above and don’t know where to begin or how to get their web properties off the ground.
Some sites, not for lack of effort or lack of vision but lack of resources, just won’t be able to compete on the same level as a Top 50 market in terms of meeting the exacting standards of the ever-changing Internets and the demands of its viewsers.
3. tkp | March 16th, 2007 at 11:15 am
I think you’re right about some of this but there are two things you didn’t mention.
First of all most broadcasters see that traditional on-air broadcasting is their bread and butter and they are very reluctant to take any resources away from that.
Second is the difference in pay. You can hire an intern to create web content, not quality but enough to get by and have a presence, and pay them a minimal amount where as an on-air personality commands a much higher sum. Until the websites start to contribute more to the bottom line this will continue and until GM’s decide to make a concerted effort to increase quality on the sites you won’t see revenues rise. It’s very much a chicken and egg problem. It’s a big risk for a GM to throw too much money into the websites when it’s going against a proven money winner like traditional broadcast.
Stations need to have a little more fear of revenue bleed before they’ll be willing to make a real effort at original quality online content.
4. Steve Safran | March 16th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Rob and tkp: I understand your points and your plight. And I try never to make points here that wouldn’t work in any market. In fact, the stuff we talk about here usually works better in smaller markets, because smaller markets are more willing to experiment and are less tied down by “tradition.”
tkp: you’re right about the chicken and the egg problem. To which I ask: “To what point does the ratings drop and the revenue drop have to hit before those stations realize they need to do more than throw a bunch of garbage on a site and call it a news website?” And since when is having a “web presence” a goal? It’s better to have a blog. In fact, free consultant advice here: why not have a blog? I’m serious: if there are no resources, wouldn’t a blog be more efficient? And more fun, besides? With so many horribly ugly and impossible to navigate sites out there, a blog news site would be a refreshing surprise.
I don’t understand why newsrooms continue to accept awful sites (unless I do). The sites reflect who they are as a station. They wouldn’t accept awful promos (which they spend perfectly good money on), so why accept an awful site that is the face of the station?
Rob: The smaller markets are the place where this is actually happening best. Look at Lawrence, Kansas. Look at local newspaper sites. It’s not about the staff - it’s about the workflow. If a newsroom just changes its workflow just a tad and everyone pitches in a few minutes - you’ve got a kickass site. As long as the newsroom sees a site as a secondary product to the Master Television Newscast, you’re right - not enough staff. But if contributing an item to the web is part of the job - which, sorry, but our jobs just changed and it has to be this way - then the site grows. And so does the revenue.
And thank you for using “viewsers” in a sentence. You deserve an LR T-shirt..
5. Rob | March 16th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I think we see the same problem Steve, just from different perspectives.
One thing is for sure … the problem can’t be solved with some miracle solution that will solve a single site’s internet challenges overnight.
It can take weeks up to months to get a news operation on board with all of the changes necessary to get where you guys feel web news operations need to be now.
The scary thing is by the time a news operation invests the necessary resources to get to where they need to be now its several months down the road and there’s a new benchmark being laid down they need adapt to in order to meet the needs of the viewsers.
6. thewashingtonchannel | March 16th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
great comments!
but it based on a premise that top brass actually wants the net to succeed.
i can’t wait for cory to add some “new media” stocks to that chart… watch how they act in tandem opposite
7. Steve Safran | March 16th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Rob: I agree, and I will even push the conversation further and say we see it from the same perspective.
One of the things Warley and I are always talking about with groups is how there is no magic bullet. There is no one thing stations can do to fix things overnight. It’s a combination of lots of things. Some can be started now, some take months, some need to be budgeted for starting next year, some are a longer-term plan.
Obviously they can’t all be executed now. What they have in common is that they need to be discussed now.
I recognize that, because LR is a day-to-day, moment-by-moment site, it can seem as though we exhort stations to do everything at that moment. We’re more pragmatic than that. We have all worked in stations and with stations. None of this is easy and none of it is fast.
However change is required and the more stations ignore it, the less likely they are to catch up.
So, I submit, we see things from the same side. Stations are crazy if they’re waiting for web money to flow in before they build a good site. That’s like waiting for TV money to flow in before you build a TV station. They’re equally crazy if they’re waiting to lose a ton of money on TV before they “try this web thing.” By then it will be years too late.
8. jn | March 16th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
VX30, a streaming video software company currently streams Maui’s Visitor Channel 7 using their live broadcast solution. This live Internet stream allows them to reach viewers worldwide. See for yourself at http://www.vx30.com
9. tkp | March 19th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
The web is a future revenue stream that needs to be tapped in order to support declining BCF numbers however convincing the people in control of the purse strings to experiment is where I’m having the problem. I can’t point to other stations numbers as an example of success and I think that’s what most station managers want. So my question is this: how does someone who believes that the internet is going to enhance broadcast tv revenue convince people who have been doing the same thing for years to invest in it?
They want to see success first and that’s not possible. Is anyone else in the same dilemma?
A bit off topic is the fact that I’ve been messing around with the new version of the USA Today website and I think it has some really innovative concepts that can be incorporated into local station sites. Has anyone else looked at it and if so what do you think of it?
10. tkp | March 19th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Steve: On the point of having just a presence on the web and what good it does you’ll be surprised but I think a lot of GM’s don’t understand the potential of it and put something up because they think they have to or because everyone else is. For the most part I’ve found the web staff to be a second class citizen in most news operations. Most people who have made it to management in local TV have been in the business for a long time and there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation. They really have an attitude of this is the way we’ve always done things and this is the way I’ll continue to do things. Like the old saying says “No one ever got fired hiring IBM.” Basically don’t stick your neck out and take too many chances.
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