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.”
