I already stay a half-hour after each shift to blog for my station. Maybe if managment would take away arbitrary and time-consuming producing tasks (making OTS graphics, creating video “placeholders,” flagging certain stories for archive and others for discarding, logging every song used in our newscasts) everyone would have extra time to contribute.

It’s easy to propose solutions like this, where you tell us how it should be done, but then say, “Of course, *I* don’t have time to do this, but someone else…”

your name looks much nicer in BLUE… like in last night’s two comments under the eventcasting story.

somehow i thought it was a sign that ‘retirement’ was over.

In addition, a lot of news managers make the website a ridiculously low priority. Your story loses a lot of power when stripped of the images and the script is just posted as text online. You need to craft it like a newspaper column, and that’s time reporters and producers don’t often have. If I were running a station, I’d lure in as many college newspaper staffers as possible and turn them loose to populate the site with fresh information. It’s better than the cut-and-paste mentality we have now.

Give me a site that’s simple and clean, with easy navigation and smooth/functional video links. Oh, and push the best content to the front page, no matter who generates it or what format (video/print/blog) it is.

It’s nice to hear someone bitching about ads whose site consists entirely of gaming Google search so people will come see his ads that link to other ads and pages with cut-and-pasted content. Well played! Best Ironic Post of 2008!

… Just another retired talking head

Second TV? That’s the thinking that leads to failure on the web.

And by the way Joel, nice site.

The newscasts from the top TV stations in most markets are watched by significantly more people than who read the local physical newspaper. Yet in most markets, the newspaper’s website typically beats the top TV station’s website in both audience and revenue by a significant margin.

The top TV station in most markets garners a 15-25 percent share or more of local television dollars but only 1-3 percent of local internet ad dollars.

A typical TV website repurposes 90-100% of all its information from TV and the wires. The editorial process for assigning stories to reporters in nearly all TV stations is based entirely on TV criteria.

Etc.

I’m not criticizing local web teams. On the contrary, as I explained, this lack of success is due to bigger factors that are largely out of their control.

Because of network shortsightedness and digital rights complications, local stations can’t offer the entertainment product that most viewers associate with their brand. “Where’s the Bengals game? Ah it’s on CBS which means KRC”. Of course if I can’t go to wkrc.com and see the game, a large chunk of the brand value is lost.

TV station that offer local news online face even more competition than for their OTA products. And with only a fraction of the production values viewers associate with TV news. However because anyone can start a website “NewsNowIowa” and become a competitor, I’d say it’d be a mistake for a station trash what little brand equity they can bring to the internet.

IMO local TV can only succeed at a scale proportionate to their OTA business, if they can bring their entertainment properties (Dr. Phil and Lost) to their local audiences. And with the same identical adload seen on OTA broadcasts. The idea of trading 24 minutes of ads on Heroes via local broadcasters for 3-4 30 secs. from a network website is stupid for the networks and a disaster for affiliates.

like ‘viewser’ this too will be used without attribution to lr.

I think the point is that it’s a *new medium.* To call lit a second anything drives home the point in the posting … looking at it as simply an extension of the current old medium.

Let’s try this mantra: The web is not TV …. the web is not TV … the web is not TV.

you can find it in the nav column @ thepomoblog (’bout 1/2 way down).

The web is no longer a “unique medium” and is rapidly becoming the “second tv.” Yes, you can take away some of the flashy overdone logos off the website, but they make me feel comfortable, that I’m getting my information from a reliable source.

It’s unfair for you to say in a blanket statement that tv staions have done a poor job succeeding online, when you don’t know their specific objectives are … let alone not knowing what their benchmarks for success are.

The only point I will add to this is that a lot of tv station web sites are overdone with advertising.

When the ads become so overwhelming in terms of amount of “real estate” on the home page they take up, rather than that space devoted to more news and information, that turns the user away.

Maybe one of the issues is, are the tv stations looking at their web sites as advertising revenue generators or information vehicles?

Joel Cohen