No, I’m not referring to the obvious connection, especially for folks who work the overnight shifts. I’m reading a book (that has yet to be released) called “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, and it has a fascinating story about the coffee business with some surprising parallels to local TV news, young people and declining ratings (especially in light of the story below).
Back in the late 1950s and early 60s, Maxwell House began slowly substituting tasty but expensive “Arabica” beans with bitter but inexpensive “Robusta” beans in its coffee, Patnaik writes. After all, customers were complaining about the increasingly high prices. Maxwell House made the transition slowly, conducting consumer research along the way, and the vast majority of its coffee drinkers were unable to detect the difference. This kept prices under control, customers happy, and the business continued to run at a respectable profit. Other coffee makers did the same.
By 1964, coffee sales declined for the first time in the history of the U.S. Younger people weren’t becoming coffee drinkers. Why? To a first-time coffee drinker, it tasted horrible. Coke and Pepsi sales began to skyrocket. Coffee continued its decline. Then a man named Howard Schultz took note of the espresso bars in Italy and launched a little company called “Starbucks,” bringing back Arabica beans with a new way of doing business. Young people began to drink coffee again. The industry had been reinvented.
You can roughly equate “taste” in the sense of coffee to “relevancy” for local TV news. With the demand to produce more and more daily newscasts — while keeping costs under control and fighting new competitors — local TV has become more breathless and plastic and less substantive and real. Consultants helped pave the way to commoditization with “best practices” culled from other markets, which are really just the same old ways of doing things. Local TV news slowly switched to Robusta beans, losing its relevancy, and just like the coffee companies of old, existing viewers don’t really detect much of a difference. But younger viewers — ages 18-34 — are watching less and less, or not starting to watch at all. It doesn’t speak to them anymore. It’s not relevant.
You might argue this decline is due entirely to the internet. But TV stations have websites, too. And that lack of on-air relevancy is translated online, where they’re reflections of their on-air editorial product, handcuffed by old thinking and cost structures. You’ll often hear local TV execs talk about on-air’s tremendous reach — that even with declining ratings, it’s still a terrific vehicle to reach large audiences. Yes, that’s true, but that reach isn’t translating online. And that’s a very big problem.
So what’s the “Starbucks” model of local TV news? Good question. It stands to reason it will be delivered in a non-linear form with vibrant community participation. It will be relevant again, switching back to Arabica beans with an entirely new business model and value proposition. And like Starbucks, it may sound preposterous to begin with.
