For the first time in nearly a decade, I’m not in Las Vegas for the annual NAB-RTNDA show. And I imagine, not many of you are there, either. “There are, sadly, many open seats at the opening session,” Steve Safran writes. “The floor is practically empty. Still, I am hopeful that the sessions will provoke leaders to take charge and affect real change.” He’s Twittering about it here.
AR&D’s Terry Heaton is also there, and he blogged about his experience on the first RTNDA panel, Leading News Reinvention. “The view from inside the business of broadcast news is very different than the view from the outside,” he writes with a tone of frustration after the session was over. “There exists the (nearly) absolute conviction that ‘quality’ content is the key to the future, and that we’ve cut back on investigative reporting, so audiences are turning away.” But as Heaton correctly explains, that view misses the point. “This is not only naive, but it completely misses the bigger picture of what’s taking place in media — that the ‘mass’ in mass media is being scattered and that the people formerly known as our advertisers are finding better and cheaper ways to find scattered eyeballs.”
Absolutely right. And I’m glad I’m not there, because despite RTNDA’s best efforts, the panel discussions erode into the same old arguments. It seems the local broadcasting industry is underestimating the need for meaningful change, or perhaps, unable to make it happen. So this year, I’m sitting it out, and I’ll spend the time working on some promising projects that I believe have the potential to take local news to the next level.
But I will miss catching up with all of the Lost Remote friends and readers. And the lunchtime margaritas.
