Obituary: Broadcast Journalism, 1938-2010

Broadcast Journalism, arguably the most influential sociological development of the 20th century, was born in 1938, when CBS Radio began broadcasting The World Today with Edward R. Murrow. For the next few decades that followed, Broadcast Journalism would come to define even further the principles of integrity established by the newspaper industry.

My participation in this saga began in January 1976. I had just been accepted to the broadcasting school at Brown College in Minneapolis. In order to help put food on the table, I worked full-time as a dispatcher at KMSP-TV, channel 9. My job was to monitor all the city and county police and fire channels for any sudden breaking news events. When something came up, such as a multi-alarm blaze, I would run down the hall to the senior news editor's desk and report the details of the event. It was his decision, then, whether or not to dispatch a film photographer, and perhaps a reporter, to the scene.

For this baby-boomer with plenty of aspirations, it was a glorious time to be in broadcast news. While my work was done mainly in the dispatcher's den, it was always exciting to run into the bullpen where the news director, news editor, producers, anchors, and reporters were hard at work putting together the stories for the evening broadcasts. What were the facts of the story? How many sources? Were there the requisite multiple confirmations of the facts? When these questions could not be answered to the satisfaction of the news director or editor, there was the occasional shouting match. However, when airtime came, there was an overwhelming sense of honor and professionalism, for the stories on the air were presented in an unbiased way that upheld the time-tested principles of journalistic integrity.

My interest in broadcasting was more on the music radio side, but I was extremely glad I got the chance to work in TV news. It allowed me to set a standard of excellence and discipline that helped me to build a solid foundation for my career, wherever it might take me. That feeling of honor and journalistic integrity grew within me and registered soundly as the years went by.

Even so, a few years later in 1979, I began to see other seeds being planted that would grow deep roots and eventually yield a harvest of deadly fruit that threatened the principled values I held so dear. At the time, the seeds were presented innocently and even logically to TV station owners and managers. The name of these magic seeds was Focus Group.

A market research company, Frank N. Magid and Associates, based in the unassuming heartland state of Iowa, was offering their growing list of client TV stations the chance to conduct market studies with their constituent audiences. The viewers, having been invited by Magid to attend so-called focus groups, would be presented with a variety of video clips from the TV station and then asked for their response. The content of the clips ranged from an anchor reading the news, to a reporter out in the field, to even the hair style, clothing, make-up, vocal delivery, and overall impression of the journalist in the clip. Often, the focus groups would even include marketing slogans, logos, set design, station promotional commercials, and even surveys about what kind of news stories the public wanted to see more, the so-called top-of-mind paradigm. Whatever was presented, focus group attendees would respond by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down.

To put it another way, Magid was taking a cue from the world of American advertising (which had been using this form of qualitative research since around 1960). They were putting a slightly different bow on it, and packaging it to TV stations and networks in order to help them monetize their news divisions, which until then had difficulty breaking even or making a profit. Thus, as each station signed up with Magid, they made the same mistake as Eve in the Garden of Eden; they ate the innocent-looking evil fruit of market research. Now that the poison had been ingested, it would only be a matter of time before true and honorable Broadcast Journalism met its untimely death.
 
By the 1980's, the health of broadcast journalism was already on a steep decline. News outfits everywhere, large and small, were subordinating almost every aspect of their operations to the whim of the market researchers and the results of their sacred focus groups. When a legacy journalist retired, video clips of the heirs apparent would be viewed in multiple group sessions and analyzed thoroughly. Up for review was not the journalistic integrity of the prospective talent, but rather their appearance, wardrobe, voice, and body movements. This gave way to two new industries: the talent agent business for negotiating contracts for news anchors, and the talent consulting businesses that helped anchors improve their craft, most of the techniques having far more to do with style and appearance than journalistic substance.

Along the way, research indicated that viewers tended to watch TV news more frequently when a crisis of one kind or other had occurred. Focus group data also demonstrated how viewers tuned in when there was a newly developing story of significance, or what has come to be known as breaking news. By the mid to late 1990's, news networks in particular began to use the term breaking news for just about every new story they reported.

Also in the 1990's, there was a proliferation of news channels on cable TV. The world of broadcasting is all about domination, and the legacy TV networks decided CNN had been enjoying dominance on cable long enough. NBC and FOX came on the scene with their own news programming, and in response, CNN added a few more channels to the burgeoning array. Suddenly, Americans were besieged with news content. There was one problem, however. There simply weren't enough hard news stories to fill twenty-four hours of content on one channel, let alone four or five. So, the executive producers, in their desperate search to fill up their broadcast schedules, began to add in-depth analysis of news stories. Every channel would break a story and invite so-called experts on both sides of the table to come on the air and debate the issues centric to the story. This gave way to an explosion of new business at public relations firms all across America, and the talking heads era of TV news was born.

The broadcast schedules, however, were still not completely filled. To solve the dilemma, network executives decided to expand the scope of their programming to include more entertainment and legal stories; stories where there was not necessarily a clearly defined moral or ethical framework and which could be debated at length. This trend in the late 1990's caused Broadcast Journalism to be rushed into intensive care, while its newer, younger, more socially relevant surrogate, known as info-tainment, stepped in to assume its role.

There was a slight recovery in the health of broadcast journalism the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the first few hours of coverage, TV news was unable to assemble a focus group, gather data, and present packaged, contrived and premeditated content with an agenda. They were in such shock that they simply reported the news as it happened in real time. For a few short hours on that horrifc day, TV news did its job; no more and no less. In the ensuing months, however, Broadcast Journalism was placed on life support. For, by this time, every little scare that society encountered was presented as a crisis of immense proportions.

The viewing public, however, began pushing back in the mid-2000 decade. Viewership on many cable news channels started to drop significantly. Instead of doing some serious soul-searching, executives chose to migrate to more vertical, edgy programming in an effort to attract an increasingly fragmented audience. At this stage, TV news more closely resembled a form of social engineering than anything else.

On January 12, 2010, the tiny island country of Haiti suffered a terrible 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Again, for a few hours, TV news did its job. But because there were very few journalists still working in TV news, coverage was anything but professional. On January 20, a Fox News reporter opened his introduction by saying, "The scene behind me is just like a made-for-TV movie." At that moment, Broadcast Journalism died of heart failure.

If this story resonates in your spirit, I ask you to email it to a friend and pass it on. At some point, some in the business of TV news will probably read it. And maybe, just maybe, they will rebuke, resist, and break the stronghold of narcissism in their industry, and get a clue.

Feeding The Mind, but Numbing The Soul

This week I have been sharing comments on ethics in technology over at Victoria Ipri's blog. In this delightful chat, Andy Havens laments that there is still too much attention being paid to an out-of-date solution called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As Andy aptly states,

"The reason (technologies like SEO) gain popularity and then die seems simple – the marketing hogs see the trends, jump in and take over. We are all guilty to some degree."

He also shines light on a newer and far better component of many search algorithms, Linguistic (or Latent ed.) Semantic Indexing (LSI), which simply put, can read good webpage copy and tag it appropriately for optimum use in search results. In other words, it rewards well-written content, which should please web copywriters everywhere.

"LSI seems like a dream come true," says Andy, "I write good content and the search engines figure out what I’m talking about. It leaves me to focus on what I want to say instead of making sure I’ve got 2.3 keywords per 134 words or whatever."

But he also finds it frustrating that, on our journey of getting indexed by search engines, we still seem to encounter quite a few bumps in the road. This should come as no surprise to any of us. The fine-tuning of new technology has never been more apparent to the masses as it is today. Before computers and the web, fine-tuning went on as usual, but it was behind the scenes at such places as the phone companies and manufacturing labs.

Today, however, because investors are demanding that companies put their pipelines on the fast-track so they can grow share price more quickly, the fine-tuning often takes place right before our eyes. In the big picture, our problems are nothing more than the growing pains experienced by a toddler.

Cultural back-sliding doesn't help either. Ethically speaking, we have allowed ourselves to be subordinated to the often bogus quantitative promises of technology and have sacrificed the qualitative values that govern our decision-making processes.

Andy provides an excellent example of this:

"I’ve got ... software someplace that can sign up to hundreds of social marketing sites and spread my message across all of them, even though I’ve never heard of most of them."

Sounds like another lazy shortcut that some marketers use in the hopes of getting something for next to nothing.

There is no easy solution except possibly some sort of ISP punitive bandwidth rate card that changes the monthly bill to an amount so high, it stings the abuser in the pocketbook.

One other solution is to do precisely what we are doing: engaging the community at large with the notion of a higher standard of conduct. Because something that good will never be out of date.

Why EVERYONE thinks they are a Social Media Consultant

Given the steep downturn in employment, it should come as no surprise that many in transition will "try on" an industry such as SocMed consulting. And who can really blame them? It is a new field and they are trying to train themselves in it and generate business at the same time. Unfortunately, many of these folks are young boomers, X'ers, or millennials, and more than a few of whom tend to hold the self-centric attitude that they can do anything without working too hard. It seems easy to them at first, until they stumble upon (pun intended!) a rough spot in the landscape that proves to be more complex then they bargained for.

Thus, with anything tech these days, vendors must be thoroughly vetted before we will even take a meeting with them.

So, does all this circus-hype impinge on the potential benefits of SocMed? Not at all. It does offer a viable alternative to legacy ad methods. It is relatively low-cost and has very little downside risk if executed reasonably well. The top three things buyers respond to are info, info, and more info. Feature-benefit pairs play their role much later in the sales process and usually in the form of case studies.

The best lead generation tactic is to provide so much helpful information, that those who are ready to take their interest to the next level with your brand find the process seemless. SocMed is perfect for this.

To see how companies are executing SocMed fairly well, check out the big brands (i.e., Apple, Coke, NutriSystem) on Facebook.

How many people actually use online-banking?

Retail banks, in an effort to reduce costs, are promoting their online banking services now more than ever. How do you use online-banking? Take the Poll here.

The Broadcast Ad model is in intensive care

It is not etched in stone that content will (and should) remain free. I tend to agree with my former employer Rupert Murdoch that the ad model is evolving into something that barely resembles its former self.

As society becomes more technologically complex, there exists the temptation for economics to somehow match its pace, stride for stride. For a short while, people will happily come along for the ride. But, eventually, a point of saturation is reached. Yes, the brain can handle thousands of thoughts in a second, but it is not a qualitative process whereby educated and informed decisions can easily be made. Once we become too saturated with data, we need to pause, analyze the buffer, then communicate with others about our analysis. Only then can we make appropriate choices.

The ad model is suffering from implosion because there simply is too much advertising to consume. People are tuning it out. This should not only be expected, but welcome. As humankind pushes back at the breakneck pace of technology, new and innovative models for creating and distributing content will begin to emerge. Many of them will likely employ various methods for generating revenue such as advertising through product/brand insertion, and tiered pricing for different levels of access.  

The answer is not limited to mutually exclusive notions because we are in the middle of a major shift in the roles that technology & media play in society. It may take a decade or two for this shift to be complete, and in the meantime, businesses must consider employing strategies that embrace complimentary mutiple approaches in order to reach and connect with a temporarily exhausted end-user.