YouTube vs. The Talking Heads

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IN QUICK SUCCESSION he checks two laptop computers on his desk, rips through a dozen emails, snaps through a sizable bank of video feeds, screens the weather forecast and gives orders to the two cameramen who stand amid coils of cables that snake through the clutter of the open newsroom.
    In a moment, Burrous, dressed casually in a gray shirt and blue jeans that look a size too big for him, is on the air going interactive with the story that emailing viewers have told him they most want him to cover. It involves a controversial statewide bill that would make pet neutering mandatory. Not exactly a stunner, but the viewers are into it. On the TV monitor, Burrous’ finger is already pointing to the results of another impromptu cyber poll conducted at the CBS 13 website.
    What makes it fascinating is that instead of having him sit rooted to a chair behind a desk in the accepted format of TV news from day immemorial, Burrous is standing and the camera is as likely to be looking over his shoulder at his fingers pointing to the screen of his PC as focusing on his face. And indeed, when the camera does feature him in the frame, it is likely to be tilted off-center, with a big flat screen monitor out-of-focus behind him.

Cells and Sites
“Aha! 52 percent of you think all dogs and cats should be neutered,” Burrous exclaims. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” There is passion in the emails and in the 513 phone messages that ultimately come in. Burrous rolls with it. “Did you know that last year 400,000 dogs and cats were put to sleep?” he says. The emails and phone calls pour in faster now. It’s a hot story, and viewers have opinions.
    Later Burrous and his co-anchor, Lisa Gonzales, sail into the other news of the day. The director of homeland security has a “gut feeling” that more terrorist attacks are on the way. The weather is weird; it’s raining in July in Sacramento, so it gets a fair shake and so do the pope, West Nile virus, the California wildfires and the Iraq war. Burrous rocks through the lineup, changing the order as he sees fit, switching at will to close-ups of the web page and then checking to see if a viewer has captured something exciting on a cell phone video that he can air right away.
    This young and interactive anchor is 32 years old and looks younger. Is this the future of TV news? Have the proliferating platforms of the YouTube generation made the old “talking heads” delivery style obsolete? With advancements in technology smashing the traditional ways of broadcasting the news, what is the future and which station in Sacramento “gets it”?

What War?
The questions are worth asking from a business point of view, because even while the internet, cable TV, video games, TiVo and podcasts carve into viewing time, there are still tens of millions of dollars at stake in the dog-eat-dog battle for TV news supremacy in Sacramento. In fact, the news war between channels 3, 10 and 13 has become one of the more intriguing and entertaining shows in town.
Continued...

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