YouTube vs. The Talking Heads

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    For the past five decades, of course, it has been anything but a war. KCRA 3 has dominated the news scene to a point where its number of viewers often more than doubled the viewers of all the other stations combined. Perhaps no TV news market in the country has been so conquered for so long.
    Today, KCRA 3 is still the towering goliath of the Sacramento region, and in a static market you could expect this to continue. But today’s news landscape is anything but static. Technology and consumer expectations are changing so fast they’ve left even the most seasoned media experts shrugging their shoulders when asked about the future of TV news.
    “No one knows what television news will look like a few years from now,” says Bruno Cohen, president and general manager of KOVR 13. “How could they? It’s going to change more in the next 48 months than it has in the last 48 years.”
    Elliott Troshinsky, president and general manager of KCRA 3, seemed less impressed with the changes, and his reasons would soon become clear enough. “Sure, the new technology will come into play,” he says. “Our ability to gather news and present news is growing rapidly, and we have many new platforms to present the news, such as the internet, but I don’t know whether anchors will be sitting behind desks five years from now or not. It really doesn’t matter. In the end, it only matters if we are accurate and delivering the news in a way that people accept.”

Pollination and Proliferation
The cross-pollination of network news and the internet is already a reality. Every station has a website, and referring viewers to it has become an important part of every broadcast. Hosting a website not only keeps stations current with their rivals, it adds another advertising revenue stream and allows them to become a richer information source. The websites contain far more substantive news than is presented during the daily and nightly newscasts because of the additional space and time available.
    Another change, this one initiated by the national news networks, is that far more anchors are going into the field to do their reporting. This supposedly gives a greater feeling of immediacy to the newscast. The use of home videos, captured on cell phones and the like, has also become more prolific. This has given rise to so-called “citizen journalism” and the theory that TV and internet news may someday consist primarily of instantaneous, unvetted videos being shot at news and disaster sites worldwide.
    Still, the dynamic aspects of TV cannot be denied. In Sacramento, about 90 percent of adults watch TV, and 82 percent say it is the most influential of all the media, according to a recent Nielsen Media Research Survey. The fact is, TV news matters to us and it most likely always will.
    However, the TV news market of 2007 is much like the wide-open computer software market of the 1970s.The decisions that are made by the stations today, in this confusing hurricane of changing technology, will likely determine their long-term success or failure. Already the strategies are being formed. The stark contrast between KOVR’s innovation and KCRA’s traditions couldn’t be more apparent.

Continued...

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