A Jolt of Digital Inspiration: LocalNewser’s On the Links

Yep, we love us our links.

Too much going on right now in this scary, thrilling time to write about all of it myself. So I’ll hit the links that I find worthy of recommending to you. Unlike other link lineups, you won’t be finding a list of stories about a mid-market anchor signing off or a weatherman who got a DUI.

I’d like to bring you a collection of stories that can spur some ideas–get your pulse pumping at the thought of the next big thing and how you can be right in the thick of it.

We can sit here and bitch about the old media companies and their cost-cutting and soul-crushing ways, or we can start turning our attention to what will be replacing those companies.  It’s an innovation revolution out there, don’t miss it!

Times are tough for newspaper and broadcast companies.  But times are intensely exciting for journalists.

On the Links, you’ll find some inspiration, and food for thought.

Brian Stelter at the Times has a great read today on how journalism rules are challenged by Twitter-reporting and iReport vide0 posts:  Journalism Rules Are Bent in News Coverage From Iran.

BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis is working a CUNY project aimed at supporting, studying, and helping spread hyperlocal news projects across the country.  They’re looking for your input on what works, and what doesn’t:  Help Us Help Hyperlocal News.

Julie Posetti at MediaShift also takes up the important questions about Twitter that have grown out of the Iran story, and she’s interviewed journalists worldwide to determine how journos and news operations are using the Tweet: Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter.

The AP’s Michael Liedtke reports a web news startup, Journalism Online, predicts it will hit a target of one in ten users paying for content: News Startup Expects 10 Percent of Web Readers to Pay.

See a good story?  Send a link:  mark@standupkid.com

WTVJ/Miami Local Newser: “I Hate Today, Hate It, Hate It, Hate It”

South Florida media blogger SFLTV has had plenty to write about in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale over the last year or so, from a potential Post-Newsweek eat-and-destroy operation involving NBC O&O WTVJ, to the standard SoFla anchors acting strangely.  (See SFLTV for ongoing coverage)

Today, SFLTV put the latest this way in an emotional tweet:  ”WTVJ is dead.”

As the site quoted an unnamed WTVJ staffer about the day’s developments: “I hate today. Hate it, hate it, hate it.”

WTVJ, rich with a storied history of journalism dating to the earliest days of broadcast news, is not, technically dead.  The onetime mighty Channel 4 became the not-quite-as-mighty Channel 6 in a misguided signal swap years ago, but the real destruction was more recent. The looming–and ultimately failed–effort by Post-Newsweek to buy WTVJ and create a major market ABC/NBC duopoly led to a mass exodus of talent.  Many saw Ocean Drive-style neon writing on the wall, and decided to get out before they were fired when the new guys took over.

In the end, the deal collapsed.  But WTVJ remained understaffed, fueled with a sense of uncertainty, and a melancholy for the end of a long run of big names doing big, real news.  Suddenly, WTVJ seemed like any other station, or worse, like a really bad one.

Today, SFLTV reports, an anchor layoff involving longtime morning anchor Kelly Craig, news reporter-turned-sports anchor Andrea Brody, and reporter Joe Carter.  The blog reports the station’s weekend morning news may be eliminated as well.

WTVJ: Selling Its Experience (Ah, How Times Have Changed)

I’m not ready to throw an epitaph on the mighty TVJ calls.  But it’s obvious to anyone who follows local news what happens to a strong station that is let to decay through lousy management, underfunding, and, in NBC’s case, a seeming lack of interest in being in the O&O business anymore.

The Miami market (where I’ve worked two tours at Post-Newsweek’s WPLG) had long been a destination market:  a place where young reporters could land and learn to be fast, talented, and worthy of a trip up the market ladder:  a market that made careers.  It was also, and maybe more importantly, a market where those Miami-bred network newsers could come home to, sink some roots and do solid, serious reporting on issues ordinarily ignored by flashy, cotton-candy local news.  A faded newspaper ad puts it best:  once upon a time, WTVJ bragged about the longevity of its people:  ”Our 11 o’clock news team has lived here for years.  So it’s only natural that they have a better idea of what’s going on.”

When did that idea get stale?  Is Miami now nothing more than a stepping stone market?

The Who’s Who list of heavyweight reporters and anchors who rose to the top, then returned to Miami is long and filled with bold-faced names.  Sadly, the trend seems to be coming to an end, and the sending of three more TVJ-ers to the loading dock to pick up their Emmys and plaques says it all.

Can anyone build a real career in any market anymore?

Ex-KPRC/Houston Anchor Wendy Corona: “Blindsided,” Now Suing (Says Houston’s “Hair Balls” Blog)

Ex-KPRC Anchor Wendy Corona

The economic savings of offloading big-name talent may now carry an unexpected pricetag:  the lawsuits. Former KPRC/Houston anchor Wendy Corona’s filed suit, according to the entertainingly-titled Houston Press blog “Hair Balls: “Former KPRC Channel 2 anchorwoman Wendy Corona is suing her former news station, alleging breach of contract and defamation.”

Corona, who arrived at the Post-Newsweek station from sister station WPLG in Miami, claims she was “blindsided,” Corona’s attorney, Jan Fox, tells Hair Balls. “One day she was on the air and the next day she wasn’t, without notice. It’s terrific damage to your public reputation to suddenly be jerked off the air due to circumstances beyond your control.”

Corona’s asking for lost wages, benefits and undetermined payment for damage to her reputation.

Local Newsers: What’s It Going to Be? Innovate or Die? (Huh? You Sure You Don’t Want to Pick “Innovate?”)

If you haven’t yet read Jeff Jarvis’ excellent book, What Would Google Do?, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.

Jarvis is a new media guru who produces content across multiple platforms (his BuzzMachine blog is required reading, and his new Guardian podcast is fantastic) and teaches digital media at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.  His book “reverse-engineers” Google to see what secrets we can uncover, and then implement, perhaps fueling a new style of journalism that will keep all of us working into the next decade.

In a discussion of financial models, and how Google transcended them, Jarvis writes:  the “winner is likely to be a new player, not one trying to protect old revenue streams and assets.”  Think about that for a moment.  Look at your own company.  Is it innovating into the future?  Or desperately, blindly, obsessively trying to make what’s always worked still work?

In New York last week, News Corp announced its latest round of firings and buyouts, cutting twenty staffers at WNYW and WWOR, cuts that affected traditional news operations and the stations’ web team.  That jumped out at me.  The web, without question, is the future.  What does it say about a company making cuts and deciding to pull back on the one area of the business with a clear, huge and critical role in the years ahead?

My answer:  they’re doing whatever they can do to cut costs and stay alive until the economy improves.  Then they’ll go back to that internet stuff.

Jeff Jarvis

Jarvis calls this the “Cash Cow in the Coal Mine:”  ”Cash flow can blind you to the strategic necessity of change, tough decisions, and innovation…How many companies and industries fail to heed the warnings they know are there but refuse to see?”

Local news refuses to see.  As Jarvis writes, station owners are losing their “destinies” because they want to “preserve their pasts.”  And you know it’s true.  As I’ve written here, there is incredible innovation happening in the world of video storytelling and news.  It’s just not being done by television stations.  Newspapers are trying new ways of including multimedia content to make their reporting more impactful, interesting and different. In cities across the country, folks are creating web-based newscasts that look nothing like the stuff stations continue to produce–just the way they always have.

Watch this promo for a new Australian newscast that debuts this month.  Aside from the cliche-ridden nature of the promo itself, is there anything here that couldn’t have been done 25 years ago?

Think about it.  What’s so different about the six o’clock news?  Sure, it starts in some cities at 4.  It’s shot in HD.  And… well, beyond that, it’s the same product we’ve been selling for decades. That reminds me of senior citizens who will buy a new version of the same old car time after time because that’s what they like.  And looking at the demographics of a lot of news, these are the same reliable viewers keeping some local newscasts alive.

Where’s the innovation?  What’s one new thing that would’ve been unimaginable to the Action News teams of the 1970′s?  Doppler radar?  That’s an improvement of the same old thing.  New ways of doing liveshots?  What am I missing?

Take the computers out of the newsroom and put typewriters back, replace the cell phones with hard lines, put the AP wire back into a noisy printer in the corner, and go retro with the set, the over-the-shoulder graphics (FIRE!) and men’s lapels, and this is the same old cereal in a new box.

It’s depressing, when you look at the environment we’re in:  a once-in-a-career time of change, with a life-or-death incentive to innovate, and yet stations still believe in the tried and true rules of innovation in local news:

1)  New Set

2)  New Graphics

3)  New Anchors

4)  New News Director

Seriously, people.  News isn’t dying.  Someone’s going to be making money giving our viewers the information they want.  But there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be us.

I guess times are just too tight to risk taking chances.  And we’ll staff the web team back up when the car dealers start spending again.  Sound good?  Yeah, that’ll work.