Long live the king (content, that is)

The death knell for newspapers has long been ringing, and all of us at the Economy League are saddened by the recent spate of obituaries. The internet is to blame, or so goes the narrative, and publishers, editors, and reporters continue to fine-tune their content and delivery for a brave new world of information technology and social media.

With all the talk of newspapers, it's easy to forget about local broadcast news. As a member of Generation X (or is it Y?), I'm much more likely to hit PhillyBlog or EveryBlock and their ilk to find out what's going on in my part of the world. 

Yesterday, I was schooled by a panel of news directors at Greater Philadelphia's broadcast stations. While ratings continue to drop, I discovered that the Philadelphia market remains comparatively strong, and local stations jump at every opportunity to fill more of their airtime with local news programs beyond the standard 30 minute segment. (I was shocked to discover that it costs more to broadcast a syndicated show than it does to produce a local news program.)

While this might seem like good news (no pun intended), all the panelists recognized that audiences continue to decline, the economy's tanking, and, like newspapers, broadcast news has to "adapt or die." As Chris Satullo, executive director of news and civic dialogue at WHYY, commented (and should copyright), "we're in a Gutenberg moment." Instead of bemoaning the upheaval of the news industry, he seemed downright excited to be in the middle of one of the most significant shifts in society since "the Bible came off the first printing press in Europe."

This Gutenberg moment is not just the ascendance of new technology, but also what is seen as an increased "hunger" for information, particularly on a "hyperlocal" scale. People want to know what's happening, and they want to know it now. And perhaps as our worldview keeps expanding, we're drawn even more to the need to know what's happening down the street, up the block, or in the town next door.

The tools exist in abundance for this constant flow of information, as hyperlocal and specialized as one desires. (I suppose this is also a chicken and the egg scenario. Has this thirst always been present, or have new technologies created it?)

To keep up, the local broadcast stations face a challenge more difficult in many ways than the print medium faces. How do you produce polished news programming that is both broad and local? And let's throw in an unstable economy to make paying for it even more challenging.

Like the world of print, local broadcast news has taken the "throw everything at it and see what sticks" approach. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, email, blogs, websites, text messages, comments, [insert next trend here]. On the backend, news operations are consolidating. Fox29 and NBC10 in Philadelphia have created an LNS or "Local News Service" to cut costs. The content created, whether AP-style reporting, video, or interviews, can be manipulated and branded to each network's needs. The journalists, photographers, editors, and so on are direct employees of the LNS entity.

And it was made clear during the panel that these titles don't even matter anymore. Everyone has to be a reporter, a writer, an editor, a videographer, a producer, a photographer, and one's own personal assistant. Think "backpack journalism" writ large.

As the conversation concluded, I was struck most by the fact that we're even talking about the categories print, broadcast, and web anymore. These don't matter. Content is king, and he's staged the world's largest coup d'état.

What we should be talking about is how to reframe the news industry as a set of "information providers." Consumers want to access the news in a format of their choice about topics they're interested in. They don't care if it's a Philly.com video feed, a CBS3 broadcast news segment, a WHYY podcast, or whatever future medium is developed.

In short, broadcast news isn't dying, and neither is print. It's the distinction between the two whose coffin we should be burying. Journalism will never give up the ghost.

--Christopher Scoville, Communications & Development Associate