I did a double-take at yesterday's New York Times headline "Local TV Newscasts Are Expanding," by the redoubtable Brian Stelter, it is hard to think of anything more irrelevant to the news environment that court-side step reporting and beach-side reports from hurricane zones.
Stelter's article shows that local news still drives advertising dollars and he makes a case, however strained, that they may have learned something from recent lean years and gotten better at reporting news.
Many [Gannett] employees have been trained to be what Gannett calls multimedia journalists, also known as one-man bands, able to record, produce and report pieces from start to finish.
“We have more people gathering content than we did a year ago, because more people are trained on more platforms,” Ms. Beall said.
Such arrangements have been a source of grumbling for TV journalists for years, but for those who have never experienced the old way — a reporter, a videographer and sometimes a producer and a sound technician — the new way is more acceptable, and sometimes even preferable.
Of course, the article also notes that these segments are bolstered by social media and commentary segments - "man in the street" blather that creates identification with the audience but doesn't had to the news value of the segment, and quotes a producer who just added a fifth person to the weather team and invested in dashboard cameras - because reporting weather as news is still the highest form regional TV journalism.
Comments