Staring into the breach:
Imagining the future of TV news

by Matt McLeod

But one thing is clear — convergence is more than an increasing reality; it’s an inevitable force. Electronic journalism and evolving technology have changed the face of news in recent years, and will continue to shift the delivery of news in the 21st Century. The once clearly-defined lines marking the boundaries between television, radio and print media, between television, computers, telephones, mp3 devices and the countless new products emerging from an exploding communications sector are all beginning to fade, blurring separate platforms into what many insiders believe will ultimately become one.

Illustration by David Waters for MJR

Beginning with the rise of radio in the early 20th Century and the popularization of television mid-century, media began a process of divergence; in the future, that trend will abate, as news is transformed into a conglomeration of video, audio, graphics and print. The challenge for broadcast media will be whether it can adapt and survive in the brave new world forged by global connectivity.

The changing state of the business

Broadcast news is still a formidable force in journalism. According to a 2006 Radio Television News Directors Foundation survey conducted by Hofstra professor Bob Papper, 65.5 percent of Americans get their news from local TV news, while 28.4 percent of Americans regularly tune into national news. The same study found that just 11 percent of people list the Internet as their primary news provider.

It’s easy to crown the Web as the new king of all media, but it’s important to remember that for now, it’s not even close. Television news is still the five-ton elephant in the room.

According to Nielson Online, with nearly three quarters of the population surfing the net, the percentage of North Americans connected to the Web far outstrips usage in any other continent. But even in the United States, a country with one of the highest per capita computer ownerships, by a strict numbers analysis, TV news is by far the most influential form of news media.

Television may still have a stranglehold on delivery, but the winds of change are blowing. People are turning more and more to the Internet to get their news. The number of global Internet users continues to soar. Today in the United State, 74.1 percent of households are connected to the Web; in 1999 that number stood at 32 percent. Even in the world’s poorest areas, the Internet is starting to make inroads. In Africa, where less than seven percent of the population is online, the Web growth rate was nearly 1,400 percent between 2000 and 2009; in the Middle East, a region where 28.3 percent of households are on the Web, the rate was 1,648 percent during the same period.

These factors have exposed chinks in TV news’ armor, and appear to be threatening TV news’ bottom line. In May, the U.S. Senate convened to study the uncertain future of journalism, forming the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet.

National Association of Broadcasters president and CEO David Rehr sent a letter to Sen. John Kerry, who chaired the committee, in which Rehr noted NAB studies had consistently shown the cost of providing local news had continued to rise annually, while “the cash flow and profits of a number of television stations decline, particularly in small markets.”

“As representatives of the newspaper industry will also attest, competition in the 21st Century digital media marketplace is relentless,” Rehr’s letter lamented. “Technological advancements and the explosion of media outlets have created an increasingly challenging economic environment for the production of quality news and information, especially (locally). The current economic crisis has only exacerbated the difficulties that broadcast stations face. Double-digit percentage declines in advertising revenue threaten to undermine the ability of television and radio stations to offer locally oriented services, including costly services such as local news.”

He asked the committee to pass legislation protecting news broadcasts, which he said are a public service, not just a business. The board’s final recommendation is pending. Whether Congress ultimately agrees remains to be seen.

Flipping the scriptM

Some of the history’s most famous footage — the Zapruder film and Rodney King tape — came not from trained cameramen, but from laymen on the scene. And today, the list of citizen journalist scoops is growing faster than ever. From a bystander with a cell phone camera who captured the only images of a jet crashing in the mountains near Yuma, Arizona, to Norfolk, Virginia, bloggers posting the names of gas stations that still had power in the wake of a hurricane on a local television website, more and more people have begun to flood the net with news.

In the new digital age, citizen journalism is all the rage. Today, South Korean news site OhmyNews.com is staffed by citizen journalists who are paid $2 to $20 for their stories.

And a Japanese news station recently ran live coverage of a disastrous car wreck continuously filmed by a trucker who captured the scene with his cell phone and streamed the video to the station.

Now layman-run stations have begun to spring up everywhere. Three years ago Daytona Beach, Florida janitor Harold Kionka created DaytonaBeach-Live.com, a free 24-hour Internet television site. With Kionka’s coverage of space shuttle launches, rock concerts and biker festivals, his site generates as many as 17,000 hits a day.

Kionka’s formula has been so successful, he’s started a second local online station — GalaxyTV.com. Not that either of Kionka’s sites rivals TV news — his video looks blurry and his opinion-driven reporting doesn’t help — but shortcomings and all, the sites have survived.

Critics in the traditional media have hammered the plausibility of relying heavily on citizen journalists on the grounds of the impossibility of controlling content with user-submitted work. Professionals have also blasted the upstarts’ credibility, citing the lack of quality untrained journalists bring to the business.

Will there ever come a time where the vast majority of news is generated by non-professionals? Those in the media business think it’s unlikely. Chambers said he’s convinced improving technology will increase citizens’ involvement in news gathering to a degree, but that broadcast journalists will always been in demand.

“You have to understand that ever since the personal video camera has been around, people have been catching things on film that other people find interesting,” Chambers said. “But that doesn’t replace the job of a trained storyteller. There will always be the need for people who know what they’re doing. You can’t replace competence with technology.”

Such arguments are expected from an industry scrambling to save its neck, but what if broadcast companies could find a way to put new technology to work for them?

In June 2009, a CBS television station in Miami aired a story that set the blogosphere abuzz. On the day Apple released the newest generation of iPhones, WFOR producer Gio Benitez filmed an unremarkable piece about people standing in line outside an Apple store in a local mall.

What was so groundbreaking about his story? Benitez filmed it using his own iPhone, making it the first broadcast news segment ever created using the technology. Other media outlets soon picked up the story, and the station began receiving hundreds of e-mails congratulating Benitez for his ingenuity and marveling at the quality of the footage.

If Benitez hadn’t been a paid CBS employee, his piece would have been seen as strictly advancing the cause of citizen journalism, but many bloggers saw the story as a win for broadcast news.

On her site The Future of News, blogger E.B. Boyd noted: “Video-enabled phones are obviously more mobile — and take less expertise to use — than professional cameras … they might be able to do more coverage than they were able to do before … Smartphones are obviously a lot less expensive than professional cameras … it might be possible to substitute smartphones for the big equipment in some situations, thereby saving money for cash-strapped news operations.”

Emerging outlets

In 2005, reporter Mark Schapiro scored a coup for Web-based news outlets, when his Frontline/World story “Nuclear Underground” landed on the PBS television show “The News Hour” with Jim Lehrer. It exposed Israeli businessman Asher Karni’s role in a worldwide gun-running ring.

The success of the report, which was an entirely Web-based project, led Frontline editor Stephen Talbot to remark that the Web was “rapidly becoming the place where we develop and shape our broadcast stories.

“We will continue to break down the barriers between broadcast and online media,” Talbot vowed.

The good news for television reporters and cameramen is that new media sites are popping up all over the Internet and bringing serious stories and legitimate work with them.

Two such sites are Mediastorm.com, which is partially funded by The Washington Post, and Bombayfc.com, which is underwritten by camera giant Canon. MediaStorm consistently runs in-depth stories covering global dilemmas. See author Marcus Bleasdale’s “Rape of a Nation,” which chronicles the world’s deadliest war, a conflict raging in the steaming jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo. MediaStorm reporters created a documentary companion piece to the book, which streams on the site.

Another MediaStorm story is Jonathan Torgovnik’s “Unintended Consequences,” which chronicles the plight Rwandan women still face in the long wake of their countries 1994 civil war. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped during the conflict, and thousands have contracted HIV, while 20,000 are raising children born as a direct result of the sexual violence.

And at BombayFlyingClub.com, a video blog, reporters are earning salaries sifting through the filthy hospitals of southern India and sweltering jungles of Ethiopia running down stories.

Granted, the reach of sites like Mediastorm and BombayFlyingClub has so far been limited, but that’s changing as technology continues to level the playing field. RSS feeds, digital newsletters, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, podcasts and widgets are cheap tricks to pull off, and that’s given up-and-coming Internet news sources a foot in the door.

The emerging world of online coverage

As it stands, there are few streaming broadcast newscasts available online. Then again, it depends on what you consider news. Entertainment news shows like Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” offer full episodes at their websites, but when it comes to the networks — you’ll be hard-pressed to find full episodes floating around the Web. What media outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX do offer is a medley of short segments, clickable stories designed to give the user control over what he or she wishes to watch.

Online video and broadcast news might share the same format, but in a number of ways, they’re hardly similar. News outlets sometimes include video segments shot by non-professionals: footage from police and surveillance camera video, webcams or videos downloaded from global niche sites.

But for the most part, broadcast news sticks to footage filmed by professional cameramen with pricey equipment. It’s not the case online, where shaky handheld clips and fuzzy pictures are the norm, especially with user-generated material.

Production values aside, many bloggers claim there’s an authenticity to raw footage and that viewers experience more connection to what they feel is an honest experience, instead of the manipulative nature of TV news stories.

Since the two styles of video journalism are so different, critics of journalism schools have argued curriculum that sticks strictly to what’s worked in the past — news teams with high-end equipment — will be less and useful in the future. Business writer Richard Sine, blogging on the Huffington Post, argued journalism schools were little more than parasites, stealing money from the pockets of students who are bound to fail at finding jobs.

UM School of Journalism Professor Denise Dowling counters that journalism schools have always stayed ahead of the curve on technology, and will continue to keep pace with the changing world of media. She cited the fact that professors have changed the program’s curriculum so that all journalism majors are required to take video, audio and photo classes. And Dowling said that no matter how the means of news delivery shifts, success of any program depends on fundamentals.

“We recognize things are changing, but we will continue to do the same,” Dowling said. “Trained professionals who report news will always be better equipped for the job. If news reporting boils down to what we use and how we use it, our students will have an advantage with both. They’ll learn how to use the right tools and they’ll know how to use them in the right way.”

A glimpse into the future

Will TV news ever go exclusively online? Dowling believes so.

“I think it’s going to happen, and I think it’s going to happen sooner rather than later,” Dowling said. “Everything is so consumer-driven these days that people want what they want and they want to have it right away. Why plan your day around watching the news at six, when you could turn on a computer and have it whenever you get the time?”

In his book “Going Live: Getting News Right in a Real-Time, Online World,” Phillip Seib argued the evolving nature of computer technology is changing the way the device is thought of and blurring the line between television and Internet media, and will continue to do so in the future.

“Part of this evolution will be a function of a convergence of hardware,” Seib wrote. “The conventional wisdom to date has decreed that no one wants to ‘watch’ a PC like a television … That problem is waning as computer equipment becomes less cumbersome (e.g., thinner monitors) and as Internet connections become smoother. These two factors are crucial in the convergence of television and the Internet because they enhance streaming.”

Television has begun its gradual shift toward the net in other areas, and increasingly, it’s free. Today you can watch thousands of full TV shows at sites like Hulu.com, movies at sites like Watch-FreeMovies.com or sports at ESPN360.com without paying a dime.

Technology also allows computer users to watch media downloaded or streaming through their computers. For a few dollars PC users can link their laptop to their big screen by an HDMI cable, meaning they can watch TV through their computer, through their TV.

The challenge for broadcast news remains whether advertisers will buy into the online scheme. At ESPN360.com, for instance, the vast majority of the commercials the site runs are for ESPN programming, because most advertisers have yet to jump on board with the idea of paying for airtime on the site. And it stands to reason — it’s unrealistic to assume viewers will sit through Internet commercials with a worldwide Web of distractions at their fingertips.

But the shift to Web news is inevitable, whether traditional news broadcasts stick with the same format and simply stream their content online, or whether most news stories hit the Internet as short snippets, as is the online trend.

As Seib argued in “Going Live,” like it or not, convergence is coming. “Separation among the three principle news media — print, television/radio and Internet — might not prove sensible or even feasible in the long run,” Seib wrote. “Some new amalgam of the three may evolve as their technologies of news delivery come together. This will be the future: convergence.”

The overriding factor is a simple one: accessibility. Take the example of the cell phone, which has all but vanquished the disappearing landline. Hardly anyone under the age of 30 still pays for a home phone any more. And really, why would they? A mobile phone is just that — infinitely mobile. Users can stick it in their pocket and take it anywhere they need to go.

Online news carries the same advantage. Technology allows remote access to national and local news from virtually anywhere. A traveler can open a laptop, switch on a PDA or fire up an iPod or a tablet computer and watch streaming news broadcasts from his or her hometown on demand. With increased broadband and emerging computer technology, picture and sound quality is improving by leaps and bounds.

And studies have shown viewers want to connect with the news, something Web-exclusive new tools let them to do. In 2006, a Radio and Television News Directors Foundation survey found that more than 60 percent of people surveyed said they were unsatisfied with their ability to interact with TV news. News consultant Terry Heaton, vice president of Audience Research and Development, said it’s a problem that won’t be solved until broadcast news moves online.

“As I heard someone once say, it’s a little like fixing a car while you’re driving,” Heaton said.

Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before television gets the picture.