Insightful, creative, provocative, irritating. Choose your description–they all applied to Jeff Gralnick, who died this week after a long battle with cancer. He spent more than 50 years in the news business, starting out as a desk assistant at CBS. He served as a senior producer at all three broadcast networks as well as CNN. A former ABC News colleague described him as an “old-school, hard-charging newsman. Some folks disliked his style, many others would swear their loyalty and follow him into the fire. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
He may have been old-school but he was hardly stuck in the past. Gralnick was an early proponent of online news and a firm opponent of paywalls. A decade ago, when he left his full-time gig to become a consultant, he worked on a research project for NewsLab examining what local TV stations were doing on the Web. The result was a four-part series that was classic Jeff–well-reported, sharply written, with a generous helping of attitude. Here’s how it began:
First, let’s try to get your attention. It IS the Internet stupid, but NOT in the way you think. It is interactivity but NOT in the way you think of that either. Merely having a site is no longer enough. Nor is having a site that posts local news–a recent survey found more than 91 percent of television Web sites already do. It is also no longer enough to use your site to reach out and touch your viewers with e-mail news alerts or program promotion. What’s important now is how you use the Web to let those viewers reach out and touch you back. In other words, it’s time to re-define interactivity.
Remember, this was ten years ago, long before social media put newsrooms in constant contact with the communities they serve. Gralnick urged stations to do more than solicit photos and video from users, although that was a relatively innovative idea at the time. He believed newsrooms should be easy to reach, open and transparent. “Never be shy about telling your users what you are doing and why,” he wrote. “If you market and promote the message that you want to be ‘touched back,’ your users will get it and do it.”
Gralnick saw what was coming and he wanted broadcast newsrooms to catch the digital wave. “Don’t think you can ignore this,” he wrote. “Others aren’t, and they’ll gain a competitive advantage if you wait.”
Was he right? You bet he was. Too bad so many stations still haven’t listened.
NBC’s Brian Williams paid tribute to Gralnik on last night’s broadcast:
Gralnick’s 2001 NewsLab project:
Part one: Enlisting users to supply content
Part two: A suite of interactive tools for involving users
Part three: Making it easy for viewers to make contact
Part four: What’s around the corner for interactive TV news
