The decade I’m choosing to call the “ohs” has finally ended and I’m happy to say good riddance. Looking back at ten years’ worth of columns for American Journalism Review, I’m struck by how little has changed for the better when it comes to broadcast news.
One of my first columns was about a revolutionary newscast–WBBM-TV’s 10 p.m. experiment in 2000 with a solo anchor and a serious news agenda. “It’s substance, all right, but without much style,” I wrote, all the while hoping it would succeed. It didn’t. And as many predicted, because it failed nothing like it has been tried again.
A year later, I went on a rant about on-screen clutter. “The packaging is so thick you can hardly find the content,” I wrote. A lot of good that did. Yes, some stations have backed away from the most distracting tickers–the non-stop, multi-level scrolling kind–but graphic overload remains a given.
Commercial radio is still a vaste wasteland for local news. The influence of advertisers doesn’t just seep into local TV news–now it’s a veritable flood. And for the most part, the network news magazines remain a tabloid trash heap, while opinion and argument dominate news on cable.
The most inescapable trend of the decade hit hardest this past year, as the recession forced stations to cut back even more than they already had. The use of solo video journalists became routine, even in large market stations. Investigative teams became endangered.
The good news? Was there any? Yes, in fact. Local stations finally recognized the importance of the Web after starting the decade woefully behind the curve. Desperate times also sparked some fresh efforts at innovation. But I’d be lying if I said I was optimistic about the future of local TV news going into 2010 (which I’m calling twenty-ten, for what it’s worth).
I do think the advertising market is poised for a rebound. The crushing cost of the switch to digital has been factored in if not yet paid off. And new technologies raise some hope for new distribution methods like mobile.
But the business model of commercial-supported free TV is under heavy siege. Broadcast groups have been pushing for higher fees from cable and satellite providers that carry their signals. But the networks now want a slice of the fees paid to affiliates, in addition to what they already reap from their O-and-Os. There’s some thinking that the networks might want to ditch the affiliate system altogether and become cable channels instead, as the Associated Press reported.
Where would that leave local stations? Protected, for a while, by the FCC’s must-carry rules, but vulnerable in the long run. It seems to me there’s good reason to fear for the future of local, over-the-air television news.
