Broadcast Journalism 2.0

I met up this weekend with some former reporters from TV6--bright, young, enthusiastic people we had nurtured here in the U.P. who had then ventured out into the world in pursuit of more money, greater challenges, and increased professional satisfaction.

Big surprise (not really): Most are not finding what they were searching for.

Why the disenchantment? First the money's still not great, and the schedule can be horrendous. Second, some newsrooms are just plain dysfunctional. Some managers simply shouldn't be managing. And finally, the news business has been undergoing revolutionary changes over the last decade. What I considered a good journalistic performance back in 2000 would now be considered inadequate. What I considered vitally important back then is no longer so important.

Let's consider what it means to start out in broadcast journalism these days (after Mom and Dad have forked out anywhere between 50 and 200 thousand dollars to educate you):

1) You'll probably make less than 20 thousand dollars a year to start.
2) You'll likely work Christmas or Thanksgiving, or both, your first couple of years in the business.
3) You may consider donating blood for a second source of income.
4) You'll be expected to look attractive on the air, even after lugging around a camera and tripod through the snow or the heat or the mud all day long.
5) Your news director may be a jerk or an incompetent or a washed-up old fool.
6) While you're performing your on-air duties, you'll be expected to post updates on your station's website, Facebook page, and Twitter.
7) You'll be expected to produce top-flight, on-air stories every day even though you're spending most of your work day on something other than reporting, writing, and thinking.
8) And when you finally...finally...get to that much coveted second job where you might finally be making as much as a schoolteacher in her first job, then you'll discover the cycle has started all over again--jackasses for bosses, unforgiving work schedules, a screaming insistence on posting stories on the wesbsite, Facebook and Twitter before you have all the facts, and a relentless emphasis on quantity and speed over quality.

It's a new world for broadcast journalism, one that left me behind about a decade ago. Construct an evocative, well-thought-out, well-crafted story, well-researched story? Hah! That's boring, that's slow, that's so-o-o yesterday.

There is room for young journalists in this new world, but they've got to love technology, they have to be married to the Internet, they must worship speed, and they have to care less (than the old farts) about the quality and comprehensiveness of a news story.

As for the young journalists we sent out into this brave, new journalistic world, I can only wish them well as they navigate the perils that await them. It's not like it was.

And if you can't handle it, then go into teaching. No, wait, teaching jobs have dried up. So....try your hand at selling shoes or managing a fast food restaurant. It's bound to be more lucrative than broadcast news.

Brave, new world

It's been a remarkable year so far for this veteran of almost 35 years in television broadcasting. A year to discard old notions and learn new things and realize that none of us really knows exactly what lies ahead in this business.

Exhibit number one: the Big Powderhorn ski resort fire. WLUC had no one available to get to the fire immediately, and in fact, we didn't make it there until at least four hours after the fire started. No problem. Regular folks--TV viewers and website visitors--sent us video, photographs and on-the-scene reports of what was happening.

The result? Huge website numbers, great video for our newscasts.

The lesson? We--the professional journalists--weren't really needed. Yeah, we probably would have done a better job and provided better, more balanced perspective, but regular folks did a pretty damn good job while we were trying to get our news cars pointed toward the fire.

Exhibit number two: the NMU security scare and shutdown. We got the news out immediately on the air and online and we hit a record number of page views for the day--over 200,000. But the most extraordinary figure? We picked up 3500 Facebook followers on that day, more than doubling our previous number. New people, young people found us that day, and they didn't necessarily do it by turning on the TV or going directly to our website; they went to Facebook, where we posted regular updates, and then many of the Facebook followers also went to our website.

The lesson? TV and newspaper news departments have to figure out what Facebook means to us and how we can exploit it, because that's where so many of our young people--tomorrow's adults--are now getting their news, whether we like it or not.

Exhibit number three: the President's visit. Again we were all over the story with numerous break-ins to programming, carrying the President's arrival and departure along with his entire address live on the air and on the web. And again, enormous numbers. People tuned in and logged in in huge, maybe unprecedented numbers. But we offered something new this time--a live web chat. People on our website from all over the UP and beyond were invited to take part and exchange observations and opinions on the President's visit.

The result? Fifteen thousand people logged in to view the wide-ranging conversation, for an average of 31 minutes per person, and 1700 individual comments were logged over an eight hour period. Were there any brilliant insights or startling observations among the comments? Not many. Were there inane banter and silly insults? Yep, absolutely.

The lesson? Although the live chat was not particularly high brow and didn't advance the story journalistically, it did provide an outlet for citizen discourse. People got to speak their minds, and that's something that we--the classically trained journalists--have never fully appreciated. Yeah, we do the obligatory man-on-the-street interviews from time to time, but for the most part, we like to tell people what WE think and what WE've seen and heard.

I think there are some real risks to exploding our long trusted and cherished journalistic models, but the fact is, a brave, new world has arrived and we've got to adjust to it, and hopefully, help re-shape it so that it allows for real, honest-to-god journalism while also serving the wants and demands of a public who are now captive to a revolutionary technology.