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.

Facebook News

We started something new on TV6 news in the last couple of weeks--we call it the Facebook Story of the Day.

I'll admit right up front that I'm not entirely comfortable with the concept, but then again, I'm an old man who has gathered and presented news in the conventional, old fashioned way for more than three decades.

I'm the old dog and this thing, Facebook, is a new trick that I'm just now starting to learn.

The rationale behind the Facebook Story of the Day is this: Conventional newscasts are steadily losing their audience, so by asking the Facebook crowd what stories they want us to cover, we might be able to pull this lost audience back to our newscasts, or at least to our website.

On its face, the idea makes sense.

Most in the Facebook crowd do not watch nightly newscasts. Hell, most Americans these days don't watch nightly newscasts.

And beyond that obvious motivation of trying to attract viewers and website visitors to our TV station and website, there's also this: sometimes, we, the "news gods," are out of touch with what people really care about. Sometimes we need a reality check. Sometimes we need to ask people--those who aren't in the business--what's truly important to them.

That's what we get on Facebook.

The problem with that approach is that, much too often, people care more about the latest Charlie Sheen misadventure than they do about the profound change that is sweeping over the Middle East, so we end up covering Charlie Sheen and ignoring the Middle East.

I'm not comfortable with that, and most journalists worth a damn aren't comfortable with it.

So how do we reconcile this need to be relevant and popular and in tune with the times, with our determination to follow our journalistic compass?

I'm not sure. I'm not sure anybody knows. We're all learning on the run, and it's tough to keep up in a world where the technology and means of communication are constantly changing.

What the heck ever happened to My Space, anyway?