LocalNewser dispatches from the frontlines of local news

The News Consumer is King. Seriously.

Here's the thing, you local newsers:  you ain't all that anymore.  Those days have gone into the proverbial history books.  And if you don't start accepting this fact, you'll be in the history books as well.

As Ken Auletta wrote in a chapter that was cut from his new book on Google, "consumers are no longer tethered to a network program schedule, a wire, a single screen or device--a TV set, a game console, a physical newspaper, magazine, or book--for their information or pleasure.  With choices, consumers feel in control, putting an end to the old argument over which is king, content or distribution or technology.  It's the consumer."

Yes, you're a bigshot because you own a big building, a lot of fancy livetrucks and an FCC license.  But with each passing moment, all that infrastructure's looking more and more like massive printing facility at the newspaper across town:  a liability.  Yup, you spent all that damn money converting to HD amid a catastrophic economic meltdown in the television industry, and now I'm saying it's like investing in dinosaur meat?  Kinda.

At the Future of News conference in Minneapolis this week, one message to legacy media companies was crystal clear:  you no longer have a monopoly on local news (and sports, of course, as ESPN expands its brand), and today the reality is that innovative young startups (Ken Doctor called them "ankle-biters" who could quickly grow in size) have their eyes on your lunch.  The leveler is the technological factor, where once upon a time a startup couldn't afford to compete with you, now they can, and some would argue that it won't be long before their run-and-gun-low-tech bottom line will give them the edge.

So what's the answer?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently talked to the Nieman Lab about the news consumer of the future and the expected trend of consumers moving from the one size fits all news buffet that most local television stations still serve exclusively, and toward a hyperpersonalized "news stream."  Here's Schmidt's idea of what it might look like:

We have about ten news stream ideas, of which hyperpersonalization is one. And, again, I’d rather not talk about specific products or even prioritize them, but I would make the following observation: In five or ten years, what will the primary news reader look like?

Well, that person will be probably on a tablet or a mobile phone, probably the majority of the reading will presumably be online not offline, just because of the scale of it. It’ll be highly personalized, right? So you’ll know who the person is. There’ll be a lot of integration of media — so video, voice, what have you. It’ll be advertising-supported and subscription-supported, so you’ll probably have a mixture. Think of the Kindle as an example. The Kindle is a proto of what this thing could look like. People will carry these things around.

So if you start thinking about that, it becomes pretty obvious what the products need to be: more personalized, much deeper, capable of deeper navigation into a subject. Also, show me the differential. Since you know what you told me yesterday, just tell me what changed today. Don’t repeat everything.

So ask yourself this:  does your newsroom do anything to serve a customer like this?  Anything?

The Knight Foundation's currently spending five million dollars a year to help those ankle biters build innovative news operations, mostly online.  The list includes experiments like Spot.us, Everyblock.com, and the Media Lab at MIT, but you won't see local television stations on the list of beneficiaries.  Why is that?  Is anybody working at an old media company willing to think about the future, or is the present just too overwhelming?

I asked Spot.us' David Cohn for his take on local television news and innovation.  "Local TV stations boggle my mind," he said.  "They are ever more screwed than newspapers, they just don't know it yet.  You ask why stations aren't changing.  For me that question is simple:  The overhead. They are running TV stations the only way they know how and that requires several camera people, an announcer, a field correspondent, a van of equipment, etc.  All that might be needed now.... but it won't, soon."

Cohn says stations are "producing news for a consumer that doesn't exist anymore."  And it's true.  Yes, the numbers are still there and you can, with more effort than ever before, squeeze profit out of that building and that FCC license.  But for how long?  At what point is it innovate... or die?

You can already start thinking toward serving news streams digitally, and the faster you make the mental adjustment, the better you'll do when you have Google opening its own local news site in your town, or the supposed-to-be-dead-already newspaper doing a better job delivering a video-rich hyperpersonalized news stream to your audience where your audience is, like on a Kindle or an iPod or an Apple tablet.

I love local news.  But man, as I've said before, if you think starting a fanpage on Facebook is "innovation," you're dead already.