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Apple’s Message to Local News: If Your Viewers are Running Away, Why Not Follow Them?

When you watch an Apple “event”—that’s what they call them, you know—as I did today, you get the brain-stretching feeling that you are getting a glimpse of the new way you’ll be doing something.  The new way that, before long, will feel very, very normal.

Remember the debut of the iPod. Launched in 2001—doesn’t it feel like they’ve been in your life a lot longer than that?—the iPod quickly dominated the brand new category of digital music players. Now you’ve got one, I’ve got one (three, I think) and looking back, Apple reinvented everything.

But think of what the executives in the music industry must’ve been thinking back in 2001. “Huh? Apple’s doing what? Music? Yeah, right. We do music. No worries.”

Well, 11.7 billion music downloads later, Apple’s still so far ahead of the thinking curve, that the music industry itself seems like a group of lumbering dinosaurs in comparison. In fact today, just to run up the score, Apple unveiled a Facebook-style social networking site embedded into the new version of iTunes.  It will inevitably blow up and become another new essential--a new way we learn about and enjoy music with our friends, and Sony or somebody will try to copy it and… well, you know.

Now switch the characters in this story to television. The old media companies don’t think like the engineers in Cupertino. They can’t seem to think beyond the legacy model. Television stations, networks, we bring you to the set, you watch, we sell your eyeballs to advertisers.

Only that's just not going to remain viable for long. Viewers are walking—many are running—away. And Apple is one of the forward-thinking companies that wants to be where the audience is, rather than trying to figure out how to get the audience back to where it used to be.

So here comes AppleTV, which will allow me to bring Netflix directly to my big-screen HDTV in my living room, or to quickly dial up an episode of Mad Men from iTunes.

Where’s the traditional network model, with programming schedules and local affiliates fit into that? In a word? Nowhere. I don’t watch anything live anymore except news and sports. And if I could find a way to get those on demand via Apple instead of Cablevision?  If I could dial up and pay to stream just the game I want, whether it's the New York Jets or maybe an Italian Serie A game?  Well, I'd prefer that to the hundreds of channels of crap I pay for, but never watch on cable.

As it is now, dramas, reality, 30 Rock—they all get recorded on the clunky piece of garbage DVR I pay my horrifically lousy cable company for, and more times than I can believe, the DVR messes up, or the drive gets overloaded and it stops recording my shows, or I become infuriated trying to navigate the PC-style menus in the DVR “guide” (three buttons to push for "delete" and honest to God the DVR prompts you upon turning on the TV to "hit any key to watch TV.") and I throw remote, DVR and even my TV out the window.

But in four weeks I’ll have AppleTV. And it makes me wonder—where does local news fit in? If I’m one step closer to cutting ties with cable, I can see into the future and clearly understand how I’ll watch television. Top Chef and Breaking Bad will come from Netflix or iTunes, right through the AppleTV box whenever I want, and right onto my big TV. No computer needed.

What I don’t know yet is where my live football will come from, or where my local news will come from.

If you’re in local news, it’s a question that needs to be pondered. If technology begins moving away from you, and it’s going where the viewers are, you need to think long and hard about getting there too.

Don’t be the guy still making cassettes for use in a Sony Walkman, you know?

Dusty Trice, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based new media guru and political consultant watched Apple’s “event” as well. And he says the bottom line for old media companies is brutally simple: “AppleTV is about to kill Blu-Ray and mortally wound cable. The content is king, not the medium.”

Watching Apple's "Event" Live, Streaming, on my iPad While Tweeting the News. No Traditional Media Anywhere in the Mix.

Local news, despite every advantage early on in adopting and exploiting the potential of the web, has remained dug in deep to the medium: television.

“I think the lesson here is that the outdated traditional content distribution models will need to adapt or die out,” Trice says. “It’s their choice.”

So far, a few flashy websites and iPhone apps notwithstanding, local television stations and local newspapers have not done a great job of escaping their medium. They just want to use the new media to grab the audience and drive them back home.

TV stations use Facebook and Twitter and the web to shout: come and watch our six o’clock news, everybody! Hey, our morning show is now on at 4:30 a.m.! C’mon, you know you’re too busy in the a.m. making coffee and getting dressed to surf the net, right? So flip on good ol’ Channel 6—just like the good ol’ days!

And the audience keeps moving away—or dying.

“The trick with content distribution is going to be meeting the consumer where they choose to consume their content and not telling them where they have to consume their content,” says Trice. “If the bulk of the audience is on iPhones and iPads, I’d worry about making content available on those devices. The consumer has evolved and moved outside the home. Distributors need to innovate and do the same.”

Right now, I get my local weather from a nifty and fun-to-use Weather Channel app on my iPad (complete with animated maps, local alerts, and video). I check it at night and again in the morning. The idea of waiting for local TV to give me the forecast sounds like an epic time waster.

I get my news online and ever more frequently, on my phone and iPad. Right now, it’s an environment where I don’t see any big settlements from local news.

Huffington Post is a bigger local news player in this world than the dominant television stations of decades past. What does that tell you?

Where do you want to be?