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16Nov/090

NBC’s “Adventurous” New Take on Local News: Not Local, Not News

Daily_Connex_HeaderLogo4 I've argued NBC has an interest in local news, and that NBC may have an interest in destroying local televisions stations with an elaborate, Bond villain style effort involving local "NBC" branded news websites (at times even competing with non O&O NBC affiliates) and through the we'll-kill-your-late-local-news-if-we-have-to-ruin-primetime-television-to-do-it plan to unleash Jay Leno on NBC stations from coast to coast.

And now comes Daily Connection.

As first reported in The New York Observer, NBC's "soft-launched" a new 3 p.m. "local" news show on WRC/Washington. The beauty of this new idea in local news? Well, it's only local if you consider 30 Rock to be part of the Washington market, and it's only news if you consider rehashed NBC content to be "new."

Here's the spin, as NBC's Matt Glassman hurled it at Felix Gillette of the Observer: "The beauty of this show is that it's got content from all over the NBC Universal platforms." (Anybody else developing an allergy to the word "platform?") Ah, content from various platforms. What a great way to say repurposed crap.

Glassman's WRC's senior producer of content (that's a title at a local station now? so cost-cutting means lay off reporters and save the senior producer of content? I guess, in a way, it all makes sense--if you get rid of local journalists creating true local "content," you probably do need a senior producer of content to find junk that's already been used and fill time) and he's a driving force behind Daily Connection.

How does this revolution in local news work? Here's the takeaway:

"According to Mr. Glassman, every day, producers in New York comb through the myriad stories that have aired or are about to air across the range of NBC Universal TV and Web properties--including NBC News, the Weather Channel, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC sports, NBC mobile, etc.--and pick out a handful of breezy stories to repeat on Daily Connection.

Producers in New York then compose and edit the news elements and send the package to a control room in Washington D.C. From there, the local station takes over.

Every day, WRC-4 assigns two members of its newsroom, from a rotating cast of anchors and reporters, to host Daily Connection. Typically, the hour of programming begins with a brief bit of live (or live-to-tape) news about the day's big story--Congress debating a health-care bill; a shooting at Fort Hood etc.--and then segues into a playful hour of effervescent news stories largely tailored to female viewers.

Here and there, WRC-4 producers sprinkle in fresh content, such as a recent, original interview with NBC artist-in-residence Jon Bon Jovi. But for the most part, the majority of the news comes from repurposed material that has already appeared elsewhere in the NBC Universal universe."

So there you have it. A local show that's produced, for the most part, by skimming feeds and who knows what in New York, and then sent down the pipe to DC, where a "content producer" finds some way of selling the junk as a "local" story. Wait! Didn't we do an interview with a guy who once was in the Army? So everybody wins. WRC fills time without spending money or putting local journalists on the street, and NBC wins by ultimately diluting and destroying the concept of "local news."

wsav0386 It reminds me of a morning years ago when I was sound asleep in my apartment in Savannah, and got a call from my news director. He told me, in colorful terms that there had been a screwup (not the word he used) and that there was no scheduled news anchor for the morning show. (The show that started in about an hour) I showered and ran to the station to find I had about fifteen minutes to prepare the first news segment. (This was a show that had no producer--the morning news guy wrote the stuff, edited the tape, and anchored. I had no chance.)

Solution? I grabbed the feed tape that had been rolling that morning, printed the scripts and handed the tape to the feed room. "What do we do with this?" I said to cue it up to the first story, roll it, and when it was over, I'd read the intro to the next story. And so on.

The newscast was a disaster. I led with a national package, and then artfully pivoted to a weekend movie review. And then it was pretty much downhill from there.

In a way, I guess I was a pioneer. I created Daily Connection a full 18 years before NBC did. Only difference: I was mortified, and they aren't.

If you want a taste of the cutting edge local journalism they're doing at Daily Connection, check it out:

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcwashington.com/video.

Tagged as: coastal sunrise, daily connection, mark joyella, matt glassman, NBC, savannah, the new york observer, washington dc, wrc, wsav No Comments

7Aug/0912

The Ticket to Web Heaven? Use Your Call Letters

WTOC11_LOGO A lot of the fun started seeping out of local television when call letters were foolishly replaced with cookie-cutter network/channel number IDs like ABC7 and NBC5. For a person who plays a pretty mean game of call letter trivia (wanna know what WIS, WGN, WSB, WTOC and WFTS stand for? I'm your guy), the perfectly idiotic march away from decades of history that all those call letters represented was depressing indeed.

Now I've confessed to my own local television nostalgia, and just the other night over drinks, I bemoaned the loss of the Sears Tower name for that tall building in Chicago. I hated it when South Florida's proud Joe Robbie Stadium became the decidedly lame Pro Player Stadium, and, well, you get the idea.

So here's my message to local television stations trying to dig a deep trench around their turf on the web: don't get clever and for Heaven's sake forget about your network affiliation.

Go old school. Use your call letters.

As I've reported here, lots of companies think there's money to be made by owning the dominant online news site in any given market. NBC--being NBC--bought up "NBC(YourTownNameHere)" domains from Presque Isle to San Diego. But guess what sites do the best in terms of grabbing people's attention and, more importantly, holding on to it?

WRAL: Calls as Old as Jesse Helms

Sites with call letters and obvious connections to years of covering news in any given town. Sites like WRAL.com in Raleigh. What affiliate is WRAL? Who cares. Here's what's important: the station's website dominates all others in Raleigh in terms of minutes spent reading news and, perhaps, checking out those web ads: the average total minutes spent on wral.com, according to research by Internet Broadcasting was 156 minutes.

By comparison, the minutes spent figure for ABC O&O WPVI in Philadelphia, which uses the domain 6abc.com, was a mere 5.5 minutes.

The numbers don't hold true for every market--in some places, like Sacramento, kcra.com has a low total minutes figure of 3.4--but by and large, the call letters that have juice seem to translate from television to the internet.

As Arul Sandaram at Internet Broadcasting told me, "While this is clearly just one data point, and much work still needs to be done in getting stations to fully embrace their future as cross platform content/distribution companies, I am hoping you see this data as we do: as a spot of promise for the local TV industry."

CBS Has Been Nice, But KSL Knows Those Calls Are Their Brand and They OWN THEM.

It tells me one thing. Embrace what got you this far, and don't throw it away. If you have nearly half a century of equity in an identity, why not use it? WFAA in Dallas does, and they have one of the highest "time spent" figures in the study at 30.7 minutes.

Salt Lake's KSL has a similarly strong number at 61.8. Both stations, in case you weren't sure, use their calls as their web ID. It's not the magic bullet, but I think it's a logical step, especially if you're in a market where the online competition is a newspaper with 100 years of equity in its name.

WFMY: Bring Back the Dancing Elf Guy!

So WFMY in Greensboro, North Carolina? Here's my free advice to you.

You went on the air in 1949 as WFMY (trivia challenge: what do the calls mean?). The guys over at WBTV went on the air the same year. There's a lot of history there. And the paper in town, the News and Record (www.news-record.com), has roots to 1890. So if somebody who lives in Greensboro wants to know what's up in town, what makes you think they'll sit down at the computer keyboard and have the impulse to type in www.digtriad.com?

C'mon, people. If we intend to survive as local news operations, we've got to think.

Tagged as: arul sandaram, call letters, chicago, greensboro, internet broadcasting, joe robbie stadium, ksl, NBC, raleigh, salt lake city, savannah, sears tower, tampa, wfmy, wfts, wgn, wis, wral, wsb, wtoc 12 Comments

18Feb/091

Media General Goes With Employee Furloughs: 10 Unpaid Days in '09

Media General's WVTM/Birmingham

Media General confirmed the rumors today, with word that “despite aggressive sales initiatives and significant cost reductions already implemented, we need to build in additional expense savings to offset the revenue shortfalls we anticipate,” in the decidedly corporate words of Marshall Morton, Media General's CEO. To put in words more commonly floated around television newsrooms, you just got two weeks off, whether you want 'em--or can afford 'em. No pay.

Media General owns 19 local television stations, including WFLA/Tampa, WVTM/Birmingham, WSAV/Savannah, and WJAR/Providence. Employees will be forced to take ten unpaid days, including four days off before the end of March, according to the Associated Press. The AP reports the company has already cut costs by $19 million dollars by suspending matching payments to employees' 401(k) retirement plans.

Media General's WSAV/Savanahh

The furloughs follow a round of corporate layoffs across several Media General stations over the last few months, including 80 positions cut in Florida last November, and on-air cuts in Birmingham and Charleston just weeks ago.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the furloughs are mandatory for all non-union, non-contract employees, though union and contract employees will be asked to "voluntarily" participate in the ten no work, no pay days.