Wrc | LocalNewser

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

15Feb/093

Time Has Told… The Era of the One Person Crew Is Upon Us

Mitch Roberts/WKRN VJ and Anchor

It's always educational to take a step back, turn around, and look at where we've been. It helps to see where we've come from, and how we've gotten to this place. In thinking about the spread of--call 'em what you will, one man bands, all-platform journalists, multimedia journalists, backpack journalists--single person crews, I looked back at the debut of the form, if you will. The early reactions to the off-Broadway version of the show that's now getting decidedly mixed reviews, but somehow selling lots and lots of tickets to news managers and corporate suits looking to find a way--any way--to cut costs and keep the profit in local news.

The first station group to go "VJ," as they called it, was Young Broadcasting, which put cameras on reporters' shoulders at WKRN/Nashville and KRON/San Francisco, copying a news-on-the-cheap model that had seen success elsewhere, notably at outfits like New York's local cable newser, NY1. Variety wrote about the "Crew Cut in News Biz" in 2005, quoting a WKRN anchor: "It's like they took the rules here and hucked them out the window."

Steve Schwaid/CBS Atlanta

A lot of rules have gone out that window, especially lately. In addition to the expansion of one man banding to stations like WUSA/DC and WNBC/NYC, WGNX/Atlanta news director Steve Schwaid recently updated his Facebook profile to read: "Steve is looking for one person bands - send dvds to me at CBS Atlanta." The whole stations, he says, won't be going OPB; he says "there will always need to be some working in teams and some can work by themselves...back to the future - we worked like this when I worked at whio in the late 70s."

The mere suggestion of one person field crews drew fire on Facebook, with one person commenting on Schwaid's profile page, "Nice BS-ing around the reality. One person does 2 times the work for less pay. That is the reality." Schwaid responded: "hey, the reality is the business model as we know it is dramatically changing...so you can be working for the last company that made the buggy whips or looking ahead...I prefer looking ahead."

Is KPIX Next?

And he's clearly not the only one looking ahead and seeing lots more reporters with cameras on their shoulders (or photographers reporting, however you want to look at it). Word is KPIX/San Francisco is bringing the one person crew into the mix, and some say it will soon show at NBC O&O's like WRC/DC, and WMAQ/Chicago as they undergo the "Content Center" transformation. (So, in DC, you'd have a Content Center competing against an Information Center?)

Is there any way to argue now that this isn't happening and won't keep spreading? Did naysayers suggest the three-person crew would never end? (before my time) And what, pray tell, is the union strategy in all of this?

As the Nashville anchor said waaaaaaay back in '05 (remember the good old days, when we didn't fear for our jobs every minute of every day?), the rules, they're getting "hucked" out the window.