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

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."

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.