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Discussion Membership
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Network TV News will die first!This may disconcert the buzzards circling over newspapers waiting for them to die -- the Internet will not replace local newspapers, but it will replace network television news. Newspapers wait for you. Web pages also wait until you are ready. Television network newscasts do not. If timeshift were the only issue, digital recorders would solve the problem. But television steals precious time from us, start to finish. The words of the news anchor drift by at their own pace, much more slowly than we can comprehend. No amount of pounding on the television will speed up the spoken script. When our interests turn in one direction, television newscasters turn somewhere else. A schedule of stories is fixed, tied to the producer, independent of our interests. Stories happen when they happen -- not sooner or later. They happen in one depth, despite different levels of viewer/reader interest. Not so for newspapers. Newspapers may arrive once during the day -- we call that periodicity -- but when they do arrive, newspapers are densely packed and incredibly fast and easy to use. All it takes is a flick of an eye to scan the dozens of headlines and pictures on a page. Another flick of an eye drills down instantly to the depth of detail. Flick your eye at the television screen and nothing happens. You are programmed. You must watch ˜ or change the channel. Television news is like the indoctrination in "Clockwork Orange" where one is forced to watch. The hovering buzzards confuse the survival prospects of newspapers because they fail to recognize that national, regional, and local newspapers have different functions and different constituencies. Local newspapers still serve as a surrogate for the reader, gathering, sifting, weighing, editing, structuring. The local newspaper function will translate easily and affordably to the Internet, along with the value added by reporters and editors. Barriers to entry have lowered for content creation and delivery, but value added by reporters and editors has a place on the Internet. If you want to test that hypothesis, the next time you hover over the play button on a YouTube video, deciding whether it is worth the 2 or 3 minutes, ask yourself if a summary below it wouldn't help you decide whether or not to dive into the depth of it. Bye, bye television network news; hello, intertwined local newspaper and web! [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "commentIt".]
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