Let’s begin with the Internet-connected TV sets that were all the rage at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. True, there were several competing systems on display, but that doesn’t mean broadcasters should dismiss them, says Arthur Greenwald at TVNewscheck, because those systems could soon converge.

If so, they’ll arrive in one massive wave that could completely disrupt the way people watch TV — and threaten the way broadcasters do business…Today’s smart TVs are precocious toddlers, little more than key word matches within a single program guide. But they’ll soon skip a grade and display much more sophisticated selections.

When a broadcast channel is just one of dozens of icons on the screen, how hard will it be to find? And when promos don’t reach viewers, how hard will it be to sustain expensive programming?

Now, consider the aggressive push by YouTube to launch 100 channels of original, specialty programs available only online. Those channels won’t just be watched on computer screens and tablets. Thanks to connected TVs at set-top boxes, they’ll be watched on big screens, too. So broadcast execs should worry, says consultant Will Richmond.

YouTube – and the many others who are pursuing original online programming – are still in their early days. But when combined with changes in viewer behavior, the proliferation of connected and mobile viewing devices and the firming up of online video monetization models, I’m betting that these efforts, particularly those led by YouTube, are going to be a highly disruptive force to the traditional TV ecosystem.

Broadcasters have been counting on mobile digital TV to change the game in their favor. When users can get high-quality streaming video for free on multiple devices, the thinking goes, they’ll be less interested in paying for “over the top” services that require an Internet connection. But mobile TV has been at the starting gate for a couple of years, while connected TVs and set-top boxes are selling now.

[Update: Just hours after this post was published, The Huffington Post announced plans to launch a live streaming video network this summer, described as “never-ending talk show.”]

What are broadcast executives doing to prepare for this disruptive future?

The assignment feature allows producers to tell photographers how much they’ll be paid. Photo and video journalists retain rights to the work they create using the app and can share it with their followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

The free service launched for iPhone last November; an Android app is in the works. Rawporter allows publishers from news organizations to bloggers to solicit either video or stills via geolocation push notices and to pay users for their work. In an interview with the citizen journalism blog NewsMeBack, co-founder Kevin Davis said the tool aims to make it easier for “everyday people to cash in on being in the right place at the right time.”

Rawporter wants to help media outlets crowdsource cost-efficient news content that they would normally not have access to. At the same time, it’s important to us that our contributors’ rights are protected, and that they get the recognition they deserve. That’s why, if something sells, contributors get paid. If something is used, they get the on-screen or online credit.

The new reality of local TV newsrooms, which produce more hours of news than ever before, makes these kinds of tools appealing to managers and anathema to professional photojournalists. We’ve written about this new world in which everyone is a news photographer before. YouTube claims that many news organizations are using its Direct platform to collect citizen reporting about news events, among them ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, WHDH-TV in Boston, Tribune Company, Gannett, Al Jazeera, and ITN News. Rawporter is so new, it’s hard to tell if it’s being used at all. The question, once again, is whether these tools are a serious threat to the profession.

My own sense is that newsrooms won’t use these services instead of staff photojournalists, but they may turn to them when news breaks where they can’t go, or when they can’t get somewhere fast enough. But freelancers could face a real pinch if stations find they can reliably and quickly get cheap video of breaking news from a bystander with a smartphone. Beyond that, asking non-journalists to get video in what could be dangerous situations raises all kinds of ethical red flags.

What’s your view?

Donahue’s is just one of the voices in a new documentary, “Running on Empty: The Brain Drain in Local TV News,” produced by two Quinnipiac University journalism professors, Karin and Bill Schwanbeck. If it sounds like an unrelievedly gloomy look at local television news, that’s about half right. Former reporters and news directors paint a grim picture of a business content to replace experienced journalists with cheaper, less capable rookies–a business that largely refuses to invest in quality. According to the Schwanbecks, only four of 40 stations in the top ten markets give investigative journalists time to cover stories in depth: WFAA and KDFW in Dallas, and KHOU and KTRK in Houston.

The film doesn’t stop there. It also examines some efforts to change the paradigm, including non-profit journalism centers and online sites. But it’s clear that those efforts alone won’t fill the gap.

Producer Karin Schwanbeck says she hopes the documentary will spur some change, possibly an effort by the FCC to hold stations more accountable. But she admits she’s not optimistic. “I’m not sure if it’s too late,” she says. “The genie is out of the bottle and I’m not sure if we can put the genie back.”

Given that assessment, why is she still preparing young would-be journalists for jobs that might not exist? Because, Schwanbeck says, she hopes they’ll be the ones who might be able to make a difference. “As Dan Rather would say, ‘You have to learn to write and you have to learn to fight.’”

As stations continue to add newscasts, they’re finally adding people too.

Stations added 750 jobs last year, recovering all the losses of 2009 (400 jobs lost) and making a dent in the 1,200 jobs lost in 2008.  In fact, the survey found that anticipated hiring in 2011 could bring the industry back to its pre-crash peak by the start of 2012.

That’s great news all around, not just for new or unemployed journalists looking for work. Anchors in smaller markets who might have moved on sooner had the economy been better are now being hired in bigger markets.

But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. of course. Highly-paid veterans are still being dumped. Case in point: Marianne Banister, who was let go last week by WBAL in Baltimore after 15 years as co-anchor of the late news. “I want to make this clear,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “This is not my choice. I’m not retiring. I’m not leaving to ‘spend more time with my family.’” The station says she won’t be replaced; it’s going with a solo anchor at 11. And that’s a trend we may see more of, says Papper.

One of the models may be WPVI, the ABC station in Philadelphia. It is very much the dominant station and has been solo anchor at 6 and 11 for at least a year or two. It was solo anchor at 11 p.m. for years, but I was astonished to see it go solo at 6 and 11 — and they are still on top. So the message is very clear.

Another clear message is that local TV sports time is shrinking. Highly-paid sports anchors may be an endangered species. Two have stepped down in DC in the past few weeks and Baltimore’s WBFF is dumping a stand-alone sports segment. Another Baltimore station, WMAR, let its veteran sports anchor go a few years ago and has watched other stations follow suit. As general manager Bill Hooper told the Sun, “They’re not firing people, but when the contract comes up, they say, ‘OK, this is a high-priced guy and we’re only giving him a minute and half at the end of the newscast, so what are we doing here anyway?”’

News sharing

What’s growing, according to the latest survey, is cooperation in news gathering, which is more widespread than ever. The survey asks if stations share information, a helicopter or pool video, and in every case the numbers more than doubled from 2009 to 2010.

Fully three-quarters of the stations surveyed said they now share information with another news outlet–either a TV or radio station or a newspaper. That compares to just a third the year before. A third now say they share pool video, compared to 15% the year before. And 10% share a helicopter, compared to 4% the year before. That’s a dramatic increase in every category.

But Papper isn’t willing to predict that sharing is here to stay. “Cooperative ventures rose substantially during the severe economic downtown in the last few years,” he says. “It will be interesting to see if a reviving economy and revenue growth leads to fewer cooperative arrangements.”

The good news is most obvious on the revenue side but there are positive numbers for viewership, as well–if you look in the right places. One of those places is not the ”traditional” newscasts on network affiliates–morning, evening or late. All three time slots lost more of their audience last year, just not as fast as they did the year before.

Audience growth

To find the bright spots, you have to look at different time slots and, in some cases, different stations. The audience for news at 4:30 a.m. grew exponentially, as the number of markets where news was on the air that early more than doubled. Viewership also was up for news at 7 p.m.

Perhaps most striking, news on stations not affiliated with ABC, CBS, Fox or NBC drew substantially more viewers, no doubt because so many “independent” stations added newscasts in the past year. And where is that news coming from? In many cases, it’s being produced by a competitor.

Consider, for example, WJBF in Augusta, Ga.  The Media General station airs 5 hours of news a day, but also produces daily newscasts for the local Raycom (WFXG) and Schurz (WJBF) stations for a total of 9 hours a day.  This spring, WJBF and WAGT will move in together, sharing a new facility. Think of them as “frenemies,” says Schurz Broadcasting senior vice president Marci Burdick, who expects to see more business relationships like this in the future. “Those stations that are number three or four in their markets will be looking at models like this.”

Newsroom staffing

So 2010 brought good news for station owners and viewers. What about TV journalists? The picture there is fuzzy. Bob Papper, who produces the annual RTDNA/Hofstra survey, says he expects this year’s data (due out next moth) will show that enough people were hired in local TV news to make up for all the staff cuts made in 2009. They may even have put a dent in the losses from 2008. But numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Veteran journalists left local TV news in droves last year. Many were long-time anchors who retired; others moved on to something else; some were let go when their contracts expired. It’s hard to quantify how those departures changed their newsrooms. They lost experience, for sure, but may have gained new energy and skills–if they made good hires.

What’s clear is the trend toward “frenemy” deals and increasing hours of news does not mean a lot more jobs. As we’ve reported, some stations added 4:30 a.m. newscasts without adding any staff.  And in Idaho Falls, where the Fisher and News-Press and Gazette stations now share one newsroom, 27 news staffers lost their jobs.

There’s much more on local TV news in the PEJ report, including the state of online and mobile. Questions? Comments? Let us know.

“The web’s dirty little secret has been known for quite some time,” says a new report from Borrell Associates. “Unique visitors aren’t unique at all.”

Based on site surveys and what it calls “complicated math,” the study says the average local website’s count of unique visitors overstates the number of actual people visiting the site by at least three times.  And the number of local people is overstated by a factor of 5.

The bottom line? The audience for local websites is “smaller, less local and less loyal than advertisers are being led to believe.” On average, the report says, about 30% of the visitors to a local website don’t live in the market. And about one-fourth of a local site’s page views are delivered to “fly-bys,” people who probably won’t return for another year, if ever.

The report says a site that claims half a million unique visitors would be more truthful if it told local advertisers that it reaches about 100,000 local people.

Sobering, isn’t it?

This is what’s become of CNN.

The one-time cable news leader has had a horrible year. Over the summer, viewership in prime time hit a 10-year low. “Larry King Live,” once the channel’s biggest draw, had lost almost half its audience from the year before. Bad enough that CNN has trailed Fox News Channel in the ratings in every part of the day for almost a decade; in prime time it’s now fallen behind MSNBC as well.

Something had to be done. But did it have to be this?

Pairing a man who was forced to resign in the midst of a prostitution scandal with an attractive blonde of a certain age isn’t inspired – it’s icky. As co-hosts of the new 8 p.m. talk show on CNN, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and conservative columnist Kathleen Parker seem ill-suited for television, and for each other. If the goal was to bring back the point-counterpoint of “Crossfire” without all the cacophony, “Parker Spitzer” misses by a mile.

To rebuild an audience at 9 p.m., CNN is replacing Larry King in January with Piers Morgan, best known as one of the judges on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent.” His TV experience includes hosting an interview program on Britain’s ITV, and he has a background in journalism, something King couldn’t claim. But there’s a catch. Morgan was the editor of a London tabloid when it published faked photos of British soldiers allegedly torturing Iraqi prisoners. He was fired after refusing to apologize. Now there’s a fine credential for a cable news host.

That leaves Anderson Cooper, who’s staying put at 10 p.m. CNN hopes that a stronger lead-in from Morgan will boost Cooper’s sagging ratings enough to pass the new Lawrence O’Donnell show on MSNBC. But hope isn’t confidence. Cooper plans to launch a syndicated daytime talk show next year when Oprah Winfrey moves to her own cable network. If that doesn’t smell like an exit strategy, I don’t know what does.

Whatever happened to the CNN where the news once mattered? Simply put, it failed miserably in prime time. While CNN tried to sail down the middle, sharp-edged opinion won out for Fox on the right, and MSNBC tacked left to pull into second place. Having finally embraced its liberal identity with the slightly goofy new slogan “Lean Forward,” a profitable MSNBC is now in position to beat CNN across the board when the final 2010 numbers are counted. “When you’re clear about who you are, you actually make money,” MSNBC’s chief marketing officer, Sharon Otterman, told the New York Times.

The 8 p.m. hour has been CNN’s weakest link. First Paula Zahn and then Campbell Brown just could not compete against Bill O’Reilly on Fox, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Nancy Grace on HLN. “Shedding my own journalistic skin to try to inhabit the kind of persona that might co-exist in that line up is simply impossible for me,” Brown wrote this spring. CNN still makes a healthy profit, thanks to its worldwide reach. It supports one of the largest newsgathering staffs at any network. But unlike its rivals, it lacks clarity of purpose.

The same company that at long last put award-winning correspondent Candy Crowley in charge of a Sunday talk show also put up with the empty-headed Rick Sanchez for years. No one seemed to mind when he staged silly stunts like getting Tasered on the air and when he repeatedly got his facts wrong. He was fired in October only after publicly accusing his CNN bosses and Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart of bigotry.

Preceding Sanchez out the door was the man who hired him, Jon Klein, who took over as president of CNN/U.S. six years ago. “Parker Spitzer” and Morgan were his decisions. He was fired just weeks after announcing the new lineup.

“The fact is Jon Klein has overseen the slow, and sometimes not-so-subtle tabloidization of CNN,” former CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre wrote on his blog. “He has systematically shed programming that aspired to provide context and perspective, in favor of ratings-seeking formulas aimed more at fanning the flames of outrage and emotion.”

Will that change? Not likely. Klein’s replacement, Ken Jautz, is a former Associated Press reporter and CNN veteran, which might sound reassuring to in-house proponents of big-J journalism. But Jautz made his mark as an executive by transforming what used to be Headline News into the gossip channel HLN. And he told the AP after being named to the top job that “the traditional, straightforward, facts-only approach” probably won’t work in prime time. “People are interested in something in addition to the facts: context, analysis or, yes, opinion.”

CNN has come a long way in 30 years. Once derided as Chicken Noodle News, it came of age during the first Persian Gulf War and proved that Ted Turner wasn’t completely nuts when he dreamed up the first all-news TV channel. When I worked there briefly in the early ’90s, the mantra “the news is the star” didn’t seem laughable in prime time. Sadly, it does now.

Originally published by American Journalism Review, December 2010-January 2011

Scripps-owned WPTV in West Palm Beach launched its early morning newscast in January; General Manager Steve Wasserman calls the ratings “respectable.” In Tampa, Fox sta¬tion WTVT reports that local news at 4:30 is drawing more than twice as many viewers as the program it replaced, the celebrity gossip show TMZ. And the numbers are growing, which is more than you can say for local news in most other time slots.

“Morning news is today’s late news,” Wasserman says. “It used to be that every advertiser wanted to be in the late news, and now they crave mornings.”

Who’s watching?

One reason may be the kinds of viewers who tune in early. At WCCO in Minneapolis, the audience for the 4:30 newscast is made up almost entirely of people 25 to 54 years old, says News Director Scott Libin. That’s the demographic advertisers most want to reach, so it’s no wonder more stations are rushing to produce a show that’s easy to sell to them.

Because the stations adding early-early newscasts already had local news starting at 5 a.m., it hasn’t cost them much, if anything, to tack on another half hour. WPTV didn’t add a sin¬gle staffer. At WCCO, the only cost has been a little overtime. The revenue from commercials that sell for a few thousand dollars each may not be huge, but it’s all profit to the station.

In some respects, the shift to mornings isn’t a great surprise. The audience for the local news at 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. has been shrinking for more than a decade. Some of the decline can be blamed on a change in measurement systems, but there’s no doubt that American viewing habits have changed. The network programs that follow the late news are in trouble, too. Between them, Leno and Letterman have lost a million viewers in the past two years.

One driving force behind the switch is obvious: driving. Longer commutes have pushed bedtimes earlier and made pre-dawn wake-ups commonplace in cities like New York and Los Angeles, where four local stations now offer news at 4:30. But commuters aren’t the only viewers targeted by stations getting into the early news game.

“There are literally tens of thousands of bakers, bus drivers, fishermen, café
managers, construction workers, hotel employees…all up long before the sun,” says Jonathan Shelley, news director at Hearst-owned WDSU in New Orleans, which launched its “First Edition” newscast in August. “We believe there is a real and consistent audience at 4:30 a.m.”

There’s definitely an audience for television at that hour. About a third of all households in New Orleans have the TV on that early already. Now, they have the option of tuning in to a local newscast at 4:30 instead of network or cable news programs. And they may watch it differently.

“People used to watch for 10 or 15 minutes [in the morning] and leave for work or school,” WPTV’s Wasserman says. Now, he says, they’re staying tuned for 30 to 45 minutes at a clip, to the delight of early morning advertisers.

Different content

What viewers like about local morning news isn’t just the timing, it’s the content. “There’s lots of stuff going on,” Wasserman says. “On the late news, a lot has already happened.”

No question, late evening newscasts are often crammed with crime and other so-called breaking news that doesn’t amount to much in the light of day. The new predawn newscasts are more utilitarian, packed with weather and traffic reports that help early risers plan their day. And they bring viewers up to date on late sports scores and international developments that took place overnight.

“It’s the only time of day when you can assume the viewers have not had access to news for six to eight hours,” Libin says. That means stories from Iraq or Afghanistan, which local stations typically wouldn’t touch later in the day, are fair game first thing in the morning. And viewers all over the country want to know the numbers from the global financial markets.

At KUSA in Denver, the 4:30 a.m. newscast that launched in June focuses on financial and business news. “There are more and more people [here] working in multiple time zones domestically and internationally that must use various work hours to conduct business,” says Patti Dennis, the station’s vice president and news director.

Not long ago, it seemed inconceivable that local news at 4:30 a.m. could succeed. Now the question is whether to start even earlier. One New York station has a 4 a.m. newscast in the works for fall. “I have no plans to go at 4 a.m.,” Wasserman says. “But if you’d asked me 18 months ago if I planned a 4:30 [newscast], I’d have said no.”

Anchors, set your alarm clocks earlier. The audience already has.

This column was originally published in American Journalism Review, September/October 2010

The average paycheck in local television news was up 2.5 percent in 2009 and salaries in local radio news were unchanged.  Both were down the year before–more than 4 percent for TV and almost 2 percent for radio–so that’s an improvement. Considering there really wasn’t any inflation in 2009, Papper says, “news people really did hold their own.”

Long term, however, the picture is bleaker. Over the last five years, inflation has eaten up every salary gain in TV news and more. Paychecks grew by less than 3 percent but inflation rose more than 13 percent. In other words, if you’ve been in TV news for five years, your buying power now is less than when you started out. That’s depressing.

A few job categories did better than others last year. The only TV salaries that changed much were for reporters, managing editors and art directors. All were up by about 10 percent. The biggest losers?  Sports reporters, whose average salary dropped by about the same amount. Ouch.

As always, the bigger the market the higher the salary. But this year’s data was unusual in one respect. Papper found almost no difference in salary changes by market size and staff size, which he called surprising. Basically, the salary picture was about the same across the board. Not awful. But not great.

The Tribune station in Houston is planning a total overhaul of its newscasts changes this fall with a new format it calls NewsFix. “The core concept is to focus more on storytelling by allowing those in the story to tell the story and to place video and audio at the center of all that we do,” KIAH general manager Roger Bare told the Houston Chronicle. Translation?

Say goodbye to traditional anchors and on-camera reporters. Most stories apparently will be fast-paced, told with lots of nat sound from the perspective of those involved. As a station employee who didn’t want to be identified told the newspaper:

“It’s not going to be as much of a newscast as a collection of stories that will roll into each other,” the employee said. “There will be natural sound, and you won’t see the reporters. It will be news for people who don’t watch news, which sounds a lot like opening a bar for people who don’t drink.”

KIAH is now advertising a job opening for an “executive producer and imaginator” to oversee the newscast and it’s an eye-opener.  They’re looking for someone “with a fiery passion to help re-invent the 80′s rooted, focus grouped, yuppie anchors and a news desk, super doppler ultra weather style.”

Experience in running a TV Newsroom is not necessary and might actually be detrimental, as this position requires someone with no traditional TV News baggage, because there’s little tradition involved in this idea.

KIAH probably isn’t risking much by trying something totally new. Its two daily newscasts get the lowest ratings in town, drawing less than a .5 rating. But other Tribune stations could be in line for a similar “fix.” The company plans to roll out the NewsFix at some of its other 23 stations “that don’t have a strong legacy news product or where the local news tradition may not be as strong as it is in other markets,” says Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman.

This is hardly the first time a news organization has talked about getting rid of anchors. I seem to remember discussions along those lines at CBS News back in the 1980s. As I recall, some experimental newscasts were even produced, with each reporter tossing to the next reporter in line. The idea never took hold.

One reason may be that many viewers decide what newscast to watch based on who the anchor is. What television news has that print doesn’t is personality. Stations have tried to capitalize on the personal connection viewers feel to TV journalists by making sure they’re not just heard but also seen. Reporters who resist doing stand-ups are inevitably told that they must appear on camera regularly because viewers want to see the person who’s telling the story. Was that just a myth? I doubt it. But if the Tribune experiment succeeds, a lot of TV managers will be proved wrong.