Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Abandoning the News, page 5

That's why it's already an overwhelmingly challenging time in the worlds of cable television and broadcast news, as well as in print media. Young people are moving away not just from television news to the Internet, but also away from television in general, a fact that makes it difficult for TV marketing organizations to even reach the next generation of news consumers since many have already abandoned TV for their computers. Still, enterprising television executives do have a variety of new tools and distribution mechanisms at their disposal. Within the new NBC Universal family, for example, there's an abundance of opportunities with CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, the Sci Fi Channel and Bravo. Meanwhile, CBS News management is focused on CBSnews.com, and the assets of Viacom, the parent of CBS. Viacom owns Nickelodeon, Black Entertainment Television, MTV, and mtvU, formerly the College Television Network. On mtvU.com, today you can find CBS News headlines.

Like his competitors at ABC, CBS News President Andrew Heyward says he is committed to developing products for the broadband marketplace, a means to find potential television news consumers at their desktops at home or at work. Some news organizations have already made a promising start. Last summer, ABC News launched ABC News Now, a subscription-based news network designed to capture the desktop audience at work, at school or on the move. It will be available on broadband services, digital cable and wireless services. Nothing like it has ever been tried before in the U.S. and it clearly fills a void in the ABC News distribution plan.

Success in these areas is critical for the networks. “We would like to attract younger viewers,” says Bill Wheatley, Vice President, News at NBC News. “We know advertisers will pay us more to reach them and NBC has long been accepted as a network with appeal to younger people. But in news, the challenge is great. The trick is that we are a mass medium and if we target young people too regularly and too narrowly, we will lose other parts of the audience. We may, though, come to a point where we will have to create programs just for younger viewers.”

That is very likely what it's going to take to change current trends for mainstream news organizations. They are going to have to program for the demographic if they are to retain consequential news franchises. For CBS News, that means using those networks in their corporate family. For others with less obvious ways to reach younger viewers, an investment strategy will be required. And at some point along the way, game-changing strategies, what Rusty Coats would call “radical” or business strategists term “disruptive” tactics, are required. (Disruptive meaning along the lines of a model that has technology and telecommunications companies merging or aligning with news companies.) As Ted Turner changed the game at a much different moment in time with the invention of CNN, and as Apple changed another game by providing accessible music downloads, dramatic moves—accompanied by the simultaneous but deft, prudent tinkering of skilled print editors, television producers and digital media journalists and technologists—are unquestionably required.

Summing Up: The
Message Is Clear
What the survey data commissioned by the Corporation—as well as the message that's coming in loud and clear from bloggers and their readers—are telling us is that there are new forms of participatory or citizen journalism that can engage those who had been outside today's news environments. Last spring, The Bakersfield Californian launched The Northwest Voice (http://www.northwestvoice.com), a community weekly paper and Internet site. Most of the content is produced by members of the community and submitted via the Internet. Similarly, The Command Post (http://www.command-post.org/) is a site created by a worldwide network of bloggers set up to cover stories and package links to other sites that add documentation. Many news executives cringe at the idea of such projects. But these are bold concepts and their premise—that news can actually be generated by readers—may be precisely what many young, dissatisfied news consumers will respond to. Similarly, news organizations need to connect to consumers through e-mail and instant messaging services, need to join the virtual online conversations that are a central place where news is discussed and need to not only embrace these approaches but also use new technologies in order to reach out to younger audiences.

It is also apparent that news has to be produced specifically for and directed to the audiences of the future, and reach them in the ways they want. In developing news products for this audience, what's required is to understand that yesterday's news is literally that and recognize that daily news delivery mechanisms, ranging from television newscasts to magazine shows to newspapers and their giveaway stepchildren, need an approach to the news focused on techniques that go far beyond who said what yesterday or the day before. New products could be built around information services designed for the Internet, or for cellular and multimedia delivery. These could include, for example, innovative, even risky programming models delivered over broadband with unique voices and tied into related blogs on specific topics, ranging from national security to local restaurants.

News executives need to quickly mobilize around what are today their secondary platforms, at least measured in terms of where, currently, their largest revenue opportunities exist. In other words, even if the daily newspaper industry's advertising revenue dwarfs its Internet business, the future of the American newspaper will be defined online from both a future readership point of view and perhaps in terms of future revenue streams as well. It is time for print industry investments in Internet products to match the online audience size and the extraordinary magnitude of the migration to digital news delivery.

While making investments is imperative, the news industry needs to do so while simultaneously inventing new, creative business approaches. Few news organizations think methodically and creatively about product development, and resources allocated to studying and inventing new news products are generally miniscule. Even at universities and think tanks, research on these critical topics is limited. Nevertheless, the time has come to forge new liaisons between the disparate worlds of research, education and news organizations in order to maximize intellectual capability and limited resources.

Meanwhile, the news industry should recognize the importance of what's going on in places like Bakersfield and work hand-in-hand with bloggers and other independent journalists and citizens to experiment with the formation of new alliances and the development of new products. With safeguards, and appropriate standards as an early requirement, news organizations large and small should bring the public—including their local community—into their news gathering and news delivery planning processes in ways that were probably unimaginable just a few years ago. From the simple touches, like making every news professional's e-mail address available, to the more complex, such as engaging with news sources and the citizenry at large in meaningful dialogue, there are clearly methods for providing the accessibility younger audiences are likely to embrace. In other words, news executives need to think about their products as participatory community institutions, not merely as distributors of their own creative output, and open themselves to input, feedback, ideas and journalism from outside their own organizations. In addition, news organizations must recognize the value of the one piece of technology that's in virtually every hand around the world—the cell phone—so that the mobile revolution is, in fact, part of a news revolution.

Ironically, some large news organizations don't even adequately leverage the know-how and expertise within their own companies. There are hundreds of very capable, technologically savvy Internet executives within large news organizations whose views about the future and whose ideas for new products and initiatives are dismissed or ignored altogether. Every major broadcast and cable news organization exists today within a corporate family that includes Hollywood studios, institutions where new technologies, new distribution channels, new production techniques and new storytelling techniques are developed. They talk infrequently and awkwardly.

Without this kind of dramatic rethinking, without a new openness to new approaches, the news industry is in peril. Certainly, the newspaper revenue model based in large part on classified and job advertising will never be the same, with so much revenue disappearing to the Internet. One recent study said the popular, free Internet site, craigslist (www.craigslist.com), had cost San Francisco Bay Area newspapers $50- $65 million in job listing revenue alone.

While the outright collapse of large news organizations is hardly imminent, as the new century progresses, it's hard to escape the fact that their franchises have eroded and their futures are far from certain. A turnaround is certainly possible, but only for those news organizations willing to invest time, thought and resources into engaging their audiences, especially younger consumers. The trend lines are clear. So is the importance of a dynamic news business to our civic life, to our educational future, and to our democracy.

Media industry consultant Merrill Brown, was founding editor in chief of MSNBC.com, a position he held from 1996 to 2002. He's served as a senior vice president of RealNetworks and was a founder of Court TV. He also worked in the newspaper and magazine field and was a reporter and Wall Street correspondent for The Washington Post. Merrillbrown02@hotmail.com