CASPER
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Signs of The Times
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SkyBOX: Signs of The Times
by Evie Haskell
Less than a month ago, the Associated Press hoisted a white flag. Faced with a threatened revolt by bloodied member newspapers (anybody looked at newspaper balance sheets lately?), the AP agreed to cut its assessments by $9 million in 2009. That's on top of $21 million in fee reductions in '08.
Given this $30 million stab in the revenue column, you might think that the AP business model ... that is, the compiling of photos, news reports and the like for its members ... is yet another doomed species.
You would be wrong.
At the end of last week, NBC Local Media and Fox Television Stations unveiled a plan to launch a local, independently run news service in Philadelphia. This service, NBC and Fox proclaimed, could cut by half the number of helicopters, film crews, reporters and such which NBC and Fox stations would need to send to local news happenings. In short, it's an AP-ization of local television news and rather than being a rehash of a failing business model, it looks to me like a savvy move. Even more, it looks like a move that ... if it works at all ... will be widely copied throughout multiplatform-dom in the very near future.
What, after all, is the purpose of having multiple news helicopters buzzing over a local traffic accident? (Except, perhaps, the creation of another accident for the local news to cover.) Likewise, what is really accomplished by having dozens of film crews and reporters converging on Sarah Palin's recent press conference ... or the Reverend Ed Young's exhortations for seven days of sex ... or the latest brush fire in California ... or .... But you get the point.
While these things may be important (certainly the brush fire is for local homeowners) do they really require the vast amount of resources spent on covering them? I doubt it. And in these times of ever tightening belts, I bet a lot of network suits will be seeing things in the same way.
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SkyBOX: Signs of The Times
by Evie Haskell
Less than a month ago, the Associated Press hoisted a white flag. Faced with a threatened revolt by bloodied member newspapers (anybody looked at newspaper balance sheets lately?), the AP agreed to cut its assessments by $9 million in 2009. That's on top of $21 million in fee reductions in '08.
Given this $30 million stab in the revenue column, you might think that the AP business model ... that is, the compiling of photos, news reports and the like for its members ... is yet another doomed species.
You would be wrong.
At the end of last week, NBC Local Media and Fox Television Stations unveiled a plan to launch a local, independently run news service in Philadelphia. This service, NBC and Fox proclaimed, could cut by half the number of helicopters, film crews, reporters and such which NBC and Fox stations would need to send to local news happenings. In short, it's an AP-ization of local television news and rather than being a rehash of a failing business model, it looks to me like a savvy move. Even more, it looks like a move that ... if it works at all ... will be widely copied throughout multiplatform-dom in the very near future.
What, after all, is the purpose of having multiple news helicopters buzzing over a local traffic accident? (Except, perhaps, the creation of another accident for the local news to cover.) Likewise, what is really accomplished by having dozens of film crews and reporters converging on Sarah Palin's recent press conference ... or the Reverend Ed Young's exhortations for seven days of sex ... or the latest brush fire in California ... or .... But you get the point.
While these things may be important (certainly the brush fire is for local homeowners) do they really require the vast amount of resources spent on covering them? I doubt it. And in these times of ever tightening belts, I bet a lot of network suits will be seeing things in the same way.