Playing on TV's Turf
Will
newspapers' online video offerings endanger local TV news?
Listen up, local television stations. Remember the monopoly
you used to have on video? It's long gone. More than 1,000 U.S. newspapers
now have video online, and some of it isn't bad. "The possibility
to replace television is in sight," washingtonpost.com's Travis Fox
recently told New York Magazine. Is it time for TV to worry?
Consider
that the No. 1 local Web site in almost every major market is run
by a newspaper. "I doubt if most people could name the lead TV station
in their hometown," Houston Chronicle Editor Jeff Cohen told a journalism
conference in St. Louis earlier this year. "I don't care how much
money they spend; no competitor or aggregator is going to get around
our dominance at home."
Now consider how aggressive newspaper companies have
been about learning TV's stock-in-trade. Over the past two years,
Gannett has trained 500 print photographers to shoot video. The San
Jose Mercury News has equipped its entire photography staff with high
definition video cameras. About a dozen newspapers sent staffers to
this year's National Press Photographers Association NewsVideo workshop,
where one of them--the Houston Chronicle's Meg Loucks--won the best
video shooter award.
Worried yet? There's more. Hearst will launch ad-supported
video channels on its papers' Web sites later this year. Other newspaper
companies already are producing their own online newscasts. Add it
all up, and television news executives could be forgiven for thinking
that the apocalypse is upon them.
But wait. Take a closer look at the competition.
California's Ventura County Star, owned by E.W. Scripps,
got into the Webcast act a few months ago with Studio805, a two-minute
headline package presented by a young staff reporter. "We have no
intention of trying to match television newscasts," Managing Editor
John Moore told readers. "We're not going to give you live coverage
via helicopter of the latest car chase, or have someone stand at the
scene of the crime 10 hours after it happened to pretend like it's
live news." Fair enough, but the Star apparently doesn't intend to
match what's good about TV news, either. Studio805 uses little video,
and the still photos that illustrate stories pop up almost at random,
without explanation. [June 2008 update: the Webcast is no longer being
produced; Studio805 is now a collection of video features.]
Another Scripps paper, Florida's Naples Daily News,
has had more time to perfect its vodcast; Studio55 debuted a year
ago (see "Adapt or Die," June/July 2006). The 15-minute program "airs"
twice daily on the Web and a local cable outlet. The paper calls it
groundbreaking and innovative, a source of hyperlocal news for a community
underserved by the closest TV stations some 35 miles away. But the
production is amateurish at best, and there's nothing distinctive
about the content. Studio55 offers garden-variety local news, sports
and weather over an annoying music track. Some of the rotating hosts
are better than others, but none is ready for prime time. One recently
stumbled through a story about "a silver of land."
A few newspapers are doing more distinctive work online.
The Roanoke Times and Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot, two Virginia papers
owned by Landmark, produce chatty, informal Webcasts clearly designed
for online users, with verbal and visual reminders to "hit that link"
for more information. Roanoke calls its TimesCast "the anti-TV."
Should television newsrooms feel insulted by the way
newspapers describe their online video ventures? Not at all, says
News Director Stacy Owen of KXTV, the Gannett-owned station in Sacramento.
"I think they're smart," she says. Newspapers "think it's in their
best interest to differentiate themselves from a medium they don't
think serves people particularly well." Owen believes television still
has a leg up with online video "because people come to us for moving
pictures," but she says TV stations have to capitalize quickly on
that advantage.
KXTV hopes to succeed online by trying something new.
The station has turned former news anchor Sharon Ito into a Web-only
anchor for News10.net. Unlike her online newspaper counterparts, Ito
doesn't read headlines. Instead, she moderates live chats with viewers,
explains how the newsroom makes decisions, anchors breaking news and
pursues stories of interest to the Web audience. Owen says Ito's most
important function is to be accessible. "Television has personalities
people already know and have relationships with," Owen says, "so why
not develop that relationship in a new way?"
Another Gannett station, KARE-TV in Minneapolis, is
seeking the same result with a slightly different approach. "A Web-based
show with a television component" is how News Director Tom Lindner
describes KARE OnLive, a half-hour daily "news hybrid" simulcast on
TV and online at 4 p.m. Conceived as a conversation about the news,
the program invites users to participate via Webcam. Lindner says
TV stations have done a good job of making news available online when
the audience wants it. "What we haven't done as good a job at is bringing
the personality that's always been popular [on] television newscasts
to the Web," he says. "Hopefully, this is a way to bridge that."
In the end, television's ability to stay competitive
online may not be about the video at all. "We have to play to our
strength," says Owen, "what sets us apart from newspapers. Our people."
By
Deborah Potter@www.newslab.org
HOME
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