rogus@ohio.edu
February 16, 2009, CLEVELAND -- WKYC and WOIO have announced a video-sharing arrangement designed to pool resources and allow both stations to cover more stories, while keeping the focus on content unique for their stations and their brands.
That's how a small item on WKYC-TV's website in Cleveland started. Now, two months later, the quotes from the two news directors found in the news release seem to be holding up. Rita Andolsen is WKYC-TV's News Director and one of the panelists on a RTNDA@NAB session on The New Journalism Networks Monday morning. She echoed her comments from the web news release, saying that the pooling partnerhsip with cross-town rival WOIO-TV only dealt with content that previously both stations would have covered and both would have basically gotten the same video and sound. The idea is to free up crews at both stations to cover other, enterprise stories. But she was the first to admitt, her newsroom wasn't exactly thrilled at working together with a fierce competitor.
News sharing partnerships in a community are nothing new. Greg Dawson, News Director for KNSD-TV in San Diego, talked about multiple partners including newspapers, magazines and websites. Also on the panel, Ed Kelley, Editor of The Daily Oklahoman, discussed a relationship with a local television station that helped the newspaper get video for its website started. News content sharing agreements among former competitors from different media platforms have been working for more than 15 years. But creating a pool video and/or information agreements among rival TV stations, or newspapers statewide, is relatively new.
So What's the Problem?
One of the points all the panelists made was it was certainly better to have one camera or reporter at a story than none, and in the current climate of diminishing resources that could become the case. But these agreements do raise questions about the number of distinct voices covering the news in a community. Competition in any business is usually a good thing for consumers. It means better quality products at a more reasonable price.
The same holds true for news media. Mass media, such as newspapers and local television, have to work harder then ever before to get and keep news consumers in the current online news environment, which provides highly segmented news for specific audiences. But if, as in the case of Cleveland, there are a major metro newspaper, four television stations, radio news stations, and various smaller community daily/weekly newspapers covering a story, isn't it more likely that all angles of that story and distinctive perspectives will make it to the public? That's the diversity of voices.
Competition has it's downside too, though. When the battle for viewers or readers to satisfy advertisers leads to rushing stories to air/print to be first, sameness across news media, and pandering to desires for sensational or entertaining news, the public loses. As we have seen in multiple sessions the first two days of RTNDA@NAB, most newsrooms are forced to do more news with fewer resources across more platforms. In a competitive environment, if a news manager is faced with the choice of giving a reporter an extra day to work an enterprise that otherwise wouldn't be uncovered, or cover the mayor's news conference that all news media in town will have, and will fill 1:30 of today's newscast plus provide extra video and sound for the web, there is no choice. If these news sharing agreements make it possible for that news manager to do both then I think they are a good thing, as long as all partners use the pooled video or informaion to produce their own stories.
So called "mainstream media" are under greater scrutiny than ever before from the instaneous blogosphere, so no television station or newspaper or radio station partnership is going to get away with monopolizing information or news perspectives. These partnerships are an economic reality for news media whose consumers make greater demands for more information, right now. As long as the end result is not fewer journalist boots on the ground, the diversity of voices heard from could increase. More resources could be available again for more enterprise and investigative reporting that had been the hallmark of mainstream local news, and could be its savior in the growing information overload.
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