In no particular order:
I went running with my 10 year old son yesterday. As we were chatting, he mentioned that you shouldn’t trust the news too much because they liked to exaggerate. He was thinking mostly of TV news. I shared with him the notion that, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.”
CBS is terminating its affiliation with WISH-TV, channel 8 and beginning one with WTTV, channel 4 beginning January 1, 2015. If WISH-TV can reboot Sammy Terry and Cowboy Bob and somehow broadcast all of the Purdue and IU basketball games (including the Farm Bureau tuba kid and Martha the mop lady intros), I think they’d be fine.
Rumor has it that the Indy Star is laying off a lot of people today. My opinion is that the long term future of news organizations is going to be investigating and reporting on local issues. Those are things that can’t effectively be outsourced or replaced otherwise. Going for short term gain by replacing those more expensive functions with cheap content like opinion or news wire reports is going to erode the long term viability of the organization because that stuff is replaceable.
They play the IFBI tuba video pre-game in Mackey. I’d always passively wondered what the IU equivalent was. Now I know.
I don’t have cable and I’m too lazy to climb on my roof to mount an antenna, so I know very little about the broadcast stations beyond what I see on Twitter, but WISH seems like it has strong newsroom and weather teams. Assuming they can afford to keep them, it could be possible for them to be a pioneer in a network-free paradigm (sure, there are other independent stations out there, but they start from a weaker position). Or it could prove that the network is king.
As for the newspapers, we’ve seen similar at the Journal and Courier for years. The corporate overlords and doing the exact opposite of what would make the local establishments more relevant. The idea that a newspaper is confined to their print and web editions is ridiculous. Could you imagine if the J&C had streaming live weather coverage to go head-to-head with WLFI? Or if it served as a local CSPAN-type resource, live-streaming city council meetings and the like. Actual value provided to the public. Gannett, of course, is allergic to this.
I don’t know that papers need to livestream weather coverage — there’s plenty of that out there. However, I LOVE the idea of live-streaming every governmental meeting. It would be fairly inexpensive to do — put a camera (or, heck, an iPhone camera) at every meeting. You wouldn’t have to have staff do it, maybe hire freelancers or students. (Or you could see if you could connect into local cable-access coverage if it’s already being provided.) If live-streaming everything turns out not to be feasible, you can always upload the video of the meeting to the site. The biggest issue would be bandwidth, so the question would be how many you could archive. The benefit may not be so much in how many people would watch — it wouldn’t be many — but in giving staffs not large enough to hit every meeting a chance to see what happened.
The greater problem would be getting these public boards to share their information and be accessible. The lack of transparency has been pointed out in multiple venues by civic activists like Zach Baiel for years.