Jamie York
Jamie York is a producer for On the Media.
Local TV News Has a Question
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - 02:58 PM
In the past, OTM has looked at the myriad ways that local TV news bend and finesse the ethical standards that most journalism outlets try to uphold. We’ve looked at health reporting, how local news cover local politicians (or don't) and video news releases – advertising in news clothing. Still, nothing quite prepared us for this.
What accounts for the remarkably similar question on every local anchor’s lips? Your guess is as good as ours. Maybe Carl Jung was right and there’s a collective unconscious. Or maybe you recognized one of those local anchors and you could call and ask them how the question arose. If you do we’d love to know. And lest it go unsaid, a tip of our hat to Conan for assembling this and to listener Joshua Johnson for pointing it out to us.
http://teamcoco.com/video/media-reacts-email-overload
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Comments [6]
I, for one, welcome our new email overlords.
Payola?
The original story that everyone repeated was essentially an advertisement for a company that offers an email service. I don't believe that kind of coverage comes for free.
Some stations carried the same intro graphic as well as the "news" footage. My guess is the tech feature is syndicated by CNN, and comes with a lead-in script that the laziest of lightweight "anchors" don't even edit. The more responsible or better staffed stations are free to edit-in additional sources, but I've only noticed one that did. I also wonder whether the one-source CNN story is itself based on a flack-feed video press release, since it's so one-sided and promotional for a single product. The software company even features the Conan composite on its website.
Could this be the end of Comment Overload?
I used to be a local new writer/producer. Local news stations subscribe to services that provide video, soundbites, and complete packages (i.e., edited 1-3 minute stories) on everything from the war in Afghanistan to rescued puppies in some random midwestern city. Every network (plus CNN and Fox) run these services. When the producer looks at the video, usually there's a script in there too. Copy, paste, repeat.
CNN uploaded a 1-minute video on this issue on March 2; it seems that many (most? all?) of the local stations posted their videos around March 5 or later. Could it be that the locals are getting their news feeds by watching CNN?
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