Or the CBS Colbert Report, perhaps

What does the future hold for CBS Evening News? For that matter, what’s the future have in store for any network newscast? As David A. Andelman of Forbes.com notes, the typical viewer of CBS Evening News is “somewhere north of 50 years old (probably considerably north) and has been watching it since Walter Cronkite (remember him, kids? Probably not) was in the anchor chair.”

That’s not the demographic most TV networks are looking for. As Andelman speculates in his recent column, “The CBS Daily Show With Jon Stewart”, things might look much different in the near future.

 

[T]oday’s pared-to-the-bones CBS could save quite a lot more money by going The Daily Show route. First, comedy writers earn a lot less than senior producers or correspondents on a network evening news show. You might want to hold on to a few such correspondents and producers just in case the pope dies or the president gets shot or there’s some other history-altering moment and you want do something more elaborate than simply poke fun at it, as Jon Stewart does so effectively on Comedy Central. Still, you don’t need to have a whole regiment of correspondents, producers and camera crews suited up and ready to go 24/7.

Moreover, The Daily Show even has the beauty of being owned by Comedy Central, which is owned by Viacom, which owns CBS.

Finally, you don’t need to jump through hoops to find creative means to keep this whole infrastructure humming along profitably. That’s because there won’t be any such infrastructure.

Turn The Morning Show over to the entertainment division, which does cooking shows and movie promos better anyway. Sunday Morning, 60 Minutes and Face the Nation can continue to totter along on their own without a whole bureau system and news infrastructure. I mean, they’re not even located in the main Broadcast Center on West 57th Street, though without that huge news operation to house, they might be able to move back into the home of the mother ship and save CBS a bundle on off-site rental costs.

 

news, media, CBS

Light blogging lately…but for good reason

You may have noticed a slight drop in the quantity of blog postings around here lately. That’s due to a number of factors — my general laziness being the predominant one. But in my defense, I’m also on a deadline crunch. I’m writing an article about the future of the news media for Currents magazine, published by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), and I’ve been up to my ears researching what the experts and futurists have to say and conducting a couple of interviews.

I’ve found some interesting stuff online about the future of the news media, especially as it pertains to the concept of citizen journalism. Here are a few I found especially helpful.

  • Future of PR. This is a wiki for discussions about, well, the future of PR, among those in colleges and universities interested in the subject. It’s facilitated by Dan Forbush of ProfNet/PRNewswire. Dan and others in the wiki have assembled a host of good information about where things are headed in PR, marketing and media.
  • The American Press Institute Media Center‘s Digital Think site. This is the digital storytelling link I pointed to last Friday. Lots of good stuff there; much to assimilate.
  • We Media — the website for last October’s We Media conference, put on by the API Media Center. This is a good site about citizen (or participatory, or peer-to-peer, or grassroots, or open-source) journalism, and it links to a good 66-page primer (PDF) on the topic. The book is now two years old and slightly dated, but it is well researched and fairly well written. The authors wax a bit pedantic in a couple of the chapters, but overall it’s a good start for anyone interested in grassroots journalism.
  • Journalism.org, creators of the annual State of the News Media report.
  • EPIC 2015 — a dystopic vision of the future mediascape, and the eeriest Flash movie I’ve seen in some time. Definitely worth the eight minutes if you’ve got the time to spare. The first couple of minutes rehashes the past decade, but after that, this vision of the future is very 1984-esque. I’m interviewing one of the creators this afternoon.

    There’s much more, but those are the highlights.

    Now all I’ve got to do is pull all this research together in 1,500 words. Piece of cake. But the blogging will probably have to be put on hold while I mix the cake ingredients.

    • blogging, citizen journalism, Internet, news