And that’s the way it is….
CBS News apparently is about to outsource part of its newsgathering operation to CNN, or so says The New York Times.
This is hardly surprising. For far too long network news operations have been fat.
CBS News had a lot of time to restructure; to take advantage of what the new technologies offered. Beet-tv reported today that Reuters News is covering Iraq with 35 videojournalists. CBS News, apparently has opted for no coverage of Iraq.
The fate of CBS News is hardly surprising. Following in the ignoble footsteps of other American corporations like Kodak, who preferred to go down clinging to the past rather than embrace new and scary technologies. Their loss, and ours.
Perhaps the last gasp of a defunct and completely out of touch management was Katie Couric’s pornographic $15 million a year salary – to work 22 minutes a night reading what someone else had written. The sheer stupidity of this, the sheer short-sightedness of it now becomes obvious to everyone. For Couric’s reported $15 million, CBS could have (could have) hired and fielded an astonishing 150 Videojournalists worldwide, paying them a quite honorable $100,000 a year to report for CBS News. CBS News could have (could have) placed itself on the cutting edge of the digital news revolution.
Instead they opted to become the dinosaur poster child of the end of old media.
Goodbye Tiffany Network.
You blew it.
9 Comments
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Tom Desrosier April 09, 2008
oops – it turns out CBS is denying the rum0rs.
Not that anyone tells the truth anymore…
I still think the end is coming, the timing perhaps is debatable.
Tom
http://www.dare2believe.com
Tom Desrosier April 08, 2008
This is unsettling; true, but unsettling. I think much of the old media businesses will follow suit, like a house of cards… Book publishers, music distributors, newspapers and magazines – all of them, soon to be gone.
But big budget TV? Not sure yet? How can some kid with a camera deliver the likes of “Boston Legal”, or “NCIS”, and so on.
Change is coming – ready or not.
Good article as always!
Tom
http://www.dare2believe.com
pencilgod April 08, 2008
‘virtual news anchor’
Been done back in 2000
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_3_32/ai_63330938
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananova
it crashed and burned like many other fads.
eb April 08, 2008
Being an employee of a CBS O & O, I cannot write public comments about these things. I know better. And its probably written in code somewhere in the corporate handbook.
I guess it is time to talk internally.
Tom April 08, 2008
It’s sad to see the network of Murrow, Friendly and Cronkite reduced to this, but it’s inevitable.
Love your pic of the dinosaur. I just told one of my classes the other day, they are BIG dinosaurs, so they will take awhile to die, but make no mistake about it, they are dying.
With all the progress that’s being made in 3D computer animation, I wonder why nobody has experimented with a virtual news anchor — call her Maxine Headroom, all the personality of Katie Couric (!) at a fraction of the cost.
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Peter Ralph April 08, 2008
The problem with US media is a lack of journalists?
The media fiasco of Iraq war coverage disabused most everyone of that notion.
Time to change your ribbon?
pip pip
Lenslinger April 08, 2008
On this we agree. May the era of the all important anchor die quickly. We’ll argue about lens sizes later.