I found this on YouTube and I like it. It’s a great parody of local TV news. It could be real. Yesterday, like all New Yorkers, we were glued to our TV sets watching local TV news coverage of Sandy.  It’s tough to fill endless hours of coverage.  It’s even harder when you keep cutting to a handful of local reporters all saying pretty much the same thing.  Personally, I don’t see the point of them standing in the rain talking to the camera.  I don’t think they add much, if anything, to the story – as they don’t really know more than the average schmoe who they keep telling to get off the streets – or at least get out of their shots.  This was a real one.  Not much different. In fact, I like the other one better. Now, the reason why I bring this up is because last night more than 30 million people were impacted by the storm. And, by definition, they were all over the tri-state area.  And most of them have iPhones, if not even more sophisticated cameras. And they know what is happening to them, if not to everyone else. Local news will occasionally use bits and pieces of ‘User Generated Content”, which is what they like to call it, but it is astonishing to me (and emblematic of the whole problem with conventional TV news) that that is all they can see to do. They still love their ‘reporters live on the scene’, even though most of them have no idea of what to say beyond – ‘hey look at this’.  Which is not much. TV networks and media companies still think of iPhones as receivers – that is, how are we going to get people to watch our TV shows on those little screens? (Not to mention the ads).  All wrong. The phones work both ways (like they do for phone calls – they receive and they also transmit). While the local TV networks kept blathering away with the same old, same old, ad infitum, the really interesting news was taking place onFacebook and YouTube (and Twitter – but in links to video and Facebook and YouTube. Some smart person is going to come along and harness all this potential and focus it and use it to create a real news feed.  I am not talking about just airing video of your trailer turned over by the wind, I am talking about creating a trained army of local reporters who know what they are doing – maybe 1,000 cameras, maybe 5,000 cameras. Now you have a real resource – with the emphasis on real. But no one I see, so far. Meanwhile, here is a video that was shot by a friend, Heli Hannele from her apartment on East 20th Street in Manhattan.  Better than the stand ups, and far more real.  Multiply this times 30 million and you have a real news service for the digital age of social media.
