Today’s television news format is a broken mess,
dominated by companies that are too large and cold to their viewers. When
someone watches the news, one is force-fed information with little to no choice
in what one is told. America has a fast-food restaurant of information, filled
with filler and everything else a Big Mac encompasses. The dinosaur of network
news doesn’t fit this century; the average person now has far easier access to
information than ever before with the advent of new and more widespread
technology such as the Internet and computers. This creates a highly selective population
that knows precisely what it’s looking for-- a population that increasingly is
the primary market for news and information.
An industry must adapt to its consumers, or else it’s
threatened by total extinction. For a new market that uses social media, search
engines, and tags on Twitter and Tumblr, the old method of force-feeding the
greasy, fattening Whopper of network news is simply not viable. Any teenager
will tell you the same thing about network news: it’s pompous, outdated, boring
and full of irrelevant and stupid “stories.” Rather than using the old, the
market must look towards what is popular in order to survive.
First, the standard news anchor would have to go; no more
pompadours and silken ties, no more teleprompters and on-air scripts. The news
anchor of the future must be real, relatable and down to Earth and must dress
and be the kind of person that young people wish to see. They should ideally
come up with most of their material impromptu (much like a “vlogger” on YouTube
would) and use a list of citations and source material for references; small
cues instead of whole sentences could also be used.
It is imperative that the news anchor seem real, natural
and young-- not forced, old and outdated. Their videos should all be either
streaming live content from online or downloadable with a minor fee of a dollar
or two; ad revenue would be shown in the video. Paid subscribers to the new
news network would be exempt from the fees and advertisements.
Second, the “news team” would encompass not a lead anchor
and a few minor characters; rather, each reporter and news vlogger would be part
of a larger network of news distribution. There would be no single man or woman
saying “Good night and good luck…” at the end of every broadcast; instead, the
team would tag their videos based on the information presented in the video and
greet their viewer likewise. Popular reporters would be able to be “followed”
in a very similar way that one can follow a blog on Tumblr or a Twitter
account. A reporter would also “Tweet” news or whatever they wished to say from
their reporters’ profile; the news would not solely be visual, video news,
anymore. After finishing a video, a list of suggestions for related videos
would appear, rated on significance; it would contain a thumbnail of the video
in a central circle, with connections to other circles radiating out.
The videos would be largely vlogger made and would
contain whatever content the viewer was searching for. One could follow a
comedy news show (The Daily Show), a serious program (NPR), or celebrity gossip
(E!News). It would be entirely user determinant and up to the viewer. This is
how network news can slim down and become the healthy salad that viewers are
looking for and not the grimy hamburger they’re given.
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