[DeadJohn]

Twenty Four hour news channels need to have time fillers

24 hours news is, IMO, the biggest factor in the decline of quality reporting.

People have become intellectually lazy

I disagree; as a collective we've always been intellectually lazy. People view their selected news source as an authority. News outlets used to demonstrate some responsibility to inform lazy/ignorant people, now the executives see an opportunity to exploit those same people.

Some news sources are still good, but the majority of people will never look at those places. People would rather find the source that provides them with the highest level of confirmation bias.

The issue might be more acute in the USA than some other countries because we have a larger economy, more people, and therefore more opportunities to make money via "news".

[TaoMaas]

24 hours news is, IMO, the biggest factor in the decline of quality reporting.

In a way it is. It's actually cable tv in general. Cable tv, along with the internet, have completely changed the revenue streams for our traditional news sources. As Clackers said earlier, a lot of the decline is simple economics. The news outlets can't afford quality reporting any more. Or rather, darn few can. In the past, we used to rely on 3 tv networks and our newspapers for all our news so that's where all the advertising revenue went. We were a captive audience and that meant the news outlets pretty much had a license to print money. Now, those same eyeballs are spread out over the internet and any number of cable tv channels...and along with them went the advertising dollars. Fewer viewers=lower ad rates=less money to put back into your business.

[DeadJohn]

^ your comments are good. I was thinking more about needing to fill 24 hours of programming. What used to be a minor thing only reported in a local paper now gets national coverage even though it's mere trivia to a national audience.

[ChrisPlatt]

The quality of that Zapruder footage was pretty awful...

Chris

[clackers]

The quality of that Zapruder footage was pretty awful...

Chris

Well, Zapruder was just a guy making a home movie.

We should expect more from our news organizations, Chris!

[Wheatfield]

The quality of that Zapruder footage was pretty awful...

Chris

Thar wasn't shot as journalism footage. It turned out to be an important piece of film, but at the time it was shot it was just a guy with a Super 8 camera doing home movies when the President came to town.

[monochrome]

Many of you know that for 10 years my elder daughter was a Senior Producer for a Broadcast Network News Division. For five years she was at the Washington Bureau and produced first the Pentagon and Embassy Row, then the White House. She moved to New York where she was Senior Operations Producer for a nightly live broadcast, and Breaking News Producer (on call 24/7).

She just told me the most significant change affecting quality of Broadcast News was the closure of City Bureaus and related termination of professionals of all stripes - who were replaced by stringers, and finally libraries of clips to download for a fee from the Web. At the end, before she became Commincations Director for a State Attorney General, she spent more time authorizing purchase orders for B-Roll than arranging reporting teams for some live shot somewhere on Earth.

As the News Staff size shrank, the competition for positions, backstabbing, harassment, lieing, cheating, political litmus tests and collusion and everything else horrible - and low pay - made the work impossible to justify. One by one talented people have left, to be replaced by lower paid, less experienced, junior employees who all have one world view.

I won’t write another epistle, but know that I’ve only scratched the surface.

FWIW, they tried to replace Sony shoulder cams with 5D’s, but the videographers just couldn’t pull focus with a DSLR. They loved the Canon color profile but they hated the quality of the product. So they got the Sony’s out of the closet and wrote a color emulator to match the Canon palette for their editing tools.

It's low quality Photo Journalism which is not surprising since lots of actual photographers have been let go and they told reporters to just use a phone. What do you expect?

My Basic Photography classes have a wait list of educated accomplished folks who have good jobs and lots of frustration with the DSLR / MILC kit they bought which promised the pictures on the box.

I now have a dozen handouts (and growing) for specific camera models with the dozen pages they need to read of the 450 pages they don't need,

Does anyone here think a Journalism Major gets classes on Cell Phone photography? They get taught how to dig out facts, interview, verify and write the story.

Culturally, cell phone pictures are so ubiquitous, folks accept them as normal. Which is good for me and why people hire me.


2018 Downtown Cary Fall Farmers Festival

In a way it is. It's actually cable tv in general. Cable tv, along with the internet, have completely changed the revenue streams for our traditional news sources. As Clackers said earlier, a lot of the decline is simple economics. The news outlets can't afford quality reporting any more. Or rather, darn few can. In the past, we used to rely on 3 tv networks and our newspapers for all our news so that's where all the advertising revenue went. We were a captive audience and that meant the news outlets pretty much had a license to print money. Now, those same eyeballs are spread out over the internet and any number of cable tv channels...and along with them went the advertising dollars. Fewer viewers=lower ad rates=less money to put back into your business.

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Last edited by monochrome; 10-07-2018 at 08:38 PM.

[ChrisPlatt]

Expect to see lots more amateur cellphone videos on news programs and still photos in publications.

Due to shrinking news department budgets and staffs, often private citizens will now be the only witnesses to important news events.

Chris