Once again, yes teevee folks, you're in trouble too

 I've said this myself, starting three years ago, on the ratings decline of local teevee news. Now, Dick Tofel of Pro Publica says that national teevee network news, which can be a big anchor for the second of the two local evening network news broadcasts, has been and continues to be in even bigger trouble. What I, via Pew, noted for local TV and Tofel for national, has one other commonality with each other and with newspapers: the younger the person, the more likely they've tuned you out.

Tofel offers some suggestions for them to avoid the print world's head-in-the-sands decades of mistakes. Whether they'll be adopted is anybody's guess.

And, as with papers, the reader/viewer decline has one other decline: ad dollars.

And, with that, plus, the possibility of bots taking your job, comes staff declines.

Streaming services gutting TV more and more

 Back in 2019, I had one blog post, then a follow-up, refudiating claims that teevee was about to face anywhere near the future financial problems of newspapers.

The initial post was based on a comment on Quora by a local-level TV programming engineer claiming "we're doing fine." I had multiple links showing local TV news viewership, a prime source of local TV ad dollars, was already declining. I had another link showing the age demographic for local TV news watching wasn't that much different than for newspapers.

In the follow-up, I noted how job cuts have affected local TV news broadcasting.

Meanwhile, national TV has had a new threat arise since then: streaming by Netflix and others. (COVID has brought yet another possible threat — movie streaming. Yeah, it's primarily a deal for movie theaters, but if it jacks movie viewing higher than before, that's extra personal entertainment time that has to be lost by another entertainment source.)

I update these ideas because streaming has come to pro sports.

And, not just any pro sport but the NFL.

And, and not just any streaming outlet but Amazon, otherwise known as Yellow Satan.

So, production engineer guy? Stop whistling in the dark.

TV journos? Tech IS coming for you

I've written occasionally about broadcast media, to a much lesser degree so far, suffering some of the same issues as print. Had one TV guy in an exchange with me a couple of years ago, seemingly whistling in the dark.

Well, a decade ago, besides the internet, newspaper people were claiming that computers couldn't write things like sports briefs off box scores or weekly real estate sales off courthouse filings. And we now know they're wrong.

So, with Reuters announcing a virtual reality bot that can act as a sports reader (and though not mentioned) as a news reader as well? You TV folks had better be less comfortable. Early morning sports anchor guy? Paid sports guy on a 5 p.m. news broadcast? You're probably gone in five years if this takes off. That's especially true since Reuters modeled the bot after one of its own sports guys.

Right now, it says it's just social media targeted. That said, let's go there. You know the Barstool Sports and Fansided people of the world are watching. A few bots could cut a few videos a day for hundreds of sites. That, in turn, puts downward pressure on teevee sports, even if TV companies don't independently eye this. That said, a VR Barstool bot would be barf-inducing.

No, local TV folks, you're still not doing OK

Several months ago, I blogged about how TV stations face their own newspaper-like problems and issues, just on a more-delayed timeframe. That was after a local programmer on the TV side said "we're doing fine."

I cited a number of links to show that, even if his individual station is doing fine (he may have been extrapolating from just it, but didn't explicitly say so) his industry is not.

And, a snafu on the Trump campaign express illustrates. In two ways.

Per Joe Monahan, now independent, but former media, and a dean of New Mexico political consultants and analysts, talks about Trump's visit to New Mexico this week.

KOB, long one of the two biggies in Albuquerque, went dark just as Air Force One touched down. Bugs in a new graphics system did it.

First, that really shouldn't happen. Second, it shouldn't have long-lasting effect. But it did. Monahan quotes an unnamed source at the station:

Joe, the station just went to a new graphics system. It had a bug in it and took the entire system down, We could not get any remote camera coverage from KAFB or the Santa Ana center or the studio. Obviously, it could not have happened at a worse time. Of course, everything is done on a shoestring budget around here these days. 

KOAT, the other biggie, was live and lapped up. Why?

KRQE didn't even bother. That's NBC, ABC and CBS in order.

Fox? Don't have a station in Albuquerque on a main channel, per Wiki. KRQE runs them as a second channel at 13.2. In one sense, that doesn't matter in today's digital TV age. But, in another sense, it's interesting that a top-50 TV media market doesn't have four fully independent stations.

As for why KRQE didn't show? Joe knows:

While the early going was a disaster for KOB it hardly registered with much of the public (especially those younger) who long ago abandoned TV news for social media and/or alternate video streams. 

The TV news audience is much smaller than it was back in 2000 when another disaster befell local media. That's when the Los Alamos fires broke out.

So, no, TV guy, you're not doing so well. It's OK to join newspaper folks and stop whistling in the dark.

For security reasons, there probably wasn't much private video of the Air Force One touchdown. But the Trump rally? People were surely Facebook Living that all over the place off their smartphones.

Local TV going the way of the newspaper?

It would seem so, given the ad drops, viewer drops and now, the job-slashing, that’s hitting local network affiliate stations.

Outside of Baltimore, CBS is seeing cuts at network-owned affiliate stations in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. The story says no order came out of HQ for this, but did note these were allegedly low-performing stations. CBS as a company lost 14.6 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Contrary to the newspaper article, though, it’s more than fragmenting of the market, or audience. And, yes, I agree that part of this is recession-driven.

It’s more than just the “traditional” Internet, of newspaper and TV station websites, supplemented by the Yahoos and Google News of the world.

Instead, just as blogging provided an outlet for some sort of “print” citizen journalism, now YouTube has done the same for video citizen journalism.

In other words, TV is facing the same future that hit newspapers a decade ago.

Newspapers have adapted, in many cities, by cutting staff writers and hiring more freelancers. In general assignment work, that’s OK. But, as The Dallas Morning News has shown here, when you have freelancers doing things like science journalism, it backfires.

Of course, TV does less in-depth stuff like that. You could keep staff reporters and videographers for investigative work, and start farming out the rest. The flip side of that is, TV stations could “bureau” their news by suburban areas, in the larger TV markets.

It’s coming, in some way, shape or form.

Beyond the world of local news, entertainment is not just going to cable channels. YouTube has more and more of that to offer, too.

And, if this story about Internet 3.0, Hypernet, or whatever you want to call it is true, we’ll see a lot more people leaving the traditional boob tube turned off.