Print isn’t the only medium having trouble with business models in the wake of web — online video is creating problems for local television news as well. San Francisco’s independent station KRON, though an early and aggressive adopter of online distribution such as blogs, is struggling like all local startions to win online audiences and revenues to match losses in the broadcast business. Ultimately, broadcast journalism is no longer subsidized by prime-time entertainment. “Now local news is a profit center, it’s not a loss leader,” KRON’s online news manager Brian Shields told me over a recent lunch.
After Young Broadcasting beat NBC in the bidding for the station during the economic high tide of 1999, NBC cancelled its KRON affiliate agreement, leaving the station without a national network partner. KRON has since signed an affiliate agreement with CNN, but was also stuck with a long-term contract for web services from New York’s WorldNow with terms from the turn of the century. While it has a unique position, KRON faces many of the same business and cultural difficulties with all local broadcasters — many of which were voiced by popular news personality Gary Radnich in this tete a tete with Shields (embedded above).
Shields has had a long career in radio and television news that’s ranged from Dallas to Sacramento over the decades. He came to KRON from Nashville, which was Young Broadcasting’s premier market after pulling out of Los Angeles. It was in Tennessee that Terry Heaton suggested a postmodern approach for Young’s anchor station WKRN, which included stronger community and web focus such as the “Nashville is Talking” blog and controversial role reassignment for employees in generating video news reports, both of which were then adopted by KRON. But after a few years, Heaton wore out his welcome, the station’s blog was largely abandoned, and KRON went back to working with WorldNow for online efforts.
In a casual moment a few weeks ago, reporter Dan Noyes from ABC’s KGO confided that while he’s not officially allowed to upload clips to YouTube, “my producer loves it when people do.” KGO is owned and operated by the national network which can afford to absorb the distribution costs in delivering video online and has begun blogging scoops before the six o’clock news airs from their own domain. KRON, on the other hand, is taking the initiative and posting content to YouTube themselves, as the free sharing site offers a way around WorldNow’s fees and promotes the programming where the viewers are going.
But driving traffic is largely one way, says Shields. “The time we see traffic on the web site is the time we go on television and tell people to go to the web site.” That said, live web efforts can sustain traffic. Shields pointed to KRON’s live webcam of the recent freeway collapse in Oakland. And whereas the station had been “burned once too often” by the FCC for broadcasting San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade live on television, this year it aired an edited segment on television and relayed the live footage online. “There’s no FCC on the web,” Shields laughed.
What the broadcast efforts have lost, and what can now be found on the web presumably, is an educated, affluent audience. “Everything we do has to be dumbed down,” Shields lamented. “The reason why local TV news sucks and nobody watches it anymore is because we have now succeeded in insulting the intelligence of everybody around.” It’s that broad approach that also informed WorldNow’s efforts in developing content management systems that could be maintained by “somebody off the street.” The terms of the contract with WorldNow also give a financial disincentive to put more video content on the station’s own site, as KRON pays for both storage and bandwidth but WorldNow recoups the lion’s share of ad revenue.
On the one hand, the financial pressure on the local station has lead it to make some questionable editorial decisions, like letting advertisers buy content. On the other, video-sharing sites and cutting-edge P2P streaming technology give KRON an opportunity to reach audiences with a production polish that nascent competitors don’t have the experience to provide. And projects from its in-house production team, like the new online destination for Bay Area Backroads, show promise (see our previous mention).
“There’s always going to be a demand for local news and information,” Shields declared. “A good TV anchor is a very difficult skill to acquire.”
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