east village idiot

I rarely get serious on here, but I might as well talk a little more about the WNBC NYC Blogger Summit last night (you know, aside from discussing Janice Huff’s extreme patience with a crowd of 150 right behind her).

I’m not nearly as skeptical about the Mainstream Media as a lot of other bloggers are for a couple reasons:

First, my blog doesn’t compete with the Mainstream Media. There’s very little on my blog that you would find appropriate for a local newscast. In fact, there’s very little on my blog you’d find appropriate for the opinion page of a newspaper. Sure, I’ve love to have a venue to be snarky on television, but it just does not compute. The audience is just too niche, and I’m perfectly fine with that. I’ll never really appeal to a mass audience.

Secondly, I’ve worked in the Mainstream Media. You have a lot more appreciation for what goes into a news operation once you’ve worked in a news operation. For example, WNBC mentioned their staff of 22 reporters last night. None of them work 365 days a year. None of them work 24 hours a day. Think about how that nets out. Think about the volume of news there is to cover in New York.  Then think about how many stories get passed on every morning in their daily planning meeting.

That’s what the real challenge that WNBC has, and I think that’s where a cooperative effort with bloggers can take shape: there are too many stories for one compact news organization to cover in a market with 7.4 million households. In New York City, the definition of ”local” is very different than it is in most cities. Historically, Mainstream Media has been responsible for defining what “local” is. Since TV News is the most mass form of local news in the Mainstream Media, WNBC is among those defining what we consider “local.”

Blogging is changing that. What many blogs in New York City consider to be “local” is what the Mainstream Media would consider “hyperlocal.” Gowanus Lounge and Blog Chelsea are great examples. You can’t find this kind of news anywhere else. You won’t read about it in the Daily News, and you won’t watch it on Channel 4. It’s even a stretch for NY1. It’s just too local for a news outlet that has the responsibility of covering Old Bridge, New Jersey and Bridgeport, Connecticut (100 miles apart), and Middletown and Montauk, New York (175 miles apart). Bloggers can truly make local news local. I think WNBC recognizes that, and the fact that they recognized the resources that bloggers can provide is a good first step.

I’m still skeptical that it can work, and there are a lot of challenges that the Mainstream Media will face. WNBC will still have the same audience that they did before they turned to bloggers for help, and no matter what bloggers can bring to the table, a viewer in Morristown, New Jersey probably won’t be interested in the Whole Foods under construction in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The size of WNBC’s on-air and off-air staff will likely still be the same, and the reporters will have the same large workloads with or without bloggers’  help. With these constraints, it’s possible that the first step for WNBC to take when collaborating with bloggers isn’t to make the news more local - it’s to make it more relevant and more interesting.

Getting more people to participate in defining the news of the day will get more people to watch the news.  The ones who are most connected with what goes on in their communities will understand what their communities want to know. Going back to the Whole Foods example: what if a group of citizens in Morristown is concerned about a grocery store being built on a brownfield site there? What if hospital closings in low-income areas of New York City are the start of a statewide trend? What if a hepatitis outbreak on a school hockey team is the result of an overlooked unsanitary condition in many regional hockey rinks? These are stories that might get caught up in the sheer volume of news tips that come from a TV market that takes three hours to drive from end to end.

We don’t want to incite panic and we don’t want to be sensational. Why would we? Blogs don’t have “sweeps” periods. We as bloggers already relay more interesting information to an audience that seeks it.  I think that by providing story ideas that might otherwise be overlooked, bloggers can vastly improve the relevancy of local TV news in New York. Kudos to WNBC for taking that first step, and let’s hope they can follow through.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Blogging about Blogging. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.