The News About The News

The news media has spent a lot of time discussing itself lately. Why has the Katie Couric-led CBS News floundered? Why has Brian Williams lost first place to Charles Gibson? It seems to me that the answers aren't that difficult, if the news anchors want to face them.

The Couric Factor

CBS News is floundering because people don't want their news from Katie Couric. It isn't that she's a woman, it's that she doesn't have an air of credibility. Watch her reports from the Today Show. Her opinions were clearly obvious, which is not appropriate for an anchor. Also, watch the Today Show 9/11 coverage. It becomes obvious early on that Couric is just a placeholder until Tom Brokaw can get to the studio. It isn't that she's a woman. Ann Curry, Connie Chung, and Elizabeth Vargas all have the credibility to be anchors. Couric simply doesn't have what it takes.

Why Williams Lost

The reason NBC News started losing its audience can be summed up in the events of one broadcast. Brian Williams told his viewers that NBC had received numerous e-mails telling them that they had focused on Hurricane Katrina too much and to move on to other stories. Despite these e-mails, Williams stated, NBC will continue its coverage of Katrina. If NBC and Brian Williams wanted to focus on Katrina, they shouldn't have brought up the e-mails. The message this sent to the audience was we hear what you're saying, but we don't care. That arrogance cost NBC its lead in the news.

All Terrorism All The Time

Iran has announced that it will launch a 24-hour English-language news channel to compete with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. The 24-hour PRESS TV news channel said its goal was to "break the global media stranglehold of Western outlets," and "show the other side of the story" in the Mideast. Now terrorists will have a channel they can call their own.

The State Of The Newspaper

I am loathe to read all of the reports announcing the death of the newspaper. Granted, I am biased on the issue, having written and edited for several newspapers I have a soft spot for them. On the other hand, I am also guilty of getting most of my news (at least the news I don't get from my own sources) from web sites, albeit most of them are newspaper sites. All that being said, the newspaper world got a boost from two recent events.

Rupert Murdoch made an unsolicited takeover bid for Dow Jones. This sent newspaper stocks climbing as it showed the pundits claimed it showed the value of the newspaper. To a certain extent it does. Dow Jones has a vast library of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, but its crowing glory is the Wall Street Journal. But the value of Dow Jones isn't the form it puts information into, its the information itself. Dow Jones, while best known for financial information, is one of the premier news gathering organizations on the planet. While its business news is legendary, it also covers politics, science and technology, entertainment and more, and does it all phenomenally well. That information has been the center of the newsroom since newspapers began and Dow Jones has kept that at the center of a media empire. That's the value of the newspaper. It isn't the paper itself. It's the news gathering organization behind it.

The importance of the news gathering organization was spotlighted in another story, that of Digg.com. Digg tried to remove stories about HD-DVD and the fact that the Digital Rights Management encryption that keeps you from copying them had been broken. Digg users revolted and for a short while, Digg became HD-DVD news central. The problem is that what was posted wasn't news. The initial story, that the encryption was cracked, was news. After that it just became a group of people using Digg to distribute how to crack the DVDs. This is the problem with user centric "news" sites. There is a difference between what is important and what is popular. Sites like Digg always stick to what is popular, whether it is important or not.

Newspapers , whether in print or online, need to serve as watchdogs. To report the unpopular as well as the popular. As long as the news gathering organizations can adapt to new media, the companies behind them will survive. After all, radio and television were supposed to eliminate newspapers too.