My bride tells me part of my problem is that I just don’t
like change. We discussed that point a
bit, and I tried to put a finer point on it by saying I don’t like NEEDLESS
change. I’ll admit my Windows 7 runs a
lot quicker and slicker than Windows 98, and while I may grouse a bit about
such changes, they seem to make things better.
Needless change, to me, is illustrated nicely by the changes CNN has made
to its early morning news program.
As I groused about it to my bride again this morning, she
pointed out that now both of us are outside the ironclad 25-54 age demographic,
so what we think doesn’t even matter to network TV programmers. She also pointed out that neither of us is
really a “broadcaster” any more (even though my day-job reporting is heard on
radio stations around the state and Midwest), so we don’t even know what “THE
CONSULTANTS” are thinking these days.
My morning routine involves letting the dogs out, herding
them back in, getting a cup of coffee, and planting my butt in front of the TV
to find out what heinous things have happened overnight. For the past three years, I’ve watched CNN
from 6 to 6:30 to get a fix on what’s going on.
But a few weeks ago, they took what (to me) was a perfectly good morning
national news show and wrecked it.
They brought in the children.
Instead of having adults like Carol Costello, Christine
Romans, and Ali Velshi give an excellent summary of the news, now, they have
Soledad O’Brein sitting around a table with a number of other children and they
“talk about the news” rather than report it.
They start with what they consider the “lead” story (spelled “lede” in
the print news biz, I’m told) and just sit around and talk about it. This morning it was the mostly-sunken cruise
ship. Some boy who couldn’t have been
more than 25 years old was trying to make a fine point about maritime law. A cynical 62-year-old bastard like me would
rather hear about maritime law from some grizzled old sea salt who at least
looked like he might have set foot on a ship or two.
This new young group of CNN morning newsies sat around and
talked about this ONE story from 6 AM until 6:15 AM, when, in frustration, I
changed the channel. In 15 minutes,
these children talked about ONE story.
Years ago, when I was consulting radio news operations
across the fruited plain, my mantra was “story count equals credibility”. In other words, years and years of duplicated
research showed that people perceived the station that ran the MOST news
stories in any given unit of time (5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes – which in
broadcast parlance is referred to as a “quarter-hour”) was perceived as being
the most credible news organization. It
was OK to go in depth on a story, but only AFTER you’d given the
listener/viewer a big blast of assorted other news items.
Granted, radio and television are far different critters,
particularly in the morning, where radio listening is done half at home and
half in the car on the way to work. TV
is still essentially a 100% “in-home” critter in the morning. I have a good friend who is considered the
top news/talk radio consultant in the nation, and he still tells me that one of
the biggest challenges is helping the on-air talent to understand clearly the
implications of the fact that the average listener is only there for about 18
minutes in the morning. They’re busy,
they’re in and out, and they want a concise summary of news and weather
frequently.
Maybe it’s the old radio news programming consultant part of
me that makes this change in CNN’s morning programming so distasteful to
me. I expect to be told about at least a
dozen stories if I dedicate 15 minutes to watching. There’s a hell of a lot more going on in the
world on any given day, like today, than a boat wreck that happened days ago. And while I confess complete ignorance about
what TV News consultants are thinking about, saying, and preaching these days,
I do NOT want to see a bunch of kids talking about the same story for 15
minutes. If I want to hear a 15-minute
rant about a single topic, there are plenty of other TV (and, God knows, radio)
stations which can provide that.
Maybe I am just too old, my opinion doesn’t count, and the
advertising department doesn’t want to sell ads about products I might find
useful. And, this morning, I was
secretly hoping that maybe CNN might make mention of the MILLION signatures on
the Walker recall petition in Wisconsin.
But, to the news children who run things today, 15 minutes
of kids sitting around talking about a boat that half-sank several days ago is
apparently more important than giving viewers a representative sample of
current events from around the nation and the world.
