Disco? Ask Instead: Can CBS Dance With Yahoo?
CBS’s Public Eye asks outside commentors to “weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large.” Tom Rosenstiel, former Los Angeles Times media critic and now director for Excellence in Journalism and vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, weighed in indeed, writing in part:
The more interesting question is whether CBS News and Public Eye are onto something here. Can a vast legacy institution like CBS News, steeped in an old technology like broadcast television, be an innovator on the Web? Or is this like watching your 80-year-old parents dance to disco at their grandchildrens wedding? In other words, will the future of online journalism inevitably leapfrog places like CBS?
That was written yesterday, contrast it with this article in today’s New York Times. In it areYahoo’s four pillars of success as defined by Terry S. Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers:
First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, is the professionally created content that…made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last, is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them…
Increasingly, Mr. Semel and others are finding that the long-promised convergence of television and computers is happening not by way of elaborate systems created by cable companies, but from the bottom up as video clips on the Internet become easier to use and more interesting. Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than one million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.
In fact, the big media companies, which have plenty of content, might in the end be the victors if they figure out how to incorporate Yahoo’s four pillars.
In The New York Times article there is a lot of talk about entertainment, while Rosenstiel is talking about serious news. For people who believe in the need for quality journalism the question for CBS and all of the mainstream media is how to be engaging and incorporate Yahoo’s four pillars, while at the same time not becoming fluff machines.
