The stem-to-stern transformation of WNBC ,,, aims to turn it from just another local affil to a “content center” reaching websites, taxis, grocery stores — even hospital delivery rooms.

The $15 million project entails not just a physical renovation and tech upgrade but a massive exodus of veteran (read: pricey) staffers, with just a handful staying onboard as of Jan. 1. Battered by the economy, NBC Universal parent GE, not to mention station owners such as News Corp., Tribune and Sinclair, are watching closely to see if Gotham will provide a survival guide for local news.

Union leaders and media watchdogs, meanwhile, characterize the change as a lawless, dehumanizing assault on journalistic tradition. And those clinging to jobs describe a bizarre scene with vets on one side of the newsroom and relative tyros on the other, with nary a word being exchanged.

“They don’t call Cheez-Whiz ‘cheese’ on the package; they call it a ‘cheese product’,” said one survivor. “What’s going to be produced here isn’t really news. It’s a news product. And you have to wonder what will happen when a major story breaks and you have someone from a small market who was cheap enough to hire.”

Hello Romenesko readers, to learn more about Representative Journalism go here and to see our Rep J experimental project in Northfield, MN go here.

Welcome Current.org readers too. You might want to read the attached comment about the possibility of PBS and NPR forming a partnership.

Then today the New York Times ran a story  saying that places like CNN and ABC are already moving in that direction.

First here is how grand it once was:

Marcus Wilford, vice president for international digital at ABC News, recalled that when he was hired 20 years ago, the news division’s Paris bureau had three camera crews, three producers, two correspondents, drivers, and a chef in a house with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Today the ABC News presence in Paris consists of a lone staff producer.

Here is how awful the situation has become:

When news happens — as it did last week when fighting broke out between Russia and Georgia — the networks can be caught flat-footed. NBC News, for instance, no longer stations a full-time correspondent in Russia and instead relies on a producer in Moscow.

Finally, here is another Times synopsis of what is happening:

CNN announced Tuesday that it would “double its domestic news-gathering presence” by assigning journalists to 10 additional cities across the United States.

But the journalists will not work from news bureaus; instead, they will be stationed at local television affiliates and other office locations. Using inexpensive laptops and cameras, they will file stories for the Internet and report live on television. One “all-platform journalist” will be assigned to each city.

The strategy reflects the increasingly portable and flexible nature of television production. Expensive bureaus with camera crews and satellite uplinks are increasingly being downsized by TV news divisions, in favor of so-called “one man bands” that interview, write, record, edit and report live.

Maybe TV news has hit bottom and is about to surge upwards again.

Of course, similar models might be in store for individual print journalists as the big newspaper companies continue to shrink. Today this from the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s parent company:

Cox Enterprises, Inc. announced today that it intends to sell the Austin American-Statesman, its affiliated operations including Austin360.com, and all of Cox’s stand-alone community newspapers in North Carolina, Colorado and Texas. Cox also intends to sell Valpak, the nation’s leader in cooperative direct mail advertising.

Cox Enterprises will retain ownership of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Palm Beach Post, Dayton Daily News and their affiliated publications.

calls this moment in the news media “the second big bang.” “We are creating a new universe, and it has all kinds of new laws and science and physics coming into play as well, in this information world,” he told me. “And you’ve got planets out there colliding with each other, new life forms taking shape; others have drifted too close to the sun, and they’ve burned up. And we don’t know how it’s all going to settle down. And it has, now and forevermore, a radiant effect.”

What is most amazing to me was that there was not one reported moment. No one interviewing people. No voice of the people. Just the big mouths, yelling at each other. It was to me just a continued extension of the ABC News debate where political trivia, sleaze and manipulation reigned supreme. If TV news disappeared tonight, what difference would it make to our democracy. None.

In my moments of despair over journalism, the profession I love, I keep getting draw back to the Public Journalism Network charter declaration. Twenty-four of  us worked on that in early 2003, but I think we did a very good job of defining what we wanted from journalism. Here are a couple of my favorite declarations, the essense of which have been totally abandoned by commercial TV:

We believe journalism and democracy work best when news, information and ideas flow freely; when news fairly portrays the full range and variety of life and culture of all communities; when public deliberation is encouraged and amplified; and when news helps people function as political actors and not just as political consumers. 

We believe the best journalism helps people see the world as a whole and helps them take responsibility for what they see. 

Did that awful TV commentary tonight help me see the world better and to be a better actor in the democracy in which I live. No. Not at all. It was a waste of my time and instead of helping engage people in the political process, it has done nothing but drive them away.

As I said after the ABC News debate debacle and I will say here to CNN and MSNBC you owe the American people an apology. We deserve better.
 

several dozen … military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized. 

And here is the news dagger:

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. …

…members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

After allowing Pentagon officials to deny the relationship, the Times reporter David Barstow writes:

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Many of these analyists showed up on Fox, but were almost everywhere else too:

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

All of this was a covert operation, unbeknown to the news outlets, indeed:

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

So we have absolutely terrible vetting by the TV and radio news, with military industrial complex shills posing as unbiased analysts, but alas we have a brilliant story by the New York Times exposing how the news media were used to spread pro administration propaganda and they did.

Of course, we the people got a distorted view of the war and in a democracy that is not a very good thing.

It took about an hour before the first real policy question was asked, then the debate took on some semblance of high ground. But this morning the front page New York Times article, also reproduced by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, dealt only with the inane part of the debate with a headline that reads: Clinton Employs Broad Attacks in a Key Debate.

The whole article deals with the attacks, and mentions in passing that the personality clashes were “Helped along by the questions of the moderators…”

That’s the equivalent of writing a whole story on, let’s say, a police interrogation and mentioning in passing that the confession was was helped along by waterboarding.

Never once did John R. Broder, The New York Times writer, explain how awful the question selection was, instead he, wrote in the Times edition I received in Atlanta:

“During the first half of the debate, the candidates spent so much time sparring over issues of character that they had little chance to discuss major issues that have dominated past debates, with Mr. Obama mentioning Iraq only 40 minutes into the event.”

The New York Times article is factual in every detail, but is fully wrong in context because it never mentions that the ABC News moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos forced the candidates into a personality debate. The questions, by their very nature, had nothing to do with policy. That was the story that was not reported, which the blogosphere for all its factual errors is getting completely correct.

Public radio thrives because it is so much cheaper and because we spend so much of our time in cars; indeed, public radio insiders talk of the tent poles where listenership peaks on the drives to and from work. Of course, there is plenty of other radio options, but if you want to hear news there are none. So it thrives. To get  where it is today, public radio, in many cases, had to cut back on its classical or other music programming. It got a younger, news passionate audiences with money to contribute.  

Of course, anyone who watches television knows there is a real news void on television. We are stuck with a bunch of talking heads blabbering away, Sunday morning “Gasbags” as Calvin Trillen calls them. But now it is seven days a week. So why doesn’t PBS turn to producing real news. The kind where a reporter goes out and gathers information. Yes, they do it on local commercial TV, but really it is all about blood and gore with no depth. I am talking about news that will make a difference in people’s lives. 

Of course, television is expensive, if you have all those big trucks and million-dollar editing stations. But what if PBS news turned to the television eqivalent of Cinema Verite, hand-held cameras, no big sets, just people out in the trenches collecting information. A kind of professional journalism YouTube, supplemented by the people’s contributions when needed.

Form a community around saving PBS by helping it create better, more impactful news oriented television.  Use that news to boost audiences and push them to better general programming.

Take chances, one chance might be to kick government financing out of bed and then really do some hard hitting journalism with some of it aimed at the scoundrels in government while praising the good guys. Instead of walking on your knees with hat in hand to collect the government subsidies, stand tall and if you go out, go out with a scream and not a whimper.

 I used to love to watch TV news, now it is a waste of time. Bring on real news and bring me back with my donations in hand. Better yet, find out how I and all the folks with cameras in hand can add to your content. Everyone else is trying it, but you already have the brand as in P-u-b-l-i-c Broadcasting. Watch what is about to take place at the Media General station WNCN-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina, which we hear is hiring 40 community embedded reporters plus teaching citizens how to shoot video, imagine that for our local PBS programming here in Georgia.

Come on PBS, stand up, brush off the dust and charge into the bright new future.  

Time Warner’s CNN this week will enter YouTube territory with the launch of iReport.com, a new Web site built entirely on user-produced news. And unlike CNN’s own properties—where only iReport submissions that have been handpicked by editors and checked for accuracy ever make it online or on air—the new site will be wide open, allowing users to post whatever content they choose, CNN said….

Here is more:  

“The community will decide what the news is,” said Susan Grant, executive vp of CNN News Services. “We are not going to discourage or encourage anything…iReport will be completely unvetted.” (CNN will, however, monitor the site for objectionable content.)

That’s excellent point number one, excellent point number two for me is that the media’s so called experts are not really experts at all. Here is one example:

The current generation of political reporters has based its bid for election-year authority on its horse race and handicapping skills. But reporters actually have no such skills. Think: what does a Howard Fineman (Newsweek, MSNBC) know about politics in America? I mean, what would you logically turn to him for? It’s got to be: Who’s ahead, what’s the strategy, and how are the insiders sizing up the contest? That’s supposedly his expertise, if he has any expertise; and if he doesn’t have any expertise, then what is he doing on my television screen, night after night, talking about politics?

Even if Fineman and company had it, the ability to handicap the race is a pretty bogus skill set. Who cares if you are good at anticipating events that will unroll in clear fashion without you? Why do we need people who know how this is going to play out in South Carolina when we can just wait for the voters to play it out themselves?

Then Rosen adds:

 Among the “bogus narratives” the campaign press has developed so far, the Politico editors chose three to illustrate their humiliation. John McCain’s “collapse” in the summer of 2007, which meant we could write him off; Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa, where the candidate without an organization took a state where electoral success, we were assured, was all about organization; and Obama’s “change the tone in politics” campaign which, according to the Gang, was not going to be in tune with the voters’ rawer, more partisan feelings in ‘08. All three were a bust, suggesting political journalists have no special insight into: How is this going to play out? What they have are cheap, portable routines in which you ask that kind of question, and try to get ahead of the race. This, too, is what I mean by mindlessness.

Rosen also picks up on this Nation piece by Christopher Hayes:

WHY CAMPAIGN COVERAGE SO OFTEN SUCKS.” He starts with something that is known to everyone in the pack: Campaign reporting is an essay in fear.

“Reporting at events like this is exciting and invigorating, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn’t know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It’s daunting and the whole time you think: ‘Am I missing something? What’s going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.’ You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.”

Whereas he had once thought of it as a rookie’s experience, this year he learned that the fear never goes away. “Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It’s like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.”

 I looked Hayes’ short piece and here is the key to what he says is needed:

You need to deal with the structural issues that reinforce these tendencies.

Rosen nails it when he writes the central problem is that the politcal journalists’ primary question is “Who is going to win?” The whole premise, as the New Hampshire debacle proves, is flawed; it is a horse-race question to which none of them have an accurate answer.

Instead Rosen writes:

… the job of the campaign press is not to preempt the voters’ decision by asking endlessly, and predicting constantly, who’s going to win. The job is to make certain that what needs to be discussed will be discussed in time to make a difference – and then report on that.