Oct
12
ABC News is Getting Desperate
October 12, 2007 |
According to the NYTimes, ABC is producing a newscast just for the web. Apparently it has been running for 20 months. I never noticed. Maybe that is also because it is almost impossible to find. I had to wait for it to scroll by at the bottom of the page. Here is the link for your viewing pleasure.
From the NYT:
Over the course of 20 months, the Webcast has evolved from a basic distillation of the day’s news into an original program that incorporates video blogs, first-person essays and interviews. It covers many of the same stories as its television sibling, but often in a different way: in one example, the day after President Bush announced gradual troop cuts in Iraq, Mr. Gibson was shown debriefing the network’s chief White House correspondent, Martha Raddatz, in the Webcast for a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds — an eternity on a half-hour television newscast.
So it’s a little bit different from the regular dull recitation of government approved news, but not by much. Recreating a newscast on the web is a boneheaded move. People aren’t sitting behind their computers, wondering where they can find a newscast. Those who are interested in the news, already know what happened before ABC puts up its show. They don’t need some dude to tell them what happened. Those who want to discuss the news have already done so on DailyKos or the PowerLine blog.
Just put up your clips on YouTube - maybe unedited - or at least segment the show for easy embedding into blogs and maybe (just maybe) highlight those on your site.
If you produce a 15 minute show about news for the web, you clearly have no clue what the web is about.
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Well, I feel like news shows like ABC World News and other evening news shows are dinosaurs for the reasons you mentioned–who waits until 6:30 to find out what’s going on in the world? I suppose it’s a nice recap.
I began watching the ABC News podcast when they first started it last year (I think) and while I enjoyed the stories specifically tailored to web users (you know, we’re ALL nerds on the ‘net) it still did it’s fair share of boring, typical, sensationalistic news telling us about problems and conflicts we’re supposed to care about and not problems and conflicts that really matter–in other words, it was just like watching the regular TV news.
This is why I stopped watching it and continued watching the podcast at DemocracyNow.org. Shamelessly liberal, but way better than any other America-based news show that I could find.
Pete - same here. I listen to Democracy Now in the morning. Probably the only American newscast I can respect and if anything, at least they don’t spend their time on discussing Paris Hilton but have in-depth interviews and not just sound-bites.