On "On The Media"

OK, so we know this is a little old – it's from last Friday – but, well, we missed it, and we thought it was too important to ignore just because we were busy interviewing George Clooney that day. (Sorry about the name dropping, but it was hard to resist. We love us some Clooney interview here at PE.)

Anyway, last week NPR's "On The Media" hosted a whole slew of media critics for a discussion on the evolution and future of the network evening news broadcasts – with a particular focus on CBS. It's a smart, concise conversation about the inherent challenges as well as possible solutions to present day problems. Here's part of the transcript, featuring host Brooke Gladstone and television news analyst Andrew Tyndall:

ANDREW TYNDALL: The things that the nightly newscasts are good at, which is very well-written, well-edited, densely-sourced packages which are two minutes long, are per minute of air time very expensive pieces of news to make. But a news organization can afford to make them if they're only broadcasting for half an hour.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: One good half hour versus 24 mostly mediocre hours of news. Who wins? Until the last few years, the big fight for audience has been waged between cable news and network news. But 24-hour cable, for all its ubiquity, also has profound limitations, says Tyndall, because it serves two masters, and neither of them well.

ANDREW TYNDALL: The one master, which is "I've just switched on television, I want to know what the latest news is," and then it's serving another one, which is "I've been watching your channel for the last two hours and I don't want to hear the same thing over and over and over again."

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In serving those two masters, cable has crafted a product that's so disposable it's not worth much to the burgeoning audience for news-on-demand online, but those highly-produced packages, roughly seven per show on the network nightly news, have a far longer shelf life. For an online news consumer searching for specific information, that's a cornucopia of concentrated content. In the new media world, it looks like the networks are better positioned to win.