How to Halt ABC News' Slide Toward Irrelevance

The whining by broadcast networks, local TV stations and newspapers about their news business woes is pathetic. The cause of their self-made problems is their stubborn resistance to replace -- not just tweak -- business models that ceased to function with the rise of social media and instant news by the people, for the people.

Their lame response continues to focus on eliminating staff and reducing the news-gathering resources that could be used to provide consumers with information and analysis they deem relevant. News organizations generally continue to filter information and insight through their own value sieve, even as consumers share news their way on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

This stark contrast in news judgment and practice is evident in the Pew Research Center's latest findings on consumers and news, and a perfunctory report in today's New York Times about the slow death of broadcast network news.

Instead of focusing on what it would take to replace their overblown legacy structures with smarter, leaner, interactive news machines, the NYT gives network executives more prime space to whine over a paradigm shift long underway. "I just looked out at the next five years and was concerned that we could not sustain doing what we were doing," says ABC News president David Westin about jettisoning one-quarter (400 people) from his news staff.

That kind of thinking doesn't deserve to survive.

All that ABC News and its peers need to know about better business models for future revenues and profits can be gleaned from enlightened research from the likes of Pew and by studying, rather than scoffing at, the evolution of digital news.

More than one quarter of Americans get their news on their cell phones - not surprising since mobile connected devices are the overwhelming universal screen of choice by anyone's numbers. Pew says 61 percent of Americans get their news online and more than half want local news from any number of sources including newspapers, web sites, radio and television.

Why local news? Because it is all about where we exist in the moment - what could be more relevant? Local TV stations and newspapers are shunning this secret to their own salvation by failing to fully integrate their resources and brands with the breadth of available interactive and social media tools. News organizations are no longer the stars of the show; they need to get over themselves.

Take a good look at Yelp, Outside.In or other hyper local services. Read any of Facebook's newly patented news feeds, or follow a Twitter link. Digital dialogue inevitably focuses on what is happening with consumers where they live, work, shop and eat. Individual relevance is the new local.

If ABC and other news organizations want to be relevant, they must consistently report (not preach) the news from the consumer's perspective -- why is this important to my pocketbook, my children's future, my weekend plans? The big news organizations might think they have been taking that tact, but their 30-second to three minute sound bites generally fail to make personal connections.

We're reminded of this with every new catastrophe and event. The Google people finder, Twitter smoke signals and Facebook pages functioned as life-saving informational tools in the aftermath of Chile's 8.8 earthquake last weekend - second only to Chile's own Internet UStream live video streaming service.

NBC News has its niche TV audiences to generate an estimated total $400 million profits (CNBC for news and politically left of center for MSNBC). But truly interactive news is not the same as trading emails and tweets with constituents as an enhancement to highly scripted, static news reports built around advertising breaks. Consolidating the status quo (persistent rumors about Time Warner's CNN merging with CBS News or ABC News linking with Bloomberg) does not represent a radical solution-just a lot more of the same old in one place. The biggest television and newspaper anchored news organizations have only viscerally catered to the reality Pew describes in its new survey results on how Americans access news:

• Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, shared it through email, or disseminated it via Facebook and Twitter posts.

All of these indicators point to one clear directive: Television and newspaper should be part of every news organization's media mix -- not the core.