Web promos: Are you touting NOT-live?

[Holland Cooke]

If your online content goes beyond typical mid-1990s style “web pages,” you are following -- not leading – the way listeners now use the Internet.
THEY'RE already using the 'net as media.
WE need to catch-up.

Content-we-feed-to-a-transmitter is now just one aspect of what a station does.
Since the advent of electronic newsgathering, TV newscasts have touted “LIVE,” to add value to on-scene reporter work seen on-air.
Now, NOT-live is an emerging value proposition, for on-demand content offered online.

Ditto for radio.
Stations should archive all sorts of audio/video/text content.

Next-level-of-detail: My notes from the recent Streaming Media West conference in San Jose.
Help yourself: http://hollandcooke.com/2007StreamingMediaWest.pdf

Bottom line:
On-air = live, largely in-car if you're an AM station.
Online = on-demand, your entre to at-work if you're an AM station.

OK, here's the REAL bottom line: Although it's been said many times, many ways, MERRY CHRISTMAS to you.
And here's a stocking-stuffer: http://members.aol.com/cookeh/December1-1.pdf

HC
www.HollandCooke.com

 

[Julius Leonard Marx]

LIVE is a sham

Since the advent of electronic newsgathering, TV newscasts have touted “LIVE,” to add value to on-scene reporter work seen on-air.

How does "live" add value when most of the time nothing is happening at these live shots (in television or news radio)?

We've all seen it/heard it: Something happens during the day. A media event. An accident. The vans stay until 11:30 pm. And are back at 5 a.m. When something really was happening, they taped it. But hours later, the stand-up is LIVE.

Something is scheduled to happen later during the day but somebody is outside a dark, empty building at 5 a.m. reading a press release.

Newsradio does the same thing, except all they need is a cell phone. Not long ago, I heard a news station send a reporter out to a school in the 'burbs early morning. Somebody who had gone to the school was involved in something 1,000 miles away. The station had a guy out there sitting in a 4x4 reading wire copy all morning and touting how this was LIVE.

Every time there's bad weather, they have some guy drive around to confirm that yes, it is in fact snowing or raining or windy at this exact spot at this exact moment and we are LIVE.

And when there is "breaking news" or a "developing story" (see the discussion "What Words Or Phrases Would You Ban From Newscasts? ") they go LIVE to the "newsroom" so somebody can read the story off the wire.

Jeez. No wonder nobody takes radio or TV news seriously.

It was better before radio people had cell phones and had to come back, sit, write, edit sound and do a real story. It was better when TV people didn't spend all day in their news vans but shot film, dropped it off for processing and then covered another story. There is no excuse for LIVE, no value added, when nothing is happening NOW.