Media convergence and the future
This book is about television news, but any prospective or working journalist will probably also be using the web regularly anyway, for both research and for writing content. The Internet’s ever-increasing value and profound social and economic impact have established it as the central information tool in our time. Yet television journalists, at least until early 2000, saw the web only as another information tool rather than a medium in its own right. It was only with the first big media merger – when America Online (AOL) linked with Time Warner in 2000 – that business knew for sure that the Internet would dominate home and business information and communication. Sound and vision news, movies, the web, e-commerce and e-mail would all converge. The traditional media companies like Time Warner (which included CNN) were desperate to get a foothold on the Net. The Internet companies like AOL had the opposite problem of not having much content to put onto it. Such relationships, as business consultants would say, were a perfect fit.
Television journalists should know that the Net and the web are not strictly the same thing. The World Wide Web (www) is the popular multimedia branch of the Internet. On the web, users can view not just text but also graphics, sound, video, and hyperlinks to other media or documents. As with the rest of the Internet, people can use the web to locate, read, and download documents stored on computer systems around the world. Television news can be broadcast through the web and the sound and vision quality are getting better all the time.
The Internet and television journalists
A few journalists who recognized the potential of the Internet made a lot of money on paper in the latter part of 1999 and early 2000 as their small and specialized Internet companies were bought up by the bigger companies (obviously worried that one day they would not be able to afford to buy them). It was a repeat of an earlier cycle in the business side of journalism when a few business-wise journalists back in the 1970s realized that one day many local newspapers would not be sold, but would be given away. Some of them gave up their exciting regular jobs, then went out in search of local markets in city suburbs where newspapers could be packed with advertising and then shoved through letterboxes. These newspapers have been commonplace for years. Journalists are notoriously slow at realizing the commercial possibilities of journalism, or are often indifferent to it anyway. A few of them did make big money in seeing the next hop in the way information can be a tradable consumer product.
The Internet then became an opportunity for journalism when the people who knew how to make websites work realized that the websites were only as good as the content within them. Journalists were brought in. ‘Content is All’ is still the maxim. Only the journalists knew about deadlines, style, layout, language and, in the case of television journalists, how to make scripting to visual images concise, attractive and effective.
During 1999–2000 there was a movement of talent as TV journalists moved onto what became known at that time as New Media. The start-up costs were low and the reward potential, and their risk, was massive. The evidence also showed that the majority of Internet companies set up actually failed within six months. Only a small minority grabbed the headlines as share prices became inflated. The Internet became a mass medium in Europe, Eastern Asia and North America by early 2000. A survey by Guardian/ICM at the beginning of 2000 showed that Internet use grew faster than any previous technological advance, including radio and television. The number of adults online in Britain grew from 29 per cent in January 1999, to 37 per cent by the end of that year.
The other aspect of that change was digital television and the rise of interactive services, the most alluring being the ability to programme a digital television to create an individual ‘Me-TV’ and multimedia service. If you are interested only in fish cookery, rugby league, soaps or just the news, then that is what you can have, all day. The technology will do the work for you. One pundit suggested that in the future people will not read books. The paradox is that one of the earliest and most successful web companies was Amazon, which sold – books.
We should not conclude that the Internet has finished changing. It is an offspring of the computer, not the traditional network of the telephone or television industry. It will evolve at the speed of the computer industry if it is to remain relevant. It is now providing services such as audio and video streams. The availability of networking along with powerful computing in portable form (laptops, two-way pagers and digital mobile telephones) is making possible an age of work-from-home communications for many news-processing operations.
Cable television began as CATV (community antenna television) and was developed as long ago as the late 1940s to serve areas which were unable to receive television signals because of geographical difficulties or their distance from transmitters. To overcome these problems antennas were set up in areas which had good reception, and the broadcast signals distributed over a cable to subscribers. By 1995 virtually every home had access to a street cable link. That led to dozens of channels. Although the cable is on the street it remains a matter of choice whether to pay for the link to be extended into the home.
By far the most intriguing development for television news began with the introduction of 24-hour all-news channels. There are several of them around the world now, but CNN (Cable News Network) was the international cable pathfinder. CNN began broadcasting on 1 June 1980, and since then has reached far beyond its own national boundaries, transmitting its service 36 000 km (22 300 miles) into space from dish-shaped antennas in the grounds of its headquarters to satellites which send the signals back to domestic and international customers on Earth. Incoming feeds from overseas bureaux are received in the same way. CNN was regarded with scorn by the big US networks when it started operations, but when the war in the Gulf started in the early 1990s it was CNN which showed everyone in news how to move fast and get stuck in. International diplomacy between Iraq, the Arab nations, the USA and the UN was quickly being conducted through the cameras of always-on-the-air CNN. CNN rivals – big news organizations like the BBC, ITN, NBC, CBS and ABC – all knew they were doing a good job in covering the Gulf War. They also privately felt that at every turn in the war they were being stuffed and outmanoeuvred by CNN, which deployed resources to live news and could put material on air instantly.
Figure 15.1 Cable and satellite. How complementary systems reach the home.
Alongside cable was DBS (direct broadcasting by satellite), a system supplementing terrestrial channels with services received directly by individual households on dishes unobtrusive enough to overcome environmental and planning objections. The signals are transmitted first to high-powered satellites whose footprints (areas covered by their transmission) are the subject of international agreements. When it was launched in February 1989 from headquarters in West London, Sky included the 24-hour Sky News as one of its core services, initially beaming its wares to dish-holders via Astra, a satellite system owned by a company based in Luxembourg. The following year Sky merged with rivals British Satellite Broadcasting to become British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), and as part of an accelerating pattern, has long been among the many options being offered in a cable or digital package.
Figure 15.2 Interactive cable news. Viewers are offered items which they can choose to watch on another part of the screen at the same time as the ‘main’ broadcast.
Cable television has also led the way with interactive news, giving the viewers even greater control over what they see. A choice of complementary channels enables them to add optional services to their main picture – for example combining the news with a weather forecast, which appears in a corner of the screen. Viewers of sporting events could even choose different camera angles. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in America envisage television of the future as a large flat screen on the kitchen wall showing a map of the world which yields relevant local news – textual, aural and visual – at a touch.
Teletext, the broadcast version of videotex officially born in Britain in October 1972, has and will continue to be another source of journalistic employment, although whether those engaged on it can be accurately described as being ‘in television’ is a moot point. The beauty of teletext lies in its simplicity and economy. A television picture is made up of a number of horizontal lines which appear on the screen in rapid succession. No television system needs every one of those lines for carrying picture signals, and it is in a handful of the unused blank black spaces that teletext is transmitted as a series of coded electronic pulses. These can be seen as bright dots at the top of a badly adjusted television picture.
On the screen, teletext is displayed as still pages of writing and graphic diagrams, either in place of, or superimposed on, the normal pictures. Coloured headings and text, which can be made to flash for emphasis, add attraction to screen layout. Pages are strung together in the shape of ‘magazines’, made up of news, sport, finance, travel and weather information and so on, the viewer (reader?) selecting the required numbered page by remote control. A ‘newsflash’ facility, which can be chosen as a separate page, appears in a black background box cut into the conventional television picture. ‘Live’ subtitling of news programmes is another facility accessed by the same keypad.
The pages are compiled by journalists using all the sources available to other broadcasters and the newspapers. Copy is typed in at computer keyboards for conversion into the teletext signals. The speed of the system allows stories to be transmitted as quickly as they can be created.
Figure 15.3 How teletext works.
There is nothing very new about the idea that a journalist can also operate a camera, or operate a camera and edit the sound and vision as well. In 1990 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation closed its regional news operation at Windsor, southern Ontario, as part of a series of economy measures, reducing a staff of more than 100 journalists, camera-operators, tape editors, producers and a support personnel to a tiny bureau. Reopening became possible only because of an agreement between CBC and the unions to use Windsor as a test bed for new technology and working practices. After a summer during which reporters were taught to shoot their own material, camera-operators were instructed in the skills of writing and reporting and picture editors were retrained to use digital technology, news programmes resumed in October 1994 – total staff: 24. Day-to-day plans and problems were handled by a joint council of management and union representatives.
CNN may lay claim to having invented the term ‘video-journalist’ to categorize its entry-level positions, but this facet of multi-skilling was also employed elsewhere in at least one other, narrower context. New York’s first 24-hour TV news station, NY-1, gave the title to the twenty young journalists it recruited and trained more than ten years ago as camera-operator, sound recordist, picture editor and reporter combined, assigning them as district reporters with the brief to find and shoot their own stories.
Scaling down the operation to such basic levels means asking interviewees to hold their own microphones and persuading passers-by to stand in while piece-to-camera shots are framed. There are also curious contortions to be seen as reporters ask questions with one eye on the viewfinder and one ear on the camera-mounted loudspeaker, but the practitioners insist they are able to get much closer to the story than conventional crews.
Critics of NY-1 complained that the standards were low and the VJs had been introduced to save money, but the station pointed to the numbers of reporters they were able to hire compared with others. The material they produced was basic, usable quality. They were, after all, not making ‘films’. They were doing news.
The television cameras available by 2000 were light, easy to operate and – if used properly – were capable of providing sound and vision of broadcast quality. A professional Betacam camera for television news can cost anything between £35 000 and £60 000. A small digital camera, with a good separate sound kit and tripod, is about £2500, although it has a shorter lifespan when worked hard and has almost zero resale value. What the lightweight digital cameras did in effect was remove the dividing line between amateur and professional. After a period of learning and experimentation with BBC News Training some experienced BBC news correspondents, already aware of filming techniques anyway, used them to compile excellent quality features when they had the time to shoot and prepare their material, aware that they would make mistakes along the way. Because it was feature or background material there was less deadline pressure. A similar service created by LWT was called The Lab. It was established so that about twenty young directors and video-journalists could train in the use of the latest equipment and pioneer the new television culture: light DV cameras used for close framing and fast-moving shots, plus editing, scripting and laying voicetracks directly into the PC. The resulting material was used in LWT’s regional output and was shot and edited at a fraction of the cost of more mainstream television.