A local ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ experiment to attract younger audiences. The goal was to engage younger viewers, particularly in the desired 18-34-year-old demographic, with an alternative to the standard TV news package.
There are good reactive reasons to experiment with the traditional newscast structure. But there’s also a big proactive reason: As linear viewing shifts from live to on-demand, consumers will increasingly choose when they watch, what they watch and how/where they watch. In that future media landscape (that is already here for some), the key “unit” of news may well be the story, rather than the show. That’s what led the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism to produce a special “Storytellers” edition of its 5 p.m. Cronkite News. The outcome was a newscast without anchors. Its method? Put the focus on the stories, and the storytellers. Here’s how it did it.
