commentary

Today’s consumer does not have an unlimited financial appetite for new streaming services. Every time a new OTT service is selected, the consumer will feel pressure to drop something else. As competition increases, one must ask what all this means to retransmission consent.

Joe Ferullo: Reporting on presidential candidates can be a lot like high school romance: It’s all about crushes and rejections, falling hard — only to fall quickly out of love. After New Hampshire, journalists and pundits are desperately scanning the cafeteria for their next soul mate. But now that voters are actually part of the equation, the media’s search for love will need to evolve.

Harassment by unhinged viewers, especially the threat of unwanted sexual attention, is a problem for women appearing on television across the country. We can’t protect our staffs from everything, but we’ve seen this particular problem too many times to not recognize it and take action. Nothing less is acceptable.

Rule changes, mics on coaches and in the faces of players on the sidelines bring viewers a fresh perspective, creating an intimacy more akin to what you find in televised baseball, tennis or golf.

A history-making night for Parasite, plus emotional wins from Brad Pitt, Laura Dern, Joaquin Phoenix and Renee Zellweger, helped cover for a mess of a kudocast.

With coverage of the Trump impeachment pretty much an overwhelming information dump, some may question why broadcast TV should bother, especially given the loss of ad revenue that results. It is during times like this that we must remember why local over-the-air television is fundamentally different from cable, OTT and all the rest. We are not just businesses. We are stewards of the public trust, operating on the public airways. Our service is free to anyone with an antenna. If viewers choose to pay to watch us on satellite, cable or OTT, then great, but no one is required to do that.

Jessica Meiselman: Over the past few years employees at Vice, G/O Media, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Slate, The New Yorker, the LA Times, New York Media, and Vox Media, among many others, have decided to organize. Management responses have had this in common: their ultimate goal is to avert a union.

Glancing at the data from the first heat of the great streaming wars, it appears that each of the major platforms is winning in their own way. This would seem to defy logic and conventional wisdom, but it tracks well with what some analysts had been projecting. While streaming has been getting tremendous hype in recent years, it’s still small compared to conventional television viewing. That means there is plenty of room for everyone to grow.

A little more than a decade ago, the tactics of some U.S. government public affairs operations began to shift. Instead of the all-access posture towards all accredited press organizations, they became more selective about which media could receive which information and under which circumstances. And today, some government agency public affairs officials have essentially slammed the door on accredited press that they simply don’t want to be bothered with.

The transition to IP allows for greater integration and greater interaction, primarily by bringing greater intelligence into broadcast workflows. In the acquisition and production stages of the content chain, greater integration can mean using media and associated metadata in smarter and more interesting ways to create and distribute content.

Iowa and New Hampshire are known for the charm of their retail politics — town halls, handshakes and hash browns. They are also the home of retail media — very local newspapers, TV and radio stations. But these days, small-town news is in big financial trouble, profoundly reshaping how the electorate in these key states now size-up candidates.

Hank Price: “Starting in July, Peacock premium subscribers will be able to watch The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers live, hours before they air in their regular slots on NBC affiliates. Instead of the fresh product NBC stations now carry after their late newscasts, they will instead be airing reruns of shows that have already aired on Peacock. This is an outrageous breach of trust between Comcast/NBC Universal and the NBC affiliate body.”

My first thought when seeing Viacom’s announcement that William S. Paley’s architectural masterpiece Black Rock will be put on the market was horror. But then I checked. Black Rock is on the National Register of Historic Places, so I, for one, breathed a sigh of relief.

Margaret Sullivan: Given that Stephanie Grisham has never held a briefing since she got the title of White House press secretary last July, is she really a press secretary? Grisham seems unaware — or simply doesn’t care — that she actually works for the American people and is paid with their tax dollars.

Broadcasters were victorious in their fight against the pay TV industry the same way they have won so many other issues, by taking their case directly to Senators and members of Congress in their home districts.

In our current political climate, local journalism must be protected at all costs. The FCC is clearing the path for its downfall. That’s the opinion of Dayton, Ohio, Mayor Nan Whaley and former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. They explain why.

David Zurawik: “This has been a decade of revolutionary, existential media change most of which would have happened had he never stepped off that elevator into the heart of the nation’s political life.”

David Brooks: “Those of us in journalism primarily do one thing: cover events. We report and opine about events like election campaigns, wars and crimes. But a funny thing has happened to events in this era. They have ceased to drive politics the way they used to. Increasingly, sociology is.”

The 2010s were transformative, except for all the stuff that hasn’t changed a bit.

Selecting the right company leaders for coaching and helping them identify the coach that will be most effective for them can accelerate performance, success and career trajectory. It can make the delivery of key projects more rapid and successful.

David Zurawik: “As this year of the TV hearing comes to a close, I should be singing [the broadcast and cable networks] praises. There has never been more overall political coverage in any one year than in 2019. But the question that demands not just being asked but also honestly discussed is whether all that television coverage has made any real-world difference. And if not, what does that say about the belief I have long held in the power of TV, which remains the principal storyteller in American life, to change the world with its cameras?”

Margaret Sullivan: “The veteran Fox News journalist’s … Sunday morning interview show is often riveting, creating newsworthy moments. Tough, well-prepared and knowledgeable, Wallace is willing to interrupt, ask follow-up questions and assert facts when his subjects are insistently spewing talking points. That President Trump bashes him as “nasty and obnoxious” or calls his interviews “dumb and unfair” doesn’t detract from that reality.

Sinclair Broadcast Group will stop producing the must-run political commentary segments that have attracted the company a lot of criticism since former Trump White House staffer Boris Epshteyn began hosting them.

Willa Paskin: “Friends, bingers, countrymen, I come to bury television, not to praise it. 2019 was the first year I started to look askance at something I have said thousands of time: ‘I love television.’ This phrase, which had previously seemed so pedestrian and yet so true, the cozy benediction lobbed at a loved one on their way out the door, suddenly became strange.”

Jim Brady: “While we’ve been chasing that adulation and virality, social has been chipping away at the core of what journalism has spent decades building.”

Hank Price: “With the unfortunate demise of print, leading television groups are making an even stronger commitment to local investigations. They are doing this with a full understanding of the financial costs. Why? Because they are in the journalism business. That means putting the well-being of the communities they serve first, no matter the cost or political pressure.”

ZypMedia’s Aman Sareen says OTT advertising is poised to overtake ads on linear TV given a perfect storm of proliferating services, audience receptivity to streaming ads and better targetability.

Congress is debating whether to renew the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act, commonly referred to as STELAR, past Dec. 31, when it’s set to expire. Dr. George Ford, with the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, says focus is on a key question: Should broadcasters get to charge whatever retransmission fee the market will bear?

Dan Kennedy: “There are two elephants in the room that are threatening to destroy local news. One, technological disruption, is widely understood: the internet has undermined the value of advertising and driven it to Craigslist, Facebook and Google, thus eliminating most of the revenues that used to pay for journalism. But the other, corporate greed, is too often regarded as an effect rather than as a cause.”

Joe Ferullo: “Lying just below big headlines from the impeachment hearings was an urgent message for mainstream media: The rules of the journalism game need to change, because a formidable player — Russia — won’t leave the arena. The game I’m talking about is how “opposition research” becomes news.

David Zurawik: “Baltimore TV news needs to get better if this city is ever going to improve. And in all the years I have been writing about media at The Sun, I have seen very little evidence that any of the major stations here are committed to making that happen. That’s one of the most disheartening things I know about Baltimore media. And it was reinforced this month by an outside review of local TV news.”

Margaret Sullivan: “If every American gave 30 minutes a day to an earnest and open-minded effort to stay on top of the news, we might actually find our way out of this crisis.”

on Wednesday — as televised impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives — journalists need to be on their game. The stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to fulfilling their core mission: informing citizens of what they really need to know.