commentary

Jack Shafer wants to thank President-Elect Trump for simplifying journalists’ mission and setting them free. “He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines,” he writes.

The president-elect will surely be a “gaslighter-in-chief,” Margaret Sullivan argues, regularly distorting reality. He’ll also punish journalists from doing their job and will “relentlessly manipulate,” as he did by stacking his first press conference with jeering-at-the-media staffers in the audience.

Poynter’s Kristen Hare: “When media reporters talk about ‘old media’ and ‘new media,’ what they really mean is print and digital. Yes, it’s taken newspapers a long time to catch up to their digitally native counterparts. There’s no longer a single business model, as there once was. And it’s still a brutal, unpredictable industry. But this year, one of the biggest lessons I learned by stepping inside newsrooms was that having a paper product doesn’t equal being or thinking old.”

In past years, my annual assessment of the TV reviews posted here during the year gone by usually yields this surprising result: Positive reviews far outpaced the negative ones. But the other day, I combed through the year’s reviews and made lists of positive and negative reviews. Lo and behold, the list of pans was approximately four times longer than the picks.

Ellen Gray: “What can I say about a year in which HBO’s Game of Thrones isn’t on my Top 10 list? When Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and Stranger Things, HBO’s The Night Of and AMC’s The Night Manager — all shows I loved — didn’t quite make the cut? That it has been a very good year. For entertainment TV, at least.”

TV and the advertising it carries will, over the next 5 years, be completely digital. Our entire industry’s odd complex about digital and our strange organization and separation around it will be blown up because virtually all media will be digital. The gap between video and TV will be entirely destroyed as we realize it’s a divide of no merit or distinction.

CNN’s Tanzina Vega: “At a time when so many people are questioning the validity of their media coverage, having people with a range of perspectives and backgrounds reporting the news is critical. The election of Donald Trump as president revealed just how deeply divided our country is when it comes to race and yet in the next few decades, people of color will become the majority of Americans. Still, very few feel adequately represented by the media.”

Ken Doctor goes into full prognosticator mode in this broadly-looking piece that speculates on FCC media crossownership rules, the subscription/ad revenue ratio changes for newspapers, the fate and foibles of Gannett Co. and podcasting’s growing audience, among other topics.

Erik Wemple journeys through the assorted missteps of newsrooms making bold, but often absurdly miscalculated, steps in the direction of innovation. His own Washington Post‘s move to separate its print staff from digital employees on either side of the Potomac, news app Circa’s blinding self-love for its own novelty and HuffPost Live’s attempt to out-cable news cable news are among the follies he explores.

Glenn Hower of Parks Associates, says that live digital streaming of sports content; the early authenticated and transactional VOD window; early and mid-subscription VOD window; and digital syndication are all affecting digital TV content distribution.

Adonis Hoffman, chairman of Business in the Public Interest: “Elections have consequences. And nowhere are the consequences more monumental than in the telecom, media and technology sector, where the erstwhile status quo stands to be upended soon. Predictably, every big decision of the last decade affecting broadcasting, cable, internet, telecom and wireless companies will be reviewed and revised by the new administration.”

Erik Wemple: “Even as he campaigned for president, Donald Trump has threatened legal action against the Associated Press and the New York Times. He has stiff-armed media organizations on credentials, vowed to loosen libel law to make it easier for guys like him to sue media outlets, ridiculed media outlets and individual reporters at rallies, and much more. Asked in a recent New York Times interview whether he’d make good on his threat on libel laws, Trump answered, “I think you’ll be happy.”

Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies: “The United States just went through a brutal election season. Politics is a nasty game. But now that the election over, we must — in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln — come together and embrace the better angels of our nature. Unfortunately, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler did not get the memo.”

Journalists may thrive on news — by definition, the unexpected or novel — but they’re terrible at getting out of their own comfortable ruts. Donald Trump has been a candidate and will be a president who requires vastly different coverage. If the ’70s brought, via Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer, what was called “the New Journalism,” I suggest we now need a New New Journalism. Here are some ways journalism must be reinvented.

The proceeds from the FCC’s incentive auction could produce enormous public benefits if they are used to build a 21st-century infrastructure for public interest media, writes Christopher J. Daggett of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.  A broad and exciting array of public interest initiatives, including digital news sites, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, public data sites, apps and civic engagement, could be built with some of the money generated by the auction.

Hearst Television’s Jordan Wertlieb: “Now, more than ever, stations should editorialize and put an added focus and spotlight on the issues that touch their local communities. Editorials highlight community leaders and heroes; hold elected officials accountable; seek to underscore important investigations and truths; and call for legislative changes that better the lives of the viewers they serve.

Fake news is mostly a demand-side problem by those drawn to it largely for the titillation effect, Jack Shafer argues. But he says it’s too important to be left to Facebook’s cure. Rather, we need to learn to live with a certain amount of it, we need to educate people in how to spot fake news and ultimately apply “small doses of reason to our media diet.”

RTDNA’s Mike Cavender: “We live in a world of media which now has a vast array of content and platform choices. Want a conservative outlook on the news? There are places for that. If you prefer a liberal spin, there are channels for that, too. We can go online to create personal news feeds which deliver only the kind of stories that we’re comfortable believing, where it doesn’t matter if they’re true. Ultimately, there is only one person who can truly mitigate the impact of fake, biased or otherwise distorted content. The news consumer.”

While contemplating what the future of TV might look like, Adam Buckman began thinking about how, or even whether, advertising will continue to be a part of it. “It was then that I began to realize how much the concept of the TV commercial — the thing that has provided the financial and to a great degree, the creative underpinning of the whole business since time immemorial — is under assault.”

The transition from baseband SDI to an open standard internet protocol is underway, aided by the Alliance for IP Media Solutions. But there’s some confusion about AIMS. Who are the standards players and what are their origins? Do they share common goals and objectives, and how do they interact? What is the latest progress on defining interoperability standards for IP-based operations? Here are some answers.

Trump’s win can’t be reduced to a failure of the broken press, writes Jack Shafer, who says reporting diligence was in full effect for the election. “Trump won not because the press failed but because he was selling something more valuable to voters than integrity, honesty and humanity,” he says, and that was appealing to Americans’ brighter sense of restoration and much darker senses, too.

In terms of the media’s fiscal health, the current election couldn’t have arrived at a more precarious moment, John Herrman writes. Major news organizations lost audience control, trust was questioned in widespread circles and social platforms, especially Facebook, emerged as “the clearest expression of what a transitional media environment actually feels like, and how disorienting it can be.” A brilliant read on a moment that has become, in Herrman’s argument, a “snapshot of messy change in progress.”

NPR’s Michael Oreskes: “We can help provide the country with a common basis of facts and a common vocabulary to discuss our challenges. We have the power to actually introduce Americans from different backgrounds and points of view to each other. We can, in the popular phrase, be a convener of important conversations.”

While the will-he-or-won’t-he speculation continues over a post-election Trump TV, Alex Weprin joins the growing chorus making the case for its very uphill battle. He trots out the cautionary tales of Al Gore and Glenn Beck, the near-impossibility of the “TV” part and the limited revenue models for a pureplay site as all deep impediments to the venture, not to mention the very strong possibility that he might be president now, too.

Jerianne Timmerman, NAB senior deputy general counsel: During the past year, a number of industry trade associations have changed their long-standing names to reflect changes in their members and industries. Notably, however, the FCC’s broadcast ownership rules reflect none of these fundamental changes.

Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik: “Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is going to be part of the election-night coverage on ABC. She will be there as one of several analysts.  ABC News hiring Rawlings-Blake even for one night after she banned a local reporter from her weekly press briefing is as wrong in its own way as CNN hiring former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as an analyst.”

New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet thinks the two cable outlets’ coverage of the election has been “ridiculous. This mix of entertainment and news, and news masquerading as entertainment, is kind of funny except that we now have a guy who is a product of that world nominated as Republican presidential nominee,” he said in an interview, blasting CNN’s hire of Corey Lewandowski and defending his own paper’s Trump coverage.

Under longstanding antitrust policy, the AT&T-Time Warner deal should be practically a shoo-in. But these are not usual times.

Technology strategist Michael Wolf predicts a fast-changing landscape that will get harder for advertising-supported content companies while enriching digital gatekeepers such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says the commission is working hard to protect your privacy and allow you to watch pay-TV programming without renting a set-top box.

What’s it going to be then, eh? Huge ratings, or an electorate so turned off by now that they’ll stay away from this third presidential debate in droves?

If Peter Kafka’s got any chops as a prognosticator, Donald Trump will be having conniptions over more than just an election loss, if he decides to establish a media presence. First he’d have to find someone to sell him a TV network, Kafka writes, and then there are the distribution challenges. If he went the digital route, Glenn Beck’s relative success then precipitous slide provides a useful example of just how hard that is. “Running a network isn’t the same as showing up on a network, and Trump is going to learn the difference,” he writes.

Jordan Wertlieb, president of Hearst Television: “Whether it is severe weather events like Hurricane Matthew, tornadoes in the Midwest or domestic terrorist attacks, local broadcasters are the lifeline of support. Next Generation Television (ATSC 3.0) offers the opportunity for our communication lifeline to be upgraded to the latest technology. The television industry has worked hard to finalize a next-generation standard and the time is now for the FCC to approve this new standard.”

The legendary baseball announcer kept the best parts of the game on the radio, even after decades on TV.

The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi: “Fact is, there really is no such thing as ‘the media.’ It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions. Those who work in the media don’t gather in our huddle rooms each morning and light up the teleconference lines with plots to nettle and unsettle you. There is no media in the sense of a conspiracy to tilt perception.”

Watching television can feel like therapy, thanks to all the idiosyncratic characters on today’s niche shows. 

Ron Stitt argues that killing user commenting on publishers’ owned-and-operated sites is about the worst move they can make, as it sabotages one of their best means of engagement. That engagement has a big impact on KPIs like low bounce rates and extended time on site, he says.

Steve Schwaid: “Stations, how do you think of your news and weather app? Chances are, many stations only think of their app as pushing forecasts and weather alerts. Few realize how many folks may actually use the weather or news app to watch the station’s air, especially during breaking events. Are your apps designed to provide a live stream of breaking weather and news? If not, you need to fix this immediately. Here’s how.”

Adam Buckman: “One thing I have never understood: Why do we care so much who wins an Emmy Award (or for that matter, an Oscar, Grammy or Tony too)? It’s great that people are being recognized and awarded in their industry for their work. More power to them, but this annual televised celebration of their industry almost always comes across as gross showing off. I suppose the same can be said of all awards shows.”