CBS Leaves News - Newspapers now Network News Dying
by Rob Paterson
CBS are rumoured to be in negotiations with CNN to outsource news gathering!
Remember CBS news was the gold standard. It was when Walter Cronkite told us that America could not win in VietNam that Johnson decided not to run. I think that this is the beginning of the end for conventional news organizations that have not adopted the tools and the culture of the real network. Here is Michael Rosenblum in full flood on what has happened:
CBS News had a lot of time to restructure; to take advantage of what the new technologies offered. Beet-tv reported today that Reuters News is covering Iraq with 35 videojournalists. CBS News, apparently has opted for no coverage of Iraq.
The fate of CBS News is hardly surprising. Following in the ignoble footsteps of other American corporations like Kodak, who preferred to go down clinging to the past rather than embrace new and scary technologies. Their loss, and ours.
Perhaps the last gasp of a defunct and completely out of touch management was Katie Couric’s pornographic $15 million a year salary - to work 22 minutes a night reading what someone else had written. The sheer stupidity of this, the sheer short-sightedness of it now becomes obvious to everyone. For Couric’s reported $15 million, CBS could have (could have) hired and fielded an astonishing 150 Videojournalists worldwide, paying them a quite honorable $100,000 a year to report for CBS News. CBS News could have (could have) placed itself on the cutting edge of the digital news revolution.
Instead they opted to become the dinosaur poster child of the end of old media.
Here is the lesson that I see.
Moving to this new world is NOT ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY. It is about culture. If you are imbued with their old culture, it is unlikely that you can make the shift. Adoption is not about the tools - CBS could have adopted the tools but they could not. They were too invested in their old way.
Many still tell me that they have time. Many tell me that they are too busy running the old to do much about the new. Many tell me that when the audience get there, so will they.
iTunes is now the largest music store in the world. The new is now no longer a beach head - the new is on the banks of the Rhine. The Homeland of the old is about to be invaded. The Gotterdammerung of the old is about to happen.
