This caught my eye today in the Washington Post (online version, naturally): “Under a new agreement reached this week with its labor unions, WUSA, Channel 9, will become the first station in Washington to replace its crews with one-person "multimedia journalists" who will shoot and edit news stories single-handedly.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121103976.html
It’s the latest in a long series of cost-cutting measures that have hit the entertainment industry in recent times and more specifically, this week. What with Viacom laying off folks, newspapers on the verge of going belly up, and NBC essentially pulling a bunch of jobs away from writers, producers, agents, etc by removing five hours of scripted programming hours a week from their schedule and replacing it with a prime time Jay Leno ‘Not Tonight Show” Tonight Show.
But that wasn’t really what caught my eye. No, what caught my eye was the station’s call letters: WUSA. I worked as an intern at WUSA when Gannett (their parent company) assigned the patriotic moniker to their Minneapolis NBC station. It has since been reassigned to a Washington DC station.
It was an exciting time, to be 22 and spending three days a week in a newsroom as well as riding around with reporters as they went out on stories.
I won the cheers of everyone on crew when, one day, I was returning from the airport in one of the station cars with film for a story, a car broadsided me and I careened into the middle lane guardrail. By the grace of God I walked away unscathed but the car was beyond repair. I thought I would be fired, fined, jailed but instead the camera crew guys patted me on the back – they’d been wanting to get rid of that junker for years. Whew. Dodged a bullet there!
Anyway, I'm not sure how I feel about one person 'mulitmedia journalists'. I'm sure most of the people I knew back 22 years ago at that Minneapolis station have long since moved on to other places or retired and it's not as though these guys wouldn't have been capable of doing it on their own if it came to that.
But I can't help but wonder - how can tv survive all these cost-cutting measures? If they're not creating a product worth watching, why, then watch? If you watch tv for scripted shows and they're not there. Why watch? If you watch tv for professional news coverage and it's not there, why watch? And if people aren't watching, advertisers don't advertise with you and you go out of business. It doesn't seem like a very smart business model to me......
more on this again because it warrants more discussion than I have today..
1 comment:
But this could be seen as good news for people like you who have the combination of on-camera personality and behind-the-scenes smarts to be able to pull such assignments off.
Not that you have a ton of time, but have you ever looked into Channel 25, New York local access? Not sure how hard it is to break in but I think you'd be a shoe in!
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