On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 5:20 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > The danger I see with this idea is that if the reruns made them enough > profit to invest in quality news, what would stop them from cutting news > hours over time to increase rerun hours in order to make more profit? I am > tempted to say they would not do that because of their commitment to > reporting the news - but then CNN has already sacrificed its commitment to > reporting the news in pursuit of infotainment, so why wouldn't they do it in > pursuit of entertainment? Broadcast networks have at least the pretense of > needing to justify their license with news and public affairs programming, > but I guess cable operations don't even have that.
I understand the danger of what would happen in the long-term; it would require a commitment from a network executive, which isn't worth much. But to me the danger we face right now is we are running low on content. Something we talk about sometimes here on this message board is where news originates from. In the last few years, I've seen HuffPo change to be more of a news aggregator site than a producer of original content (it's primary Twitter feed is 90% links to photos of Kardashians or summaries of who said what on the previous day's talk shows), and that is trending on CNN's website (its "Around the Web" section used to be the only place where it would link to outside sources, but now I see content "borrowed" in the sports and entertainment sections, as well as international news) and many others I frequent. With newspapers merging and shutting down, with magazines switching to online only and lacking subscriber revenues, and with broadcast news outlets shadows of what they were even five years ago, there is a decline not just in quality but in the amount of content, good or bad. Nobody has created a viable app for news that functions the way the iTunes Store does for music and TV shows and movies. Content gets stolen by dozens if not hundreds of websites (as a purely object lesson, an innocuous comment I made last month on Google+ about the styling of the new Corvette now appears word-for-word on over 50 websites). Since news doesn't seem to be something people are willing to pay for, we have to start thinking about what people will pay for to subsidize the news. Otherwise there will come a day, very soon, when the aggregators will run out of sources to poach from. -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
