Los Angeles, CA—The Internet and today’s video technology has given us the ability to gather and report news with inexpensive equipment and just a little knowhow.
This could be done with modern prosumer video equipment rather than the elitist stuff costing in the tens of thousands. News video can even be gathered and edited with a modern iPhone. Of course you want the best quality your budget can handle. You need watchable video and poor audio is inexcusable.
The local stations here are fading fast into the Abyss of low viewership, minimal content and vanishing revenue. Viewers and print news readers everywhere are abandoning the papers and TV news broadcasts for no-nonsense content on the Internet. Those seeking news can search and find news and information without the overpaid news readers and their mindless and often propagandized chit-chat.
With streaming video a team of video journalists producers with a good assignment desk management team can put together the days news, for re-playing 24/7.
Sports and weather should be a part of this only if its newsworthy. Sports and weather sites could be created for those folks that need that at other sites.
Like all news rooms, the assignment desk personnel monitor government, police and fire department activity. They keep up with ongoing court cases and the public relations people that shamelessly peddle their self-serving crap for their clients. The assignment desk people decide whether to send reporters out to chase various news stories.
The reporters will respond to news events like anyone in the news business. They will gather video of action, interviews and happenings they will edit and package them into stories with time slots they deserve rather then strict time frames. The key here is great storytelling content.
If there are still broadcasters around that want to use our content, they can buy it!
Important events can be live streamed but allowing politicians to drone on and on as is the current practice must end. The vile practice of kissing the government PIO’s asses in hopes of getting information must also end. Reporters making friends with cops out on the street should be encouraged. Frankly, if politicians want face time they can pay us for advertising!
Reporters must learn or, re-learn how to access public records and find those people that know what’s going on to interview for their packages.
Advertising and marketing should be handled by a crack traffic department.
Instead of helicopters, camera drones should be deployed to gather video whereever possible at great savings.
When the audience wants news, they can get it the way they want it. The content should be packaged by whatever time is necessary, not preset time traditionally set for television.
There should be an investigative team for long form stories covering the usual extortion, theft, fraud, government mismanagement and the injustice that never stops.
A news organization that deals exclusively with news does not have the $$$ millstone of broadcasting or paper-printing around it’s neck.
An upstart website could become the number one local news source if operated correctly. Do we really need mindless chit-chat in our news content? Let’s hope our news consumption time is more valuable then most most TV news executives have guessed.
I shot and edited the below story complete with a voiceover on my iPhone in minutes last December while in London. I wanted to share my experience with the iconic London Eye Ferris Wheel overlooking the city.
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