I Got Fired

What a terrible time it is these days to get laid off from your job, what with the sour economy and all.

And getting fired isn’t much better.

But that's what happened to me five weeks ago, and you can read all about it right here.

Content vs. Competition

I'll never claim to be a pioneer in online news, but I have been at it for nearly a decade and I've been progressive enough that I'd like to think I'm near the leading edge.

The thing that frequently turns me off about the news business in general is this long-holding take that we're not allowed to openly acknowledge the competition. If only our viewers could see us!

It's always been the norm in a newsroom to keep one ear -- and both eyes -- on the strategically placed monitors. On the occasion that one of the other stations has a story your station doesn't have, the knee-jerk battle cry is often to send a crew and play catch up, often times at the expense of a better story that's already in-house.

I'm not saying a station should go on-air and parrot its direct rival, but I think it's fairly Mickey Mouse to pretend this rival doesn't exist either, especially consdering how many scoops might dictate your editorial meeting tomorrow morning.

I'll never forget the story my dad often told me about when he was a star quarterback at powerhouse Cathedral Latin High School in Cleveland in the late 1940s. He said his coach required all players to stop their pregame stretching and applaud when the other team came out onto the field. Classy and respectful. Ya know, the complete opposite of the modern-day television newsroom.

Anyway, this is where my new gig comes into the conversation. In just a week, it feels like we're moving in a direction much healthier than what I'm used to. Sure you want to beat the competition, but there seems far less of an obsession with the local rivals.

I'm obviously not on the broadcast side, so certainly my view is incomplete. But online here, we scour other sites, not just AP wires and in-station broadcast content, and if there's something good done by someone else, by all means, we post it. Is it lazy? Is it stealing? It's neither. You have to remember, we're not providing content for our competitors. We're providing content for our viewers and users. Sure we give the necessary and appropriate attribution and even link back to the original source material. But the bottom line is that our "viewsers" don't care where the information comes from; they just want the information. And those are the people we serve.

The news business has changed dramatically in recent years and will continue to do so. Gathering, producing and distributing content is a completely different ballgame than it was just five years ago. And if you still want to be a player five years from now, then you have to think of your consumers first, not the competition.

And thanks in large part to social networking, the information industry is evolving daily as well. Dave in Cincinnati saw something on a blog today, sent me the link, I checked it out, Googled a few keywords, found the initial report, and then wrote my own short story, of course properly citing and linking back to the original source.

Cue Up The Blame Machine

I have a secret to tell.

I made a mistake at work today.

You did too probably.

Fortunately, our missteps didn't lead to the deaths of seven unsuspecting people.

But someone made a mistake on the job on Manhattan's Upper East Side a few days ago, and a construction crane collapsed, turning an otherwise lovely Saturday in New York's late winter into the scene of a national tragedy.

And for the last 48 hours, the local news is doing what local news always does -- looks for a scapegoat.

No matter which station you watch, those hometown anchors you love so much tell you go to their Web site and vote in surveys or leave your comments on a forum so we can all talk about whether we think safety precautions were sufficient there, as if we were familiar with that particular construction project before the collapse. It's far less of a discussion or conversation than an exercise in unanimity. I mean, are viewers of local TV news truly the collective authority when it comes to construction safety standards?

But that's the mentality of the the three-staged news cycle: Tragedy, Reaction and Blame. It's ridiculous, and it once again recalls the conversation about which came first: the public's need/want for this type of stuff, or the news agenda dictating the public's need/want?

Everyone makes mistakes at every workplace every day. Sure the logical perspective doesn't do much to bring back to life seven people who were sons, daughters, parents or siblings. I get that; I really do. As insensitive as it sounds, shit happens; life can indeed be unfair. I wish we could leave it at that, but when the shallow culture isn't obsessed with the sex life of a celebrity, or the sex life of a governor, or shoot, the sex life of the new governor now, the shallow culture is looking for someone to blame, humiliate and straight up destroy.

The News

This I just heard on a local newscast: "It turns out a glass of red wine a day may keep the doctor away."

Yeah, it turns out. As if we've been waiting with bated breath to hear the findings of the latest research because the red wine story isn't the most overplayed health tip in the history of TV news, and we don't already hear about it every three weeks.

Say, did that Mary Lou Retton win the gold medal? I hadn't heard.