The New York Times today writes about NY1, "The Little Channel That Could." NY1 News is Time Warner's hyper-local cable news channel for New York City. The low budget channel, famous for "one-man band" reporters who hold their own microphones and cameras, has become a major and influential player among New York news publishers as well as a model for many local news channels who compete with newspapers around the country. NY1 reaches 2.2 milion homes and often has more viewers than either MSNBC or the Fox News Channel. It's web site is ranked 12,607th in the world by Alexa.com and regularly has more web readership than the sites of the New York Sun and NY Newsday. During the recent NYC transit strike, NY1's web site even approached the readership of some of the larger NYC papers. Because of its hyper-local and comprehensive coverage, the station is a focal point of discussion among local elected officials. The station proudly declares: "For New Yorkers, NY1 is the only local news worth watching." If they keep improving their web readership, they may one day be saying that NY1 is the only local website worth reading...
Steve Yelvingon recently asked on his blog: "Should every newspaper be pursuing [local/regional channels]?" It seems obvious to me that the answer should be a resounding "Yes"! As I recently wrote on my blog, it is clear that because of the web, video news producers (like NY1) have spent the last few years learning to produce written news and are thus crossing over the line into the medium traditionally reserved to the newspapers. In the mean time, although some newspapers have been haltingly learning to expand beyond merely repurposing printable news on their websites, most papers haven't even begun the process of learning the multimedia skills that will be required to compete on the web as news providers in the future. On the web, even radio producers such as NPR are beginning to provide readable content which compares to that of some newspapers. (NPR is rated 1,481 by Alexa -- far above most newspapers.) If the newspapers don't start learning the skills of their competitors such NY1, ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. they will soon discover that they have forfeited the opportunity to be major providers of local news just as they have forfeited their franchises for classified advertising (to eBay and Craigslist), job postings (to Monster, etc.) and movie listings (to Fandango, MovieFone, etc.).
Just as the newspapers once had a natural advantage in the realms of advertising, jobs postings, and movie listings, they had a natural advantage in producing web news since they had well developed writing teams whose output was most appropriate for the original web -- a low-bandwidth medium that "locked out" the video and audio producers. But, while the newspapers slept and focused on repurposing printable content, the radio and video producers were busy learning to produce written content and building compelling online experiences that are more appropriate for the future broadband "newspaper of the future." NY1 and other local news channels needed to spend millions of dollars learning to build a newsroom, hiring reporters and learning to manage written content on the web. A local newspaper would have been able to significantly reduce the startup costs by leveraging existing reporters and would have been able to spread the continuing costs across paper, web, and cable outlets...
It is clear that the "online newspaper" of the future is going to be multimedia and exploit the broadband connections that are becoming common. What isn't clear is whether the "online newspaper" of the future will be a product of the television producers or of the content aggregators like Yahoo!, Google and MSN. If things go as they are, the only thing that seems clear is that the newspapers will be bit players in this game.
bob wyman
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