Insights is a new weekly series featuring entertainment industry veteran David Bloom. It represents an experiment of sorts in digital-age journalism and audience engagement with a focus on the intersection of entertainment and technology, an area that David has written about and thought about and been part of in various career incarnations for much of the past 25 years. David welcomes your thoughts, perspectives, calumnies, and kudos at david@tubefilter.com, or on Twitter @DavidBloom.
This installment of Insights is brought to you by Beachfront RISE. 
The most powerful man in TV news has just lost his job, throwing one of the biggest properties on cable TV into limbo. Meanwhile, network coverage of the political conventions has been carved down to an hour a night, a symptom of much diminished ambitions and indifferent ratings. Jon Stewart’s heirs couldn’t pull an Emmy nomination in a category that Comedy Central dominated for a decade. And of course viewership everywhere in TV news is settling downward, quickly.
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Yes, it’s a complicated time to be in the business of TV news (or, as Stewart called his show, “fake news”). Perhaps the more interesting question as these sources of news all fade into history alongside Edgar R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite is what happens next? In what feels like an inflection point in the history of the business, who will be the faces of news in the future, if any?
Increasingly, if you’re looking for video, especially of breaking news, you’re probably not looking for it on traditional TV, cable, or even satirical shows.
A just-released study by market-research firm Gfk says 25% of U.S. households, a full quarter of them, no longer have cable or satellite services, a big jump from just a year ago. That means no CNN, Fox News or MSNBC (or even Comedy Central). And even if you’re set up to watch over-the-air channels, chances are very good that, if you’re under 45, you’re not sitting down to watch the 6 o’clock national news either.
And speaking of Fox News, Roger Ailes, who founded and built Fox News into a dominant political and cultural machine, is gone, following an investigation surrounding Gretchen Carlson’s sexual-harassment allegations.
New York magazine reported this week that Ailes’ now-former bosses, Lachlan and James Murdoch, reportedly want to pivot Fox News to a different tone and approach. It’s difficult to imagine what Fox News looks like post-Ailes and post-pivot.
Will Fox News, which for all its power and profits never commanded more than about 1.3 million daily viewers, be a part of the skinny bundles of the future? Will it be wrapped into a stand-alone app, or part of a broader online package of Fox assets (corporate sibling FX, for instance, just launched a standalone Apple TV app)?
And then there are the successors to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at Comedy Central’s nightly news satire shows. I think highly of Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore, but Comedy Central’s long-running dominance of the variety-show Emmys ended last week, a reflection perhaps of the shows’ waning cultural centrality. Will their programs remain go-to news sources, albeit satirical ones, for many Millennials? I’m guessing no.
And we won’t even get into what’s happening with local broadcast news, which once comprised a license to print money but that now don’t even get checked for the local weather and sports (these days, there’s an app for that).
So, where are all these audiences going when big news breaks? Yes, some are still checking in to CNN or CBS or one of their direct competitors. But more likely, many audiences are looking at highly focused niche news sources pushing live streams, lots of video, deep analysis and other content designed to stir reactions. And they’re probably pushing it first to viewers’ phones. (The desktop is so 2008.)
Here’s an eye-opening factoid: YouTube’s mobile app, just the app, reaches more 18-to-49-year-olds than any U.S. cable network. And the app’s average viewing session lasts more than 40 minutes. YouTube already has three vertical apps: YouTube Music, YouTube Kids and YouTube Gaming (never mind SVOD service YouTube Red). What happens if they launch a YouTube News app to go with the original episodic programming they just announced at VidCon?
Archrival Facebook’s heavy investment in live streaming is only one of several big services providing access to breaking-news video. The company’s shift in its News Feed to give live streaming more prominence has been a boon to fast-adapting publishers, who are seeing 268% more shares for their Facebook-native videos than text posts linking back to their sites, according to a NewsWhip study out this week. Facebook execs believe posts will basically be “all video” within five years. That seems a bit aggressive, given the site’s very broad demographics (I mean the non-techie grandmothers on there), but count on video being omnipresent soon enough.
And a live Facebook stream can be a big thing, for both the news and the person capturing the news. As someone put it recently, those 1.65 billion Facebook users mean 1.65 billion local news bureaus, waiting to “broadcast” live from the scene. The Facebook Live stream right after Philando Castile was shot by police in Minnesota, and the millions of views it attracted, was just one controversial and painful example of what will be routine in the future.
In the tumultuous days since, there have been live streams from more shootings, violent protests and much else. Turkey’s government largely shut down social media and the Internet during last week’s attempted coup, but the only way embattled president Recep Tayyip Erdogan could signal to outsiders that he was okay came through a Facebook video stream.
And live streaming is handling more prosaic news events too. Those political conventions, for instance, are being streamed in their entirety on several major online platforms besides Facebook, including Twitter’s Periscope, Amazon-owned Twitch, and Google. Yahoo’s Tumblr is carrying live streams, too, featuring coverage by PBS’ NewsHour. The Atlantic, one of the few print dinosaurs to effectively evolve into the digital video era, will be live-streaming from the convention for an hour each morning, and conduct a string of in-person policy talks and other events for attendees. Yes, the networks and the New York Times are doing their own streams, but so too is the Republican Party, cutting out the middleman in a move that will be increasingly common.
For news organizations of all types, the rise of mobile, live-streamed video from potentially millions of sources provides all kinds of challenges. Can they, should they, try to curate that material in any significant way, to provide intelligible understanding of the bigger issues in a given situation? What happens when the live streams contradict what the official sources are saying? Will they be the arbiter of what to believe?
On the business side, even if news organizations do take on the curation challenge in a significant way, can they win a big-enough share of the evolving news audience to make money? For that matter, who owns the rights to make money from that video? Many organizations already are having trouble building sustainable publishing models; putting unpredictable live streams from outsiders on the scene next to advertisers’ content may be a giant headache waiting to explode.
Equally big challenges face reluctant quasi-news platforms such as Facebook, Periscope and YouTube, which must figure out on the fly which controversial videos stay up. More worrisomely, they seem to be doing it without any significant journalism background or developed sense of ethics and newsworthiness to help guide decisions.
The Castile video, for instance, was offline for an hour because of “technical problems” before Facebook restored it. But Facebook reviewers are removing gruesome videos of terrorist beheadings and similar material that are “shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence.” Other controversial videos won’t have as clear-cut a basis for being taken offline or left up. And decisions like these on what to show will have an increasingly big impact on how we perceive news stories. These big platforms’ policies will help shape the narrative of many future events.
Who will be the faces of the future, the Lester Holts and Anderson Coopers and Meredith Vieiras of this coming age of distributed news? I suspect those faces will look a lot like just about all of us, but perhaps like none of us in particular for very long, in an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of people and places and feeds in the “TV news” of the future.
Editor’s note: This piece was updated to reflect Ailes’ departure from Fox News hours after it was initially posted.
This installment of Insights is brought to you by Beachfront RISE, the premier app building company that houses all of your content in one place for any device, and monetizes it automatically with their built in programmatic video advertising platform.
