It’s Spring, right? Like, March 19th is the official first day but we’re all in agreement that once Spring Training is underway, we’ve started Spring? So, it’s Spring, which means not only Spring Training but Spring Cleaning, and for the news media, that means looking at what we do and deciding which elements are unnecessary.
Time to Marie Kondo this thing, and if it doesn’t bring… well, not joy, really, it’s more like whether you’re wasting time or not raising significant revenue or just filling space. We have too much of that stuff.
Like practically all the old benchmarks on radio, for example. Traffic reports are the most obvious. They still exist in the age of Waze because they’re a sponsorship opportunity, but they bring programming to a screeching halt and allow listeners to tune away. There are still exceptions: Major markets with all-News stations and lots of traffic can still do it, because there’s some value in alerting drivers to problems that may not be on the direct route Waze has prescribed but may cause issues later. But in most markets, nah.
Here in South Florida, Miami stations could dispose of traffic by just repeating “Traffic is at a standstill in all the usual areas, and if you’re on U.S. 1 south of downtown, you’ll hit every red light from I-95 to Homestead.” West Palm Beach stations generally have nothing on which to report – we only have two major highways, and 99 percent of radio traffic reports just say everything is going smoothly.
The reports exist to justify sponsor tags. They get in the way of regular programming. Find something else to sponsor.
Does cable news need panels of four to six pundits “analyzing” every political story every day? Do viewers get anything out of them? I watched some of the Super Tuesday coverage and there was practically no content that varied from overanalyzing polls and extrapolating generalizations from results that merely confirmed what we already knew was going to happen.
There wasn’t a single moment on any network when I thought, “You know, I hadn’t thought about it that way.” Is that entertaining? Because it isn’t terribly informative, and “Why am I watching this?” was the primary thought on my mind. (“Because you don’t want to watch the injury-decimated Sixers lose to Brooklyn” was the consensus answer.)
While we’re getting rid of stuff from election coverage, a general ban on interviewing random voters on why they voted and how they voted would be a relief, too. What one individual voter in Colorado Springs thinks about the candidates doesn’t tell you anything worth pondering. Why do it?
As for newspapers, I’d suggest getting rid of print by now – the circulation figures for the print product have dipped to shockingly low levels – but, living in Early Bird Special country, I still see people having the Sun-Sentinel and Palm Beach Post delivered to their driveways every day, and until that generation is gone, there’s still a market for it and I imagine that having consolidated printing and distribution, there might still be a profit in running the presses.
I wish the product of all that work wasn’t a paper with news that was online two days (or more) earlier, a mostly useless sports section with nothing about the previous night’s games, and comics — the highlight of the paper since the early 1900s – reduced to a page of corporately-selected, nationally-uniform strips.
Many papers have eliminated box scores and game coverage (not worth it when it’s all online and on social media already) and are using AI to “cover” high school and college sports. There’s a market for better coverage of local news and sports, but nobody wants to pay for it. We get what we deserve, I suppose.
Local TV news? With a few exceptions, it’s all crime and feel-good features, plus weather. The crime stories just scare people. The feel-good features are like reading press releases. Just keep the weather – it’s all people really care about, and weather apps really suck.
Seriously, can you rely on Apple’s weather widget? It’ll often predict sunny or partly cloudy weather, then, when it’s pouring, the app suddenly changes its forecast and alerts you to what you already know. Our local TV meteorologists are more accurate. The phones are good for tornado warnings (can’t mistake that eardrum-piercing siren), but local TV does weather better. I’d rather have a half-hour of that than news about a shooting in West Palm and a bake sale in Delray.
You know what? There’s a TL;DR version of this: Do what you’re better at doing than anyone else. Don’t do the things for which technology has provided a better solution than you offer. Put your resources into the good, entertaining, informative stuff. Get your broom and sweep out the rest.
Then straighten up your studio. It’s a mess. And I thought I told you not to put coffee cups near the board.
Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
