speaking of journalism and copy and all that… unnecessary comma. sorry!

Commenters keep repeating this quaintly inaccurate notion. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia: “…she has remained in third place in the nightly news time slot and as of June 2009 has under 5.5 million viewers.”

It seems that producing fiction is always much more expensive than reporting reality.

If it weren’t for her interview, we might very well have Vice President Palin today.

You might have forgotten, but the McCain campaign kept Palin so far away from anyone who even MIGHT be slightly hostile that she was a veritable unknown to the vast majority of the American people. People gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Until the Katie Couric interviews, and the SNL mockery of them. As far as I’m concerned, that $15m was well-spent. Cheap at twice the price.

Why is this a quaintly inaccurate notion? Why else is she on the air except to generate ad money? Not doing it well doesn’t mean she’s not doing it at all.

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity…Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are successful because they’re funny *and* they know and care about the news they’re mocking. The BBC has “Have I got News For You” and “Mock The Week,” both comedic reviews of the past week’s news. They’re both very good but not as badly needed as The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. The UK does have mediocre news on the other channels. The have Sky, for instance.

NPR auditions its newsreaders too, just like any other radio station. I still remember what Mara Liasson (sp?) sounds like from when I listened to NPR over 10 years ago (she’s on TV now but I hardly ever see her).

If the huge salary of Katie Couric indicates anything, it’s that of the size of the mature TV “news” industry and where it feels its money is best spent.

If you want to see news presented more cost-effectively, catch Euronews sometime. They don’t even use newsclowns; just voiceovers and footage mostly, with some segments of in-depth analysis.

Oooh, are we referring to her as a journalist now?

There aren’t any Cronkites or Brinkleys on network TV anymore. Just talking heads reading paid-for drivel.

Pratically none of it is. There’s almost nothing resembling real journalism in the mainstream media anymore.

The problem is on the other side of the screen, if it weren’t profitable they wouldn’t make it.

Here’s the thing, if we (the public) don’t hold these idiots to a higher standard than pretty meat-puppets reading news tid-bits between commercials, then we will have received exactly what we asked for.

Yep, that’s right, WE are the ‘invisible hand’. Start slapping.

It takes a lot of work to come up with all those puns, and even more work to say them in a sing-songy tone.

Yep. And dumbass special effects, like that stupid “beam-in” thing from last fall. And graphics (except on their website). And costumes.

And, of course, they can hire people with “radio faces” and good brains instead of empty masks like Couric.

Aldasin 4: I can’t remember the last time I watched the network evening news, but I’m thinking it’s going on 20 years or so now.

I watch the network news! I watch John Stewart with some regularity.

What?

Now I get that the majority of those in that age bracket aren’t going to get their news from the web, but what’s with the constant need to be updated about the same thing over and over again ad nauseum?

Katie Couric is presumably making her salary off the Nielsen numbers generated by said parents (or the numbers the network convinced themselves she’d be able to pull in), though said parents are presumably old enough to have established brand loyalty and be less receptive to advertising (as the theory goes). So are they just behind the times? Did the network reach and miss? Or am I missing some important metric of Couric’s presence on the network?

To be fair, my parents also listen to NPR.

But mainly just the news.

One important difference: radio is much cheaper to produce than TV. NPR reporters regularly call in reports live via telephone. Live video feeds often require a satellite truck. One guy in an apartment can put together an audio piece in a couple hours. A similar video piece often takes much longer, even when using advanced studio gear.

Broadcast TV is simply more expensive than broadcast radio. Crews are bigger, equipment is heavier (you don’t haul along a set of lights when doing an audio interview).

Indeed that’s the fun of radio reporting – you can get to a place quickly, pull together a report, and let the street sounds trigger the imagination of the listener. A wonderful medium for creative work … but it’s not the same as broadcast video.

My local paper is mainstream. My local paper produces real journalism (that I have ZERO chance of finding elsewhere, as I live in a small 1 paper community). My local reporters deserve to get paid for their work. I do not want my local paper to go out of business.