Ted Koppel at The NY Times: And Now, a Word for Our Demographic - Very good piece. Koppel talks about his views on the future of television news. (Thanks to Media Orchard for the refer.)

Koppel wrote:

Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers’ unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.

What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.

Then you have things like the clip of Jon Stewart appearing on Crossfire shortly befire its untimely demise. How many millions of viewers did it have online? I think Koppel might not realize how much the net is going to change 'television' (or video) news.

I like the point about broccoli, though. It's something I think our own SoonerBoomer talks about all the time - what does the audience really want?

It's an important question.

Scott Baradell wrote at Media Orchard:

Ted is basically saying that the TV news business is attempting to sell ice to Eskimos -- oh, we mean Inuits.

Which means that crushing the ice, or shaving the ice, or flavoring the ice, or otherwise screwing around with the ice will not necessarily make the ice something that Inuits want to buy.

Exactly.

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