I'm going to drop some video footage here, but I urge you to look at the original posts on Anderson Free Press here and here to see the comments from the local citizens. (Anderson has gained some national attention lately...)

This has been out for a little while now, but I still want to break it up some and give my own opinion. I did something similar last year at J-Log. The intro to this year's edition seems to say, print might not be dying so suddenly, but even more important is that we don't let journalism (the ideals) die. There are fewer people covering news. Not a lot of independents have stepped up to the plate yet, though. (One nugget in the intro is that they found 5% of blog posts to be what journalists would call journalism. I'd like more on that. Let's continue, though.)

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.

Right on schedule, MediaShift, the new PBS blog manned by Mark Glaser, launched today with The Revolution Will Not Be Advertised. Good first post. And, the site allows comments. It's cool to see him get his own platform so to speak. I look forward to a lot of good reading.

Terry Heaton, over at TV News in a Postmodern World, has a great piece (2006: The Unbundled Awakening) on the promise of good things in 2006. Sure, there are dangers ahead and those currently controlling the media are loathe to lose the profit margins, but for the people, for the citizens, 2006 is looking to be a good year.

David Newberger has an interview with Jason DeRusha of WCCO-TV in Minnesota. Most of the questions deal with blogs and/or blogging, but it's interesting to hear answers from an old media journalist. Also interesting to note about this interview is that it's available as an mp3 and was transcribed by CastingWords.com, a company who uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Media Orchard has an interview with Brian Shields, online manager and chief blogger at KRON-TV in San Francisco, regarding some of the company's innovative Media 2.0 initiatives. Says Brian:

"Ask anyone outside our industry and they'll tell you, local television news SUCKS ... I believe that KRON is the most exciting place to be in local television news in the entire country. We are either going to save the industry, or drive the final nail in the coffin. Either way, it's a great place to witness history."

Anne Blythe at News-Observer: Public workers used in promos - Showing that journalism still works when cross ownership is low, Blythe reports on WTVD ABC-11 (Durham, NC) using firemen and fire fighting equipment to film commercials touting their journalistic qualities. Sigh.

The Fire Chief, Bruce T. Pagan, was quoted as saying, "Our personnel were on duty. If we needed them for a call, we could have called them and they would have been out of there fast." The Fire Chief added that it was actually a benefit because of the firemen being promoted on television for free.