Closing the door…
With a population of more than 8 million people, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the USA
It is also the second wealthiest state in the country, when measured by median income.
Thus it is more than a bit peculiar that New Jersey is the only state in the USA with no televsion news station.
None.
It used to have one, but Governer Chris Christie just closed down New Jersey Network in a cost-saving move.
Jersey has no conventional network or even local TV coverage because if its deadly (from a media perspective) location between NY and Philly. They drain away viewers and advertising dollars.
However, this is a lame exuse for having no coverage at all.
The State Legislature has voted to move the NJN operation to the hands of WNET/13, New York’s public TV station. And WNET has promised to give New Jersey 20 hours a week of coverage – all studio based.
The fault here is not with Chris Christie, but rather with both the management of NJN, and of television stations in general, who would rather go out of business than embrace new technologies and work in new ways.
NJ State Treasurer Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff said the state hopes to save $11 million a year. The state will still have to spend $2 million a year to maintain the broadcast equipment – towers and such.
So the $11 million was for content production.
Well, this is indeed what it costs when you send out reporters and crews and run your news from expensive and expensively staffed studios and buildings.
But video and televison don’t require any of that any longer.
Let us suppose (theoretically) that we hired 50 journalists across the state and paid each of them $100,000 a year (which is a pretty good salary). Instead of coming to some building in Trenton to do their work from 9-5, they worked from home instead – that is, spread out all over the state, living in their patches and reporting from the places they know well. Instead of going with crews they each had a small digital video camera and a laptop with Final Cut Pro.
They reported in the field and cut on the laptops and uploaded their stories daily to a central server. That material was then assembled to create news content for New Jersey, both on TV and online.
The total cost for that kind of operation would be half of what the state is currently spending now on their rather less than stellar nightly TV news show – and would quadruple the number of reporters covering the state – and from a lot more places.
They could have done this.
The technology for it is already here.
They could have done this, but they didn’t.
Instead they chose to shut the entire thing down.
They would rather go out of business and stop providing the people of New Jersey with much needed information about their own state than to change the way they work.
This was a tragedy for the State of New Jersey and its people.
It was a tragedy not of a lack of money, but rather a lack of courage and imagination.
If you would like to see what a sole reporter with a video camera, working on their own can do in New Jersey, to take a look at www.nj.com
This is the website for The Newark Star-Ledger.
A newspaper that has embraced video in a big way.
How big?
In the past few years they have won 7 Emmys (that’s a TV award!) – they’re a newspaper.
7 Emmys for a newspaper!
For shame NJN.
For shame.
