Archives

In the 1950s in America, Joseph McCarthy, the Senator from Wisconsin was running riot over the nation. Searching for a cause to help his career, he hit on the idea of a massive communist conspiracy infecting every branch of...

In my newsletter yesterday, I outlined what I see as the inescapable disaggregation of the current architecture of journalism—that is, newspapers, TV networks, and so on. The Internet’s technology, coupled with the power of the iPhone, renders most of...

For all of the history of journalism (and it isn’t really that long a history), there have been two barriers to entry: The first was the complexity and cost of producing the product. As AJ Liebling wrote in 1961,...

My mentor in the television business was Fred Friendly. For those who never heard of him, he pretty much invented TV news. He was Edward R. Murrow’s producer for many years before he became President of CBS News. For...

Local news is in trouble. More than 2400 newspapers have closed in the US in the past decade, with more to come. Local TV news is also in trouble. Viewership is down and the all important younger demographic is...

The Wall Street Journal reports today that legacy TV news networks are increasingly looking to TikTok to solve their problem. Their problem is that their viewership is rapidly diminishing, (or rather dying, apparently) with a median age of 69. TikTok, of...

We have wrapped up a year Video Storytelling Bootcamps with CBS News and Stations with more coming in 2025 Below are some great examples of work from the last few months. One of the fundamentals of our approach is...

For the past 35 years, I have been carrying out a very interesting survey of journalists in the TV news business. For those 35 years, I have been running video storytelling bootcamps, in which I teach reporters to shoot,...

There is a great deal of concern, well placed, that few people under the age of 30 watch TV news. Viewership of TV news in general has fallen, so naturally, TV executives across the board are searching for a...

Did you watch the video above? Did it make you feel good? Did you come away feeling positive about the world? This is also news. News that people enjoy watching. In a recent study the the Reuters Institute at...