5 Years Later: “Why have computers matured so much over the past 62 years while TV news has remained pretty much unchanged?” – Michael Rosenblum
Posted December 20, 2016
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Why have computers matured so much over the past 62 years while TV news has remained pretty much unchanged?
Michael’s answer to his question, “Fear”.
He should know. Michael Rosenblum has been around national TV newsrooms for decades. After a successful stint as a producer at CBS News, he left the network and established himself as a trailblazer in incorporating video via his digital videojournalist, or VJ, educational programs. His VJ training company has trained journalists here and abroad to shoot their own video. Rosenblum managed the conversion of The Voice of America, the United States Government’s broadcasting agency (and the largest broadcaster in the world), from short wave radio to television broadcasting. And, in his spare time, he conceived and founded Current TV and New York’s local NY1
So, Rosenblum speaks with some authority when he cites Dreadmonger’s favorite motivator, “Fear“, as the chief architect of the network nightly newscast that he knows so well.
Writing in his blog today, Rosenblum TV:
“It is an industry driven not by risk, but rather by fear. When I was at CBS News we used to call the place Cubicles of Fear. The reason was that the risks for any innovation were so high (if you tried something and it failed, they fired you), and the rewards so scanty. Unlike online start-ups, no one at CBS News got equity in CBS, so what was the reward for big growth? Nothing.”
“In the real world there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Scott Pelley, Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams or Walter Cronkite. Snore. Is it any wonder that viewership is dropping like a stone?”
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