MMMM #17 - So Much News, So Few People

How do truly dumb mistakes make it onto TV News? A few nights ago, a local Alabama station was doing a story about the Space Shuttle being rolled back from the launch site because a planned mission to Hubble had been scrubbed. The video viewers saw as the anchor read the story was of a retired Concorde supersonic jetliner on a barge being transported to The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on the Hudson River. I didn't know diddly about TV News when I started this part of my career fifteen years ago, but now I have the concept pretty well figured out. In order for that totally incorrect video to end up on-air, either a) NOBODY looked at it before it went on air. or b) somebody totally ignorant of the quarter-century long history of the shuttle and the SST looked at the video for a few seconds and decided, sure, that's the shuttle sitting on a barge! I suspect the job of picking the video was handed to an intern, and everyone else was so busy doing their fifth or tenth newscast of the day that nobody else saw the video before air. And the reason that might have happened is the stations have vastly increased the amount of "news" hours they air without adding, and maybe even while cutting, staff. There are tough economic times for everybody, broadcasters included, but the trend of expanding the amount of airtime devoted to "news" while keeping the number of news people the same started long before the Wall Street plunge. [By the way, newspapers are following the same trend. The L.A. Times cut 75 positions today after having shed 250 positions last Summer. And the papers are asking more and more of the remaining news staff...take video, write blogs, do web stories. Read a story in the NY Times today about that trend, including the end of all but one day's print editions of The Christian Science Monitor] [The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature on this blog. As with everything else here, it is strictly my own opinion.]