Scrolling through the E.W. Scripps Company’s announcement of a round of layoffs that killed jobs for nearly 30 people at Tulsa’s KJRH this week, this description of their new strategy caught my eye:
The company will launch 24/7 local news streams, starting in approximately one dozen smaller markets. This rollout will eventually expand to all local stations.
The new model prioritizes publishing stories as they are ready rather than waiting for specific time slots. This approach puts more reporters in communities to deliver information throughout the day. While linear broadcast schedules will remain for traditional viewers, the company is prioritizing social and streaming platforms where audiences are migrating, the memo said.
Setting aside the horror of the phrase “24/7 local news streams,” I have to ask: Who determines when a story is ready? As local media continues hollowing itself in both print and on TV, its remaining practitioners are looking more and more like the solo creator who makes decisions on the fly, out in the field. In other words, the new product for TV news looks more and more like what my colleague Alicia Chesser observed earlier this spring: the live storm streamer.
This would be beneficial or good or ultimately net out to a societal positive if you accept that more information helps people understand the world around them better. But it does not. In fact giving people more information makes them understand things less.
In the book The Black Swan, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes a 1960s experiment where two focus groups are shown unclear images that are brought into focus at different times: