Where's the news coming from?

Knowing you're on the verge of some kind of profound change, but not knowing what that change is going to be or how it will play out can be madenning . . . or at least kind of unsettling.

It’s happening right now with the television news business. I’ve been working in this realm for 20 years. When I started, the wire copy spewed out of clattering mechanical wire machines. They were antiques even then; dot matrix printers were more sophisticated. The copy was fed from wire services — some downtown, some further away — printed one letter at a time on six-ply newsprint with carbon between the layers. A major story was announced when a bulletin moved and bells dinged. There was one computer in the newsroom, used for communicating with the Ottawa bureau.

Twenty years later, there are more computers in the newsrooms, and there is video on demand. But how much longer, realistically, can folks in the news business expect people in the audience to show up at the same time everyday in big enough numbers to constitute an audience that can be sold to an advertiser — or, at least, to a media buyer?

A lot of the stuff I liked about newsrooms when I started working in the business is now widely available: you can get all the wire services on your desktop. You can get the equivalent of the affiliate feeds off any news site. And the very best print outfits are offering other media. Both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have extensive video elements on their sites. Add the existing cable news channels — the same ones that serve as the sources for a lot of the video seen on newscasts — and there seems to be less and less reason for standard-form newscasts to exist.

And yet, CBS is spending God-knows-how-much money to hire Katie Couric (which is particularly funny given the fact that Bob Schieffer is boosting the CBS Evening News into second consistently; maybe the problem isn’t CBS, maybe the problem was Dan Rather as anchor).

It’s a weird time. The future isn’t clear. But the television news business as it’s currently constituted doesn’t look like something that can last. Right now, working in a television newsroom feels kind of like working in a buggy-whip factory in 1900 or so. How much use are even the finest buggy-whips, if those horseless carriages constitute most of the traffic?

The strangest aspect of all this is the increasingly conservative forms that TV news hews to. You might think that if your entire business model and all your approaches are changing and changing the way your porduct is seen whether you like it or not, that maybe you might as well experiement, or find some way to make your product relevant. but that doesn't seem to be happening.

There's the other thing -- compare a current newscast with the Camel News Caravan -- the very first television news program -- and it wouldn't be substantially different. The only attempts to chaneg the form and presentation of television news in its history seem to be NBC News Overnight -- not quite a year-and-a-half. It started July 5, 1982, because that's the night, statistically, when the fewest people are watching television. The only other thing that's come close to NBC News Overnight is ABC's World News Now. Interesting that in both instances, having no money and being viewed as some necessary-but-despised obligatory duty were catalysts for creativity, for making a newscast that informed on more than just the most basic and immediate level, and that treated the audience like sentient adults.

Also, the writing seems to have been a part of the difference. And a lot of writing on television newscasts doesn't achieve that. Either it's the most basic, utilitarian wire-copy fare with its own particular quirks, cliches and bad stylistic tics ("local residents," "robbery gone wrong," "parent's worst nightmare," and, of course, "up in arms") or it's stenorian bloviation -- voice-of-God stuff . . . or at least some sort of mild hectoring from a second-string prophet -- you know the kind of thing).

Linda Ellerbee is doing great work as a documentary-maker for Nickelodeon, but would it be possible to pay her to teach people how to write for TV news? As she said about Overnight, though, she and her confederates wrote what they said. How many TV anchors do you think do that, even a little?