Mark Blevis

It’s easy to see that specializing and streamlining is not the beacon of fortunes the media conglomerates have been counting on. Radio and television in particular have been gambling on homogenized content and centralized programming in an attempt to make their content work on the widest scale possible; all of this at the expense of local interests and personalities that regional audiences can relate to.

Media organizations (including the CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster) have invested heavily in celebrity hosts in an attempt to shoehorn their idea of personality into ever shrinking program time slots. To save money, many radio stations have replaced live bodies with Voice Tracking (pre-recorded programming). Media organizations (newspaper, radio and television) have been forced to slash budgets, and with that, headcount. That means fewer people are being asked to do a lot more with a lot less.

I met one sports columnist last spring who explained that, in addition to having to meet and interview people for his column (for which he traditionally takes handwritten notes), he’s expected to shoot some handheld video of his guest to publish on the newspaper’s website as well as write a blog post to supplement, not compete with, his column.

While on a recent evening visit to a local radio broadcast centre from which four separate radio stations transmit, I observed that only one of the four had a live host at that hour and that was only because there was a planned competition between two rock songs for which a live host would be required to take callers’ votes. Two of the four were Voice Tracked following the evening news until the morning show. The remaining station has only one on-air host for the morning show; it’s Voice Tracked for the remaining 20 or so hours of the day.

In talking with a number of Program Directors, Journalists and Producers, I’ve heard a common mantra — the media organizations are competing against portable technology (iPods, etc…) and digital downloads. Then, as if to point out the mistaken approach by the conglomerates that own them and have driven much of the homogenization, they all point out that the key to success in this industry is appealing to local interests.

To keep my posts to a reasonable length, I’m going to spread my thoughts on the mistakes made by the media organizations and some possible solutions over the next few days.