Sure, we’ve gotten more news choppers and better graphics on weather and politics. There are a few interesting TV news apps. But, for the most part, your local TV news broadcast looks much as it did a decade ago. It’s pretty much locked into its time slot of 5 p.m. or 10 p.m. You sit, you watch. The anchors work their way through weather, traffic, sports and the smattering of local stories brought to you from the roving news truck. If you stick around long enough, maybe there is a great story at minute 22.

But what if you could harness all the emergent technologies to reshape TV news into a brand-new product, one that maximizes audience engagement, personalizes broadcasts to your interests and allows you to dig deep into digitized news archives?

We recently put that question to a group of technology executives and TV news professionals during a day-long workshop at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. The guest list included Cisco, DirecTV and several tech startups, as well as ABC, CBS, Univision, Frontline, the Los Angeles Times and Reuters. The goal was to see if we could come up with ideas for products that would take your TV news to the next level. We did. But first, why hasn’t this happened already?

One of the big problems for TV news, especially local news, is that, well, it still kind of works. Yes, national news broadcasts grab only about half of the 52 million viewers they had at their 1980 peak. But they are still making money by owning a coveted audience of mostly seniors.

Meanwhile, local TV news is, by many measures, thriving. It often accounts for as much as half of a station’s total revenue. Many local TV stations are producing upwards of five hours of live TV news a day. Some are even expanding. Around 74% of Americans either watch or check a local TV news web site at least once a week, more than any other news source. Though news snobs may snicker, Americans also rate local TV news as their most trustworthy source, giving it higher grades than 60 Minutes or NPR.

But success can breed complacency. And in an environment of constant upheaval, there is no clear path toward successful innovation. At the same time, the costs of doing nothing are sky high. Just ask any newspaper executive.

There are a few areas where TV news cleans everyone’s clock. On the local level, it’s weather and traffic. There are plenty of easier and even more accurate ways to get traffic updates, but TV news puts a narrative behind that backup on the freeway (it’s the jackknifed tractor-trailer which slammed into the guardrail) and serves up aerial views of the scene as well.

Also, for a live event, nothing beats TV news. Whether it’s the runaway balloon boy in Colorado (a hoax, it turns out) or coverage of a DC-9 dropping flame retardant on a wildfire in Southern California, TV news produces can’t-look-away coverage.

But it’s also shackled with issues that make it such a poor fit in an access-anywhere, news-on-demand environment. During the eight hours we spent cloistered together in a room, our group of TV news folks and techies pretty much agreed on the shortcomings.

First, there’s a total absence of viewer control when it comes to TV news. They are still producing a one-size-fits-all broadcast, which feels increasingly anachronistic to the viewer.

Also, appointment viewing – with the news stuck in a time slot – clashes with packed schedules and increasing competition for mindshare. I might DVR a sit-com, but news off the DVR gets stale quickly.

The good news is that there are solutions to both of these problems. And solving them might also help TV news crack another problem: how to directly connect with its audience.

One scenario the group came up with is an app that would allow viewers to build their own broadcasts throughout the day. As soon as the sun comes up, the app pushes out a list of five video stories. Viewers can choose which ones to put in their playlist and which ones to discard. As the day moves forward, viewers are given more choices. Some come from pushed breaking news alerts; others come from the viewers’ own social network or favorite topics. The playlist is dynamic.

Whenever the viewer has a free 20 minutes, he or she can watch the tailored broadcast on the device of choice – phone, tablet, computer or regular TV. The stories that play are the latest on a particular topic, so if you selected a story on the debt ceiling in the morning, then you’re greeted with the most up-to-date version when you decide to watch.

The goal is to create a news package that is both customized and curated. Those two characteristics often appear to be at odds with each other. But it was clear from our day-long exercise that customers want both.

Another prototype that came out of the day was a news interface that allows you to pause the broadcast you’re watching in order to go deeper into a particular topic. After watching a two-minute piece on Syria, the viewer can choose to go back in time and learn more about the rebels, the Assad dynasty or other aspects of the story by instantly accessing a broadcaster’s digital archives from a list that pops up on the screen. When the viewer has had his or her fill, it’s back to the regular broadcast.

Other ideas for innovation emerged from the discussion. As usual, the technologists saw a sea of possibility while the news folks saw a wall of obstacles, such as content rights and a newsroom culture resistant to change. But the takeaway from the day was that TV news, if it chooses, has the potential to radically enrich the way it engages with its audience. Let’s hope they seize the opportunity. So stay tuned.

“Report what you do best, and link to the rest.”

I’ve found some insightful, thoughtful coverage of the disasters online, from stunning photo graphics to an engaging first-person account of trying to land a plane immediately after the quake.

Unfortunately, on TV, I’ve watched a lot of garbage, too.

Tim Goodman last week, in that previous link, tore apart the U.S. cable channels for their simplistic questioning and sensationalistic reporting in covering the Japan disasters, noting that they’ve fallen short of their international competition:

“Covering this trilogy of terror in Japan really underscores how much better prepared reporters and anchors need to be. The incessantly simplistic and embarrassing questions need to stop. Someone needs to tamp down runaway speculation. Also, the attention on the Middle East in past years has dulled producers’ sense of keeping experts from Asia on the source list.

“It’s a shame that going online to watch videos from NHK, BBC and Al Jazeera English was far and away the best option for Americans.”

While I agree with Goodman’s harsh assessment of the U.S. cable channels, I disagree that “it’s a shame” that Americans have to turn to other nations’ reporters for better international coverage.

I’m just glad that those options are out there, and thanks to the Internet, American audiences now can access them. If there’s a shame here, it’s that we have to go online to find this coverage, and that our cable channels are not bringing it to us, instead. I wish that American journalists, facing limitations in logistics, training and background, would recognize that other reporters on the scene are doing a better job and instead refer us to their work, rather than wasting scarce newsroom resources trying to duplicate something that they cannot.

This isn’t to say that U.S. news organizations can’t cover foreign news. As Goodman even pointed out, CNN’s Tokyo reporter, Kyung Lah, has done an admirable job bringing perspective to her network’s coverage. But that’s because she’s based in Japan, knows the culture, understands the ongoing narratives and has sources in the region.

If U.S. news organizations are willing to make those commitments by maintaining well-staffed foreign bureaus, then they should expect to meet or exceed coverage from others. I’d love to see the U.S.-based cable and broadcast news channels staffing more bureaus around the world. But I’m not so naive as to believe that CNN, MSNBC and especially Fox are about to drop more money on international coverage, unless it involves temporary spending to cover a fresh new war. And the days are over when news organizations could expect to parachute reporters into a situation and have them deliver better coverage than their readers can find elsewhere.

It’s past time for broadcast journalists to end the days to of parachute journalism and instead learn a lesson from online news: Report what you do best and start linking more to the rest.

Of course, a hyperlink – in the literal sense – as of this point is not yet possible on traditional cable and broadcast television. But as video on demand becomes more popular, I anticipate the rise of video hyperlinking. All one would need would be a network address upon which a particular piece of video resides, and to employ existing technology for on-screen linking.

Perhaps this will happen first on a service such as Netflix’s. Imagine watching an old TV sitcom, then clicking or tapping an onscreen prompt to jump to the movie that sitcom was parodying. Video hyperlinking might make it possible for future generations to understand why we thought ‘The Simpsons’ was funny.

And it could allow TV journalists the power of sourcing and referencing documentation and additional reporting that their online colleagues now enjoy.

But what about lost traffic? What about advertising eyeballs? I can hear the complaints now. But we heard these same complaints from print journalists transitioning to online a decade ago, and they learned the value of becoming a curator as well as a reporter of the news. There’s money in being the initial source to which people turn in a crisis. Broadcast journalists, given time and technology, will learn those lessons, too.

Until that technology arrives, broadcast journalists would better serve their viewers by choosing not to deploy their own reporters to every far-flung story, but instead to identify and run on their channels superior coverage from local sources, whether they be from native news organizations or other organizations’ local bureaus. This already happens in the initial moments of breaking news stories; I’m suggesting that the relationship should continue for the story’s duration.

To keep down the costs of acquiring this additional video, news networks should more fully develop video-sharing alliances with other national and global news broadcasters. Such alliances might also create a need for some of our domestic broadcast newsrooms to raise their game, to begin providing coverage of domestic news that meets the standard of international journalists, so that they will agree to video swaps in the future. (Don’t forget the first half of the advice: “Report what you do best.”)

Ultimately, as with many lessons about journalism in the Internet era, it all comes down to building community. By building a stronger global community of broadcast journalists, we can bring the best possible coverage to the individual communities that each network serves.

One-man band

The increasingly popular one-man news bureau – a solo journalist who gathers news using multimedia tools – should leverage each medium to further engage the reader, said Sites.

In September 2005, Sites became Yahoo News’s first original content correspondent, pioneering the “one-man band.” Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone showcased an ambitious undertaking: a one-year trip to all the major conflicts zones around the world reported by Sites, with video, text, and still photography.

Carrying over 60 pounds of equipment, Sites leveraged each medium’s unique strengths to tell his stories. Video was for the “inherent drama,” the “motion” of the world – capturing verbs like dancing, singing, talking, exploding. Text was for “nuance,” the “details that bring a story to life.” Still photography was reserved for portraits to create a powerful “connection to someone’s face,” explained Sites.

Reporting simultaneously in three dimensions is “not a replacement for mainstream media… but an amplification of it,” said Sites. By putting a human face on the global conflicts and “stringing those stories together so that when you see them online, perhaps collectively, cumulatively, they provide a greater idea of what’s happening in that conflict zone.”

Sites views news in new media as not the “last word… but the first word” to pull the reader into the story. “The computer that delivers news is also a tool for you to respond to the information.” Under the intimate portraits and videos of ordinary people caught in war, Sites provided links to the chronology of the conflict (BBC country profiles) and to possible solutions (NGOs and political organizations).

The site drew two million viewers a week. Sites’ workload was heavy: Spending about ten days in each war zone, he transmitted a 600-1,200-word story, five to 15 photographs, and two to three videos every day.

“In some ways I felt that doing this project was a bit of penitence for my journalistic sins of past,” said Sites.

He was referring to November 2004. While covering the battle of Falluja as a pool correspondent, Sites shot a highly controversial video of a U.S. Marine shooting and killing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi insurgent stretched out on the ground of a mosque. Most international networks ran the full tape. All the American networks blacked out the shooting.

“It was absolutely the wrong decision,” recounted Sites, who supported censoring at the time. He explained, “That videotape to me had the potential of creating more bloodshed,” and that conflicted with the journalistic ethic of minimizing harm.

“We failed the public,” Sites admitted. “It wasn’t the government. It wasn’t the military… We censored ourselves.” Subsequently, Sites wrote a 2,500-word open letter to the Marines involved in the shooting on his blog, retelling the story of the shooting and putting it in context. That piece was picked up by newspapers and TV stations around the world.

“What that demonstrated to me was the power of online media in telling a more complete – and sometimes more accurate story than traditional media,” said Sites.

Focus on characters

After Sites’ return from the Hot Zone (and a year off scuba diving to decompress), he and Yahoo continued their foray into original reporting in May 2007, albeit with a dramatic change of subject. “People of the Web” is a series of articles and four to four-and-a-half-minute videos featuring people who use the Internet to “bypass the traditional world.”

He profiles people who circumvent traditional approaches to acting (lonelygirl15), music (bands on MySpace), and art (Phil Hansen).

“What I wanted to do was reach into the computer, and pull out that human being,” said Sites. He looks for stories that contain a strong Web component, a colorful central character, a compelling visual, and an element of social relevance.

For example, Hansen, an X-ray-technician-cum-artist became famous not through galleries, but by broadcasting his art-making process via YouTube. His art is interactive. One particularly impressive project – on a ten-foot, circular canvas-wheel canvas – was created with the words of his viewers. Hansen asked people to write him a moment that changed their lives. Each letter appears as a tiny dot on the canvas, but the blended result was that of a picture of the artist’s own face, cradled by four hands.

Sites said that he’s beaten the mainstream media on most of these stories. Fox News, for example, reported on an online dating service for farmers after Sites covered it.

Reporting in color

The media of video, print and photography contain finer shades that journalists could explore, Sites said.

Within solo journalist broadcast reporting, for example, are at least four techniques that “don’t compete with each other,” demonstrated Sites. Each technique offers a subtly varied angle ranging from micro-view to macro-view.

First, in a traditional first person stand up, the reporter holds the camera at arm’s length and films himself speaking over events in the background. A variation of this technique is one in which the reporter does not himself appear on camera. In both cases, the solo journalist can pan the scene using himself as the center, turning in place, and drawing a circle with his arm and camera.

A third technique uses POV plus nat sound. Sites showed an example of a video of a Sudanese woman singing a rebel fight song to lull her malaria-stricken baby to sleep.

Using a fourth technique that Sites calls “post-impressionistic narration,” the reporter provides a sort of director’s-cut commentary. He watches a video with the viewer, talking over the footage. The time lapse and informal narration offers a macro-view of the events on screen.

“Everyone talks about the Internet as the death knell for newspapers,” Sites said, “No, it’s TV that’s really bad online.” Whereas newspaper websites have become great sources of info, Sites said – they just need to learn how to monetize the Web – Sites criticized local TV websites for simply parking their aired stories on the Internet.

When asked if offering so many retellings of the same event would over-saturate the viewer, Sites replied, “It’s a matter of palette… It makes the journalist work harder.” And in the end, it benefits the viewers and the sources.

“The mediums are not displacing but enhancing each other, playing off each other in ways that are relevant,” Sites said. “TV didn’t kill radio. It transformed it.”

“I am a big believer in television journalism–its power for telling stories and raising issues that should engage younger audiences who are my peers,” he said recently. “But I just didn’t see younger people tuning into network television news.”

He did see that generation flocking to online news and shifted to the Web with them. Since October 2006, he has been a senior producer at ABC News Digital where he says he has an opportunity to test how the power of television can translate onto the Web. Samuels spoke to OJR recently about sending out stringers with DV cameras to cover world news and how the webcast might be a precursor to the television newscast of the future.

OJR: Tell me about the webcast you produce for ABCNews.com? How different is it from the evening newscast?

Samuels: It started before I came here but they basically wanted a way to have some news before 6 o’clock available to those who were online. So correspondents who were working for the 6:30 broadcast would file pieces for the webcast at 3 o’clock so that people could click on them and watch them during the day from their office or before they left to go home.

But over time it’s evolved to where it has a distinct attitude, and it’s not shy about targeting a different group of viewers who may not be watching the network news. There is a different focus, a different DNA to the show. We kind of loosen the tie a little bit, if you will.

We do stories that may be appeal more to Generation X and Generation Y than stories that are directly trying to appeal to Baby Boomers and [their] parents. As a person in charge of it, it’s my job to kind of select stories that I think appeal to a younger generation.

We really have no rules to the show. We can try things that are very different. The mandate is to try to be different and try and engage the viewers who are not right now watching the evening news broadcast.

People believe that younger audiences get their news from the Daily Show. It’s a very smart show, but it’s produced by people who work for Comedy Central–not by traditional journalists. We have tried to create a webcast with content that appeals to people who are looking for news but are not really that engaged with what the traditional shows are offering.

OJR: Could you give me one example where the storytelling underscores how different it is from the 6:30 broadcast?

Samuels: Sure, I’ll first go over just the nuts and bolts. It’s essentially a 15-minute, commercial-free show every day that we tape live with Charles Gibson as the anchor. The first two and half minutes are the meat-and-potato headlines–the traditional network news fare. The rest of the show has pieces that can be on the news of the day but they can also be like features.

As an example, though, correspondents usually go out to cover stories; they write a script, edit it and put it together for the broadcast. But I tell them to just shoot a video blog. So in today’s show, Miguel Marquez in Los Angeles was assigned to do a story for the broadcast about the new line of Bible-themed action figures that are going to be sold in Wal-Mart. So when you watch the broadcast tonight it’s going to be a traditional, well-crafted 1:30 to 2-minute piece. What we asked him to do is that when you are at Wal-Mart and you are reporting your piece for the broadcast, just stand there, hold up these action figures and just tell us about them. Don’t script anything perfectly just give us your own impression and your sense of what is the story. Miguel filed a video blog piece that is about a minute long for our webcast. It’s a little less formal, it’s a little more raw and I would argue in some ways it is a little more real.

It is less polished but I think younger people are willing to accept that and almost prefer that instead of showing what’s packaged so perfectly.

Now if there is a piece for the broadcast that we are interested in, we will put that on our webcast as well. For example there is a piece for broadcast tonight about a woman who has homeless kids taking photos of what they wish to aspire to. And it’s a wonderful piece that should be interesting no matter how old you are. We’ve put that into our webcast.

Another example. We did an interview for the webcast exclusively with Christopher Hitchens, on his book, “God is Not Great.” We sat him down in front of a camera and we had him basically talk about the themes in his books and we edited that down into an essay. That would never go on the evening news shows but for us it worked. It’s provocative and it’s different.

OJR: You’re also lucky that you can use any portion of the massive amounts of content produced for ABC News on your webcasts. How much of what is produced specifically for the webcast is constrained by budget issues?

Samuels: Sure, a bit of being different is also for budget reasons. We don’t have the broadcast news staff; we don’t have the broadcast news budget. So we have to do things a little bit differently but I think effectively as well.

OJR: How are you as a broadcast-based news organization using interactivity on the Web?

Samuels: Now if you go to our website ABCNews.com, you can comment in real-time on the broadcast.

I’ve only been here for four months but I am trying to slowly bring more interactivity into the fold. One thing we would like to do is have people watch the show, react to the show, and then the next day feature their reactions. This would mean that viewers could literally sit in front of their webcams, tell us what they thought and we will put it on our webcasts.

The Christopher Hitchens’ piece is a perfect example. We asked our viewers to send reactions and comments in video about his provocative essay. Going forward, I want to do more of that.

I am also trying to develop a way for people to send us their story ideas for the webcast. If you think there is a story in your town or city that you think should be on the webcast, send us info and we will try to assign someone to do the story.

Those are two ways that I hope would make us more interactive soon.

OJR: News organizations have always controlled distribution of their content. The Web is changing that with RSS feeds, Google News and other ways of news personalization. What is ABCNews.com doing in that direction to share its content more broadly?

Samuels: The webcast is available on iTunes. When it’s posted on iTunes, I believe we are one of the few video broadcasts that have chapters. So when you are watching the webcast on iTunes, you can fast forward through the segment if you are not interested.

In June, we had over 5 million people download the webcast from iTunes and ABCNews.com.

I should mention is obviously every segment that we do for the webcast lives as an individual piece, if you will, on ABCNews.com. So the webcast exists as a show but it also exists as a way to manufacture very interesting short news segments for ABCNews.com.

OJR: Disney’s ABC and Apple’s iTunes have obvious connection through Steve Jobs and Pixar. But there is also this realization that you need to be on as many platforms as possible. Are your shows available on places like YouTube as well?

Samuels: This is a little bit beyond my pay grade but I think that ABC News is not letting people post our content everywhere else, including YouTube. Their philosophy is we want to drive people to our websites and we want the clicks on our websites. That’s an internal discussion that’s going on and I think a lot of media companies are trying to figure out how much do you let float out there and how much do you keep behind your walls.

OJR: How do the reporters and producers react to all of a sudden having more work to cut an earlier segment with the pressure of meeting the 6:30 deadline?

Samuels: I think that initially they probably thought it was pain in the neck but I think that they understand that this is the future.

The downloads of our show is increasing. Whereas if you look at other forms of news content–whether it’s newspapers, or evening newscasts, or news magazines, or nightly news shows–they are decreasing. With that in mind, I think they realize this is something they have to do.

We also try to have them do something a little different. They don’t have to give us the same thing that they doing for the broadcast. We want a video blog with a behind the scenes look at something.

Also, I am already using stringers around the world for content. Before the advent of small DV cameras and laptop editing, these stringers were only used when there was a huge catastrophe. Today I can call the stringers who have DV cameras and laptops for editing, can they can do a story about anything and send it to me over FTP and we can put it on the webcast.

For example, the recent stand off in Islamabad, in Pakistan, an ABC News person in Islamabad that filed for the web cast virtually everyday. He would shoot it and send it to us with his own DV camera and it was wonderful stuff. As we go forward, my plan is to have people all over the world filing for us–stuff that would never get on the evening broadcasts because they have a more serious structure to them. But we can post video blogs from people in Cuba, in China, in Islamabad, in Africa, in Australia, in France… everywhere. Because the technology allows that and I don’t need the polished or experienced correspondent. These are usually younger people. I love to have that kind of energy and that raw look at the news from around the world. Technology makes it possible.

I can’t predict the future but I know that ABC News is making a commitment and an investment to position young people with DV cameras around the world in Africa, in India, in places where they ordinarily would not be able to afford to put a crew and a cameraman and a producer. Now you can put a 20-year-old graduate student with a DV camera and a laptop in far away places and they can send you things through the Internet and you can put them on the air. I plan to have my show take full advantage of that in New York.

OJR: How do you respond to critics who say this is nothing but an attempt to cut expenses by using inexperienced and therefore cheaper labor because the technology allows it?

Samuels: I absolutely understand that argument. If I am an editor who has worked 30 years in my craft and some young kid out of graduate school and edits these pieces, what does that say for the value of my skills? I would say there is room for both, but I think if you are an editor or a cameraman that’s been in network news for a long time, you might have to adapt instead of shooting with your beta camera take a DV camera out and shoot with it. If you are an editor that’s used to working with a big beta system, use your skills to edit on a laptop. I don’t think the skills are no longer needed I just think that the tools are changing.

At the same time, what we do everyday with a smaller staff as we do is pretty remarkable. So I think there is something to the notion of less people doing more.

There are also more outlets for work in terms of work that’s different and that’s exciting.

OJR: As the generation that’s used to the structured evening news format gets older and older and continues to shrink, are we going to start seeing some of these webcast techniques making their way into the evening news?

Samuels: I think it will over time. When you have a 20-year-old stringer in Islamabad doing your report it’s not going to look like Brian Williams. I am of the mind that younger people are more able to appreciate a raw unpolished news pieces. They are used to homemade videos on YouTube. YouTube is big because it’s not the polished sitcom stuff that’s on the network. It’s raw, it’s shaky video, it’s … its real, it’s gritty and I think that appeals to younger viewers.

When I took the job, I asked myself whether the anchor, Charlie Gibson, was the right man for the job for the younger audience? I have been so pleased with how he embraces the show. He values the show and he gets what we are trying to do. We don’t have him be anything other than what he is which is a very intelligent, passionate. He is not trying to pretend like he is young and hip. But the content of the show is different and he embraces that.

There are plenty of days where he will see something on the webcast and he will put it on the newscast. That has happened more than once.

I think in many ways we are almost a breeding ground, an experiment, if you will, to see what might work going forward for the news division.