EDITOR’S NOTE: We are aware that this video being set to “auto play” is annoying, see the note at the bottom of this article as to what we are doing about it.
Jerry McKinstry sent out a tweet today suggesting folks watch the segment above on FiOS1 on how the evolving media landscape affects the news in the Hudson Valley.
As someone who has been heavily involved in evolving the media landscape for more than a dozen years — most on the national level but for the last 6 years in the Hudson Valley. I cannot recall this topic ever being discussed in the local media so I was pleasantly surprised to see it come up on WRNN/FioS1 News.
McKinstry, along with Richard Brodsky were the guests of WRNN/FioS1 News news anchor and host Andrew Whitman.
Whitman caught my eye because he recently did me the good turn of alerting me that an update we put out on our Obama reporting — a report from Fox News Channel that Obama was cancelling a number of his Labor Day Weekend events and that this was due to an elevated terror threat — was incorrect (we updated the story and tweeted out a correction).
For those not familiar with the trio, Brodsky is a blogger at Demos.com, McKinstry co-hosts a talk show on a 50-watt community radio station and Whitman is active on Twitter.
I suspect that if Brodsky, McKinstry or Whitman were reading this article they might have paused for a moment to consider that last sentence. I would expect they might describe themselves just a bit differently.
McKinstry might want you to know that he is a “communications and public relations professional with experience as an opinion writer, columnist and political commentator and was a member of the Newsday editorial board that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, at the Journal News for 11 years, an Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Iona College for 10 years and more.
Brodsky might want you to know that he served in the New York State Assembly for over 25 years, has a law degree from Harvard, and sponsored a wide range of legislation in Albany and more.
Andrew Whitman might want you to know that he is an Emmy Award winning broadcast journalist who has covered major stories throughout the United States and currently services as Senior Political Correspondent for RNN’s “Richard French Live” and FiOS1 News.
And, of course, they would be right.
Just because Brodsky publishes his opinions on a blog does not define him as a “blogger” any more than McKinstry would not be defined as a “paperer” because his articles were once published in the Journal News. Yet the two of them are quite keen on defining as “other” those who operate in a journalistic capacity but are not connected to an existing economic entity.
Of course, this opens up a whole McLuhan-esque debate which gets quite complicated (and quite interesting) in an era of ubiquitous mobile devices that can send and receive text, photos and videos of news and information which entirely bypasses traditional media gatekeepers.
The segment is intended to discuss recent changes in the Hudson Valley media landscape, how those changes impact key issues in our region and how changes in that coverage then change how people understand and take action on those issues.
In the end, the segment never lives up to its billing because it almost immediately devolves into two guys in a bar reminiscing about the good old days and how “kids these days just don’t understand”.
I was half-expecting to see Whitman start serving Martinis.
Although Whitman begins the nearly eight minute segment on a hopeful note — that a “shifting media focus” bodes well (probably, he hopes) for coverage of governments and town councils (he specifically mentions blogs) — the segment immediately turns negative with McKinstry bemoaning downsizing, layoffs, and the decline of the local press corps. Where there would formerly be a half-dozen or so reporters covering a meeting or press conference, he notes, there might be none.
Brodsky joins in, lamenting the departure of Greg Clary from the Journal News and the subsequent decline in knowledgeable coverage of the Indian Point Energy Center. Brodsky complains that without Clary the information that comes out about the nuclear power plant comes from those with “axes to grind” while admitting that he (and he lumps in McKinstry) have their own axes to grind. McKinstry left journalism to work at Thomson & Bender, one of Westchester’s biggest public relations firms with close ties to various government officials, agencies and politicians, founded by two Gannett employees. Brodsky has filed lawsuits, issued reports and otherwise fought against Entergy operating the power plant for years.
Brodsky says the problem with blogs and talk radio is that people show up with a point of view so that news comes from a point of view and the news coming from these sources tends to reinforce these views.
Of course, the talk radio format is designed to elicit points of view so nothing new about that but the idea that “blogs” are inherently slanted makes about as much sense as saying that a piece of paper is slanted because it might be used to print an Op-Ed article. It might also be used to write a love note or to print currency or to toss on a returning hero during a ticker-tape parade. A blog is typically defined as a web site that is dynamically updated through entries published in a reverse-chronological order. What those entries say is entirely up to the person writing the words submitted to the software.
McKinstry and Brodsky are using the terms “blog” and “blogger” without even attempting to define what they mean and using the terms as an empty vessel to which they can pour whatever meaning suits them in a given sentence. Mostly, however, it is meant to convey the idea of an accountable, irresponsible peddler of dubious information to a unsuspecting public.
A “blogger” is a person who makes use of blog software to publish to the web — that person can be Charles Manson or Sandra Day O’Connor, Steven Hawking or Roger Clemens, Pope Francis or Lady Gaga. It is the person not the software that counts.
To counter these “bloggers”, Brodsky sees a need for something he calls a “broader news function” and he provides three examples of organizations that can provide that — Gannett, New York Times, FIOS (by which he means WRNN) — which he imagines can restore order to the chaos he perceives.
Is there anyone who questions that the Journal News and New York Times are left-leaning media outlets with their own axes to grind?
I have to admit that I am not terribly familiar with WRNN/Fios1 and the the public face of that station — Richard French — so I did what all good journalists do, I checked Wikipedia.
WRNN-TV is described as an “independent television station operated by RNN serving the New York metropolitan area which is licensed to Kingston, New York, USA. Broadcasting on channel 48, WRNN broadcasts a schedule of mainly infomercials, home-shopping programming, regional and international news programs, some syndicated programming. The station’s studios are located in Rye Brook, New York, and its transmitter is based on Beacon Mountain, near Beacon, New York.”
In 1993, WRNN-TV was acquired by Harrison, NY businessman Richard French Jr. French soon made WTZA into a family-run operation, with his wife and three sons involved in various aspects of the station. His oldest son, Richard French III, was appointed as WTZA’s general manager and would eventually become the face of the station.
In early 1995, most of WTZA’s remaining general entertainment programs were replaced with infomercials. In October 1995, the call letters were changed to WRNN, and the station shifted into a news-heavy operation.
The news product, however, was tilted with a lean towards the French family’s home base of Westchester County, and a philosophical shift to the left. Richard French III, WRNN’s general manager, news director, and host of a nightly call-in talk program, had been active in the New York state Democratic party prior to his father’s purchase of WTZA.
In short, WRNN is a left-leaning media outlet run by a general manager and news director with strong ties to the New York state Democratic party.
So, what Brodsky is addressing is not the emerging media landscape in the Hudson Valley but his view that there is a need to put the genie back in the bottle to combat the “danger” of “small independent outlets” that do not share his progressive political sensibilities and where the media agenda is no longer set exclusively by liberal media outlets like Gannett, New York Times, and WRNN.
In other words, Brodsky fears a world where people think for themselves without liberal media elites to explain the world to them.
McKinstry agrees with Brodsky “whole-heartedly” then builds on the idea of the need for a “broader news function” with an “an independent press corps” that people believe to be objective…
I need to stop and say that I am really having a hard time watching this exchange because it is as if the last decade of participatory journalism (blogs, twitter, etc.) is something being proposed as a new concept to be considered and voted upon (presumably by “our betters”) rather than something that has already happened. OK. Continue.
…McKinstry then posits a breathtaking straw-man argument — that that the alternative to the paternalistic “broader news function” envisioned by McKinstry and Brodsky is a world of unknown nefarious bloggers and anonymous commenters, grinding their axes, lurking in the dark, putting out God-knows-what where “we don’t know who they are”.
Is he talking about Westchester residents who share information on blogs, blog comments or tweets and Facebook posts? Or is he talking about terrorists from Al Qaeda or ISIS? It’s hard to tell the difference.
McKinstry later differentiates between someone who covers an area or subject for 10 years as opposed to someone with a blog for 6 months or a year.
He never does explain why a person who operates a blog for 6 months is not knowledgeable but that someone who works for a newspaper for 10 years is knowledgeable. I would expect that a retired nuclear engineer might do a better job covering Indian Point on a blog than any reporter the Journal News might assign.
McKinstry seems unable to comprehend the idea that people are not so stupid that they will blindly accept whatever anonymous comment they find posted on a web site as fact. The concept of a “trust relationship” with a reader extending beyond a particular economic entity like Gannett or the New York Times is clearly foreign to both McKinstry and Brodsky.
I will say that I have met more than a few Journal News reporters who were assigned to cover New Rochelle but spent very little time in New Rochelle, did not know their way around the City and relied almost exclusively on the local government for information — in other words were basically serving as stenographers for the police department, city manager, mayor, school superintendent and school board president.
Brodsky then asks what McKinstry says is the “million dollar media question”:
Is there a way for communities that are growing like they are in the Hudson Valley to access information that doesn’t come from somebody who’s got a point of view going in?
This is not only not the million dollar question it is not even worth the paper it is not printed on.
The real question is “How can media outlets with a larger media profile and a trusted brand leverage both to curate the tremendous explosion in alternative media sources, self-published media outlets and those tens of thousands of average citizens not operating in a journalistic capacity but rather providing a powerful news gathering function by shooting photos and video on their smartphones?
From this point, the PR guy from Thomson & Bender and the career politician, opine on a media business model that will permit a return to some golden age of media which exists only in their mind.
I can hardly continue — you need to watch the video for yourself — but just know that it ends with Brodsky talking about recently learning to look up movie times on the web and Whitman suggesting the title of the segment should be “Richard Brodsky figures out how to use a computer.” And these are the “experts” given air-time to discuss the new media landscape? Yikes!
Whitman’s Movietime remark might have opened up an interesting discussion on something that is at the core of the “problem” identified by McKinstry and Brodsky — disintermediation and its impact on the business model for newspapers. The moment passed leading me to wonder, how it is possible to discuss the decline of the newspaper business — the actual, unstated topic of the discussion that takes place — while omitting the topic of disintermediation and the impact of online services like Craigslist, Fandango, Cars.com, Amazon, Yelp and more?
A previous segment discussed The changing media landscape in the Hudson Valley. In that segment, Brodsky comes across as a bit more enlightened and realistic. He notes that this is a time of the beginning a replacement of traditional ways of getting media (from New York City media outlets and the Journal news) and that the old ways have lived their time and the market is moving on. That said, he continues to be obsessed by being able to get movie tickets online.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We are well aware that the video above is set to “auto-play” when you load the web page. We went to great lengths to try and disable “auto-play” in the embed code for the video without success and decided to just add the code “as is”. Quite a few readers have complained (and we agree!).
Therefore, we sent a message to Verizon 1 News asking them to fix the issue:
Dear Sir or Madam,
I run a local news website in New Rochelle, NY. As you are now offering more coverage relevant to my readers I am paying more attention to your site and your news coverage so I can link my readers to you.
I wrote this article: http://www.newrochelletalk.com/system/content/how-does-evolving-media-landscape-affect-news-new-role-media-plays-hudson-valley
I then embedded the video.
The embed code does not allow for editing “autoplay=true” to autoplay=false”, instead it is appears to be set on your server and you have it set to “autoplay=true”.
I spent a good deal of time attempting workarounds to no avail.
I am getting complaints, readers are very annoyed that the video begins to play as the page loads on my site.
I would ask two things…
1. If there IS a workaround or a way to disable autoplay for the embed video please tell me.
2. If there is NO workaround, please discontinue the practice of REQUIRING autoplay=true and set it to default as autoplay=false.
I have been doing this sort of stuff for a long-time and setting embed video to auto-play only is akin to pop-up ads and the sort of bad taste usually reserved for porn sites.
Please let me know if there is a workaround or if you have disabled autoplay.
Thanks
Robert Cox
Managing Editor
New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound