The Future of 24-Hour News
New Directions, New Challenges
Edited By Stephen Cushion and Richard Sambrook
Chapter 2: The View from the United States: Three Forces Shaping the Future of Video News
Extract
← 26 | 27 →CHAPTER TWO
The View from the United States: Three Forces Shaping the Future of Video News
DAVID L. WESTIN, BLOOMBERG NEWS AND FORMER PRESIDENT, ABC NEWS
Questions about the future of television news in the United States are easily answered: there is none. The days when we got most of our news on television are either gone or rapidly going. Today, we routinely watch video news reports throughout the day and night on all sorts of devices, only some of which can be called “television sets.” Increasingly even our TV sets are fully connected to the internet, so at any given time, we’re not even using them to watch what we’ve traditionally considered “television news.” Those producing video news reports aren’t necessarily named “ABC” or “CNN,” but often now are companies like Yahoo!, BuzzFeed, Vice, and the New York Times.
What’s more, consumers don’t much care. We want our news accessible, compelling, and convenient—convenient to us, not necessarily convenient to those producing it. If that means watching it on television, fine, but convenience now means watching it also on a smartphone or a tablet or some new device soon to come on the scene. Televisions may not disappear altogether, but television news will no longer be a genre onto itself.
Questions about the future of video news in the United States, on the other hand, are more difficult to answer and much more interesting. To...
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