I discovered today that the Newark Star Ledger will cease printing the paper.

This is a newspaper that has been in business continually since 1796.

The Star Ledger joins more than 2,400 other newspapers in the United States that have gone out of business in the last decade.

The legacy media is in trouble. And because the legacy media is in trouble, the nation is in trouble.

The legacy media, The Star Ledger, The New York Times, NBC, CBS, NPR and PBS, amongst others, are rapidly being supplanted by social media. In a recent study by The Pew Charitable Trust, 50% of Americans, and a rather astonishing 83% of people between that ages of 16-25 got their news from social media. This is a problem. It is a problem because social media has no standards for journalism and no standards for truth.

Aeschylus may have said ‘“truth is the first casualty of war,” but in fact, truth is the first casualty of social media.

Mark Zuckerberg has gutted any pretense to fact checking and Elon Musk, when he is not busy gutting any American foreign aid programs, long ago gutted any pretense to truth on X.

On a casual visit to X you can learn that the earth is in fact flat, that no one ever went to the moon, and as of this morning, Musk posted: “”Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19, that killed millions of people?”

This would be the same USAID that in fiscal year 2023, disbursed $72bn of assistance worldwide on everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. It provided 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024.

Musk and Zuckerberg (and others) have no interest in journalism and no interest in taking the time and effort to report the truth. They have no standards.

But if you are going to go to all the effort of actually reporting the truth, what good is it if there is no one watching?

NBC Nightly News, which is the top rated evening news program in the country, has 5 million viewers – out of a nation of 340 million which means that 99.5% of the country is not watching. NBC Nightly News’ average viewer is 68 years old. This is a problem. When Walter Cronkite delivered the news for CBS News in the 1960s, he had 40-60 million viewers in a nation of 180 million.

So how to attract and hold viewers in a very competitive media world?

The answer, ironically, is right in front of us, on our screens.

NBC may only have 5 million viewers, and it’s free, but Netflix has 280 million subscribers and they pay. People also binge watch Netflix, hour after hour.

Why do they do that?

Because Netflix plugs into a very basic human instinct – the love of being told stories. Stories that have a character, a plot and an arc of story. This is a fundamental of human beings, this is what has attracted us since the time of Aeschylus – since before Aeschylus.

Know the story of Exodus in the Bible? It’s a pretty simple story and it’s been good for about 3500 years: Moses, a prince kills someone then goes into the desert in hiding. While there, he is confronted with his fate, and returns to Egypt to take on the evil Pharaoh and brings his people into the Holy Land. Ever see The Godfather 2? Same plot: Michael Corleone, a prince of the Corleone family kills someone and then has to go into hiding in Sicily. There, he is confronted with his fate, returns to Las Vegas where takes on the evil Hyman Roth, defeats him and takes his family into the Holy Land… of Las Vegas. Same plot. Likewise Star Wars, Breaking Bad and a thousand other movies and series you have seen.

Joseph Campbell laid it all out in his seminal book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

The trick then is to marry news and journalism to character-driven storytelling. When you do it, it works.

Here’s a great example – done by journalist Itay Hod with KPIX the CBS affiliate in San Francisco – and all done by Itay alone on an iPhone. This is character-driven storytelling married to journalism. In our experience, these things really work – audience engagement is very high. People watch and they come back for more.

The post How To Save Legacy Media appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

J.D. Miles is an award-winning reporter with KTVT | CBS News Texas. He’s been reporting since 1996 and has worked all over the world. But until last week, he had always worked with a crew. Last week was different.

JD participated in our intensive 5-day video storytelling bootcamp. We’ve been doing these with CBS News and Stations for two years now, and the approach, the product is very different. I think JD came into the bootcamp more than a bit skeptical. I think he left with a very different idea of how TV news stories could be made and what they could look like.

Appended is a story that JD reported, shot, scripted, tracked, edited and produced all on his own, all in one day, and all with nothing but an iPhone. The result, I think you’ll agree, is a pretty powerful personal story – just the kind of thing that viewers really resonate to.

The post A New Approach to TV News – with an iPhone appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

We have been running video storytelling bootcamps for years (40 years actually).

They last for 5 intensive days, and we teach journalists all over the world to tell their own stories using only an iPhone. The above story was reported, shot, tracked, edited and produced by journalist Eva Andersen, CBS News, Philadelphia. All done in one day.

The post This Is What The Future of TV News Looks Like appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

In the 1950s in America, Joseph McCarthy, the Senator from Wisconsin was running riot over the nation.

Searching for a cause to help his career, he hit on the idea of a massive communist conspiracy infecting every branch of both government and society. He had no hesitation about making wild and unfounded claims to a media looking for headlines. It was a toxic combination.

Soon his Red Scare captured the country. The HUAC, the House Un-American Affairs Committee began holding hearing and subpoenaing everyone they could lay their hands on. “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’ They demanded that people ‘name names’. Careers and lives were destroyed. The nation was gripped in a kind of hysteria. No one was safe, and almost no one, not even President Eisenhower, had the courage to take this man on.

Someone who did was my mentor in the television news business, Fred Friendly. Friendly was the producer for Edward R. Murrow, a great journalist, whose massive portrait now graces the entrance to the CBS Broadcast Center in NY.

Together, they followed McCarthy at his innumerable rallies and speeches. They filmed everything he said. Then, they cut it all together. It was called McCarthy in His Own Words. And that was all it was. McCarthy in his own words.

CBS ran it in prime time. It was a courageous act in those days. Anyone taking part was risking their careers. Fred told me that when he the team sat in the editing rooms, screening the material and putting the show together, he told his staff their mission was about combatting fear.

“The fear is palpable,” he told the staff. “The fear is here in this room.” And it was. Standing up to a demagogue took vast courage then. But they did it.

The program aired, much to the credit of CBS and Bill Paley who owned CBS, which also took enormous courage, and it went along way to helping to bring McCarthy down. They attacked him with his own words. They let him simply hang himself in a way. His lies, his prevarications became obvious to anyone who watched the hour. Accusation after accusation, lie after lie.

That was the power of televisions. That was the power of journalism.

Not much later, the live broadcast Army-McCarthy hearings, also on CBS, finished McCarthy off. Famously, Boston attorney Joseph Welch turned to McCarthy on live TV and said, “at long last, sir, have you no decency?’

And that was how it ended. The look on McCarthy’s face, broadcast to the watching nation, finished him off.

There’s a lesson in this story.

Subscribe to Michael’s Newsletter here: Subscribe here

The post How CBS Saved the Nation appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

Posting this on LinkedIn yesterday, I got a response from Ed Hersh who writes “The problem is — much like streaming — that it’s a LOT of work to find what you want. No more opening “the paper” or going to a single site”

I think to understand what is going to happen to journalism now, in a world of TikTok, X, Facebook, and even Substack, we can learn by looking at what happened to the world of ‘journalism’, such as it was, 500 years ago.

Prior to the invention of the printing press, the only books written were the Bible, and the only publishers of the Bible were the Church. Handwriting a book was expensive and difficult. Think of the Church as the NBC of its day.

The advent of the printing press suddenly opened the door to anyone and everyone making books on their own. Think of the printing press as the iPhone. Prior to Gutenberg, the biggest library in Europe was at Cambridge University. It had 40 books. A decade after Gutenberg, there were 15 million books in Europe. In a way, the printing press is like TikTok: It has lots of content.

To a world suddenly flooded with content, how was a reader supposed to know what to read and what not to read? How was a writer going to get paid, if they were no longer a monk in the pay of the Church? A system evolved out of this chaos, and I expect a similar system will evolve out of the chaos of everyone and their brother making content and throwing it online.

Over many many years, two things helped ordinate the messy world of a democratized and open press. First, literary agents and agencies arose who would represent the very best authors. Anyone can write a book (trust me), the hard part is finding an agent. The agents are the first curators of quality. If the book sucks, no agent will touch it.

The second thing that arose were the publishing houses.

Today, if you want go looking for a book, it’s a pretty good bet that something published by Random House or Simon and Schuster is going to worth your time. A self published book on Amazon (I have a few) is probably not going to get your attention.

The same is inevitably going to come along to ordinate the mess with millions of online self-appointed journalists putting their videos or text online. A system of gatekeepers will be appreciated by all.

If you want to get on the cutting edge of the future of journalism, set up an agency to rep the newly evolved independent journalists, both video and print.

And once you have gatekeepers who can sift through the dross to find the gold, you can also be sure that gold will follow. People have always been ready to pay for quality since the days of the Greeks and Romans.

Tech may enhance that, but it is not going to change it.

Subscribe to Michael’s Newsletter here: Subscribe here

The post The Future of Journalism – Part 2 appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

Matthew Yohe at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

For all of the history of journalism (and it isn’t really that long a history), there have been two barriers to entry:

The first was the complexity and cost of producing the product. As AJ Liebling wrote in 1961, “freedom of the press is limited to those who own a press.” And owning a newspaper, or starting one was expensive. So if you wanted to be a print journalist, it meant working for The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post. You got a job, got paid a salary, and were free to report, write, and have your work published, all at no expense to you.

The post The Inevitable Future of Journalism appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

Edward R. Murrow

My mentor in the television business was Fred Friendly.

For those who never heard of him, he pretty much invented TV news. He was Edward R. Murrow’s producer for many years before he became President of CBS News.

For those who never heard of Murrow, you can find him covering the entire right wall when you go into the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street. He was the most powerful and most pre-eminent radio broadcast journalist in the world when radio was the only medium. Today, often without realizing it, TV news reporters and anchors imitate Murrow and the style he developed.

When television news was invented in the 1950’s, both Murrow and Friendly were dragged into the new medium kicking and screaming. Radio was their medium. Television was something new and rather alien. They didn’t really like it.

Coming into TV, Murrow and Friendly also brought their contingent of radio reporters — often referred to as Murrow’s Boys. People like Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, William L. Shirer and Bob Pierpoint. (I was Pierpoint’s producer at CBS News).

They were all great journalists, and they all cut their teeth in the wire services before they moved on to radio, where they made CBS News the gold standard for broadcast journalism. The problem was that when they moved to television, they brought all their radio skills with them.

Since there had been no model for television news before, it was a blank slate and Murrow and Friendly made television news as though it was radio, with the pictures added almost as an afterthought. They had come from a world of written scripts, interviews and sound bites. They never really thought about pictures. To them, pictures were an afterthought.

In those days, (and right to the present), the journalism work was bifurcated. The reporter or correspondent wrote and recorded the soundtrack, just like in radio; the camera person’s job was to provide ‘coverage’; that is, pictures that could be slapped on top of the written script, which drove the story.

And so television news as forever treated as radio with pictures added. the stories were and continue to be driven by the sound bites, the written narration and the interviews. Pictures were an afterthought. Editors would try as best they could to have picture match word — sometimes it worked, often it was just b-roll.

This was a tragedy because television is a visual medium. That’s its real strength and power, but it is a strength that is often relegated a secondary consideration. Don Hewitt, the founder and first Executive Producer of 60 Minutes (and a man who started his career as an assistant to Friendly), called his bio Tell Me a Story. He used to judge pieces for 60 Minutes (he wrote) by putting his head down and just listening to the track. Great for radio — but not really television.

TV news could have taken a different course, driven by the visuals as opposed to the written script. That, after all, is where the real power and potential of the medium lies, and continues to lie, largely untouched. Film director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and even the iconic 1984 Apple commercial) got his start at The BBC, but moved to making commercials for TV — reinvigorating the Chanel brand with TV ads driven almost entirely by stunning visuals, as all his films are.

Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Full Metal Jacket; The Shining — among others), began his career as a staff photographer for Look Magazine. His whole basis of storytelling is visually driven (2001 is almost entirely a visual experience). He also shot and edited all of his films, pretty much on his own, and largely hand held. This is visual storytelling at its best.

It’s not too late for TV news. It too can be driven by visuals first and allow a degree of creativity in design. Do that, and you’ll attract a whole new young generation who are already making all their own videos on their phones. And that’s who you want.

The post TV News’ Original Sin appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

“Dr. Strangelove” Directed by Stanley Kubrick, distributed by Columbia Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Local news is in trouble.

More than 2400 newspapers have closed in the US in the past decade, with more to come.

Local TV news is also in trouble. Viewership is down and the all important younger demographic is not even interested in watching.

Last week, the Poynter Institute produced a study offering solutions to help fix local TV news.

In a nutshell, Mr. Wiser suggests that instead of local TV news as it is currently constructed, it should, instead emulate talk radio. This, to me, is a terrible idea. It takes the medium further from what it should have been all along. Radio is not television. Television is a visual medium.

Wiser’s suggestion, however, is very much the product of TV’s birth, and also of its original sin, because television, particularly the news, was the child of radio, which is the foundation of why TV news doesn’t really work.

When TV was first launched in 1939, David Sarnoff, who had pretty much invented broadcasting and broadcast news unveiled the new technology in Rockefeller Center saying “now we add pictures to the sound.” Sarnoff, and NBC had been all about radio. He saw TV as radio with pictures added. This curse has followed TV news since its inception — pictures added to the sound.

The progenitors of television news all came from radio. Their model was Edward R. Murrow, the great voice of CBS News radio. My mentor in the TV news business was Fred Friendly, Murrow’s longtime producer. When all the great radio journalists moved to TV, they continued to work in the same way they had worked in radio — writing a script, doing interviews, and lacing the sound together. The pictures were added almost as an afterthought. They were driven by the writing and the interviews. That’s how TV news was done in 1950 and it is still how it is pretty much done today. The video is called ‘coverage’, or the video is video images of the reporter either doing a stand up or interviewing someone. This is still radio. Radio with pictures added.

Now we come to Stanley Kubrick.

I am reading the most recent Kubrick biography, Kubrick, an Odyssey by Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams. As I read the book, I have come to understand that it is not radio that should have been the foundation of TV news, but rather pictures and visual storytelling — the foundation of movies. And this is what made Kubrick so powerful a master of what is essentially a visual medium. He was from the beginning driven by the pictures.

Stanley Kubrick was born in the Bronx, but started taking pictures when he was a kid. By the time he was 17, he was working for Look Magazine, the competitor to Life and by the time he was 19, he was one of their best photographers. His orientation was visual — he saw the world in pictures and he created stories in pictures first.

His first major feature in Look, Prizefighter, an 8-page spread on boxer Walter Cartier was pure filmmaking in stills. He followed Cartier from the moment he got up, going to the ring, through the fight and to the conclusion. It was a visual character-driven story. A year later, Kubrick took his first shot at filmmaking, The Day of the Fight, and reproduced his Look Magazine story in film — again following Cartier through his day. Kubrick’s emphasis was always on the visuals, and that would become his trademark through all of this films, from Lolita to Dr. Strangelove to 2001: A Space Odyssey and so on. Kubrick was a visual storyteller.

What also differentiated Kubrick was that he shot all his own stories, and he also edited them. He demanded complete creative control. Even when he directed Sparticus, his first big budget Hollywood film, he grabbed the camera and reduced the cinematographer (with 30 years of experience — Kubrick was 29) to mere observer. Kubrick also insisted on editing his own films.

This is the path that TV news could have taken — driven by the pictures and the events as opposed to the radio script — because television is fundamentally a visual medium.

What made it possible for Kubrick, at the age of 21, to start making his own films, and more importantly to start experimenting with the medium and maturing and evolving as a filmmaker was that he had his own camera.

In the TV news business, until very recently, the cameras was incredibly expensive and complex. Most stations only owned a few. But as we move to iPhones, where everyone has one, we can now allow reporters the freedom to experiment with what TV news could look like. TV news is a medium with vast untapped potential. The idea that a program like 60 Minutes pretty much looks the same as it did in 1968, 56 years ago, simply tells us how terribly calcified the medium is.

With both Spectrum and now CBS, we have trained more than 40 reporters in each station, working with iPhones to shoot, edit and produce their own news stories. 40 cameras in play every day, in the hands of 40 reporters all the time. That opens the door to the potential for a very different kind of TV news — one that is first driven by the visuals and the events, the way Kubrick was driven, but more importantly, a place for creativity and experimentation. When you move from a few camera crews to 40 cameras in play all the time, you allow freedom to fail — to try new things. Sometimes they’ll work, sometimes they won’t. But the medium will expand and mature.

Over the years, Kubrick’s work matured as he tried and learned new techniques of what was essentially visual storytelling. TV news could become the same kind of hothouse for experimentation in what is fundamentally a visual medium, also based on storytelling.

TV news could become one of the most exciting places to work for young storytellers like Kubrick once was. Open the door to them and you’ll find that the whole demographic of your audience will change as well.

The post Stanley Kubrick Showed Us How to Make Local TV News a Success appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that legacy TV news networks are increasingly looking to TikTok to solve their problem.

Their problem is that their viewership is rapidly diminishing, (or rather dying, apparently) with a median age of 69. TikTok, of course, is, rather frighteningly, the number one go-to source for new for 39% of Americans, and with a far younger demographic.

Well, TikTok is certainly entertaining, and it does attract a younger demographic, but then again, Marvel Comics are entertaining and they certainly attract a younger demographic, but I am not sure society is well served by having The New York Times migrate its content to Marvel Comics.

In terms of delivering in-depth reporting that engages an audience, there is already an alternative that, in my opinion, presents a far better model for audience engagement (and a far younger demographic) and that is Netflix.

While NBC Nightly News, the #1 rated TV news program in America gets 5 million viewers a night (and in that 69+ demo), Netflix garners 280 million paid subscribers. And, as anyone who has binge-watched a Netflix series, from Game of Thrones to Stranger Things (with 1.65 million cumulative watched hours), there is something to be said for the format.

And what is the essence of the format? It is all about storytelling — a character that an audience can relate to, an arc of story and a resolution. This is what creates that all important bond between viewer and content. (Admittedly, dance routines are also effective, but you don’t find them on Netflix).

When television news was invented in the 1950’s, God did not descend upon Rockefeller Center and command David Sarnoff to create News with a reporter stand up and lots of b-roll and some man on the street soundbites and an interview. The current news format is not cast in stone. What we can do then is to borrow from Netflix (and Hulu and HBO) and take their excellence in storytelling and marry it to news and journalism.

Character-driven journalism is not new to newspapers, though it once was. It was once called The New Journalism in the 1960s — see Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe. Today it is industry standard. Why not take the Sopranos or Breaking Bad formula and marry it to TV journalism? (How many interviews have you seen in The Sopranos? How many Man on the Street soundbites have you seen in Breaking Bad?)

That is just what we have been doing with Spectrum News 1 and CBS News. Marry great storytelling to great journalism. The results are pretty astonishing. They grab your interest and hold it — while still delivering important journalism.

Want an example?

Here is the same story (more or less) done once on TikTok and again by Spectrum News 1 reporter Taylor Schaub (on an iPhone BTW — and for which he got an Emmy nomination. You tell me which is more compelling television.

The post The Future of News is NOT TikTok, It’s Netflix appeared first on Rosenblum TV.

Below are some great examples of work from the last few months.

One of the fundamentals of our approach is to move from a written script driven ‘package’ to a picture driven ‘film’. As a result, photogs, unbound by any prior constraints prove to be remarkable visual storytellers – and great journalists in their own right.

Take a look at this example, done by Armando Aparicio Garcia, a photog/editor with KCAL News in Los Angeles. Done as his 2nd bootcamp project, all in one day, all on an iPhone and nothing else – and of course, all done entirely by him. This is television that resonates with a viewer. Our goal is always ‘the viewer experience’. That’s what leads to audience engagement, higher ratings and return viewership.

The future of TV news is not TikTok, it is Netflix. Marrying Netflix storytelling and cinematography to journalism and news.

Take a look at this lovely story done by Hannah Kliger, award-winning reporter at WCBS | CBS New York. Done in one day, with nothing by an iPhone, Hannah reported it, shot it, tracked it, edited and produced it on her own. This is television journalism done the way newspaper journalism is done- character-driven stories with heart. Congrats! Waiting to see this over Christmas.

These bootcamps are NOT iPhone training. Frankly, that would take about an hour. Our focus here is taking CBS News journalism and marrying it to Netflix storytelling techniques? Why? Because NBC Nightly News gets 5 million viewers out of a nation of 340 million people. Netflix gets 280 million paying subscribers. They know how to engage an audience with storytelling.

And when it comes to demographics, an astonishing 75% of those aged 18-30 subscribe to Netflix. This tells us something.

So what happens when you marry the high quality journalism of CBS News to the compelling storytelling of Netflix?

Take a look at this story, done last week by Penny Kmitt, a reporter with WBZ | CBS Boston – all done in one day, all done solely by Penny and all done on an iPhone.

In the bootcamps, each participants reports, shoots, tracks, edits and produces their own stories (as opposed to packages), using only an iPhone. Take a look at this story, done by Beth Germano, a long-time and highly accomplished broadcast journalist with WBZ | CBS Boston.

What makes this story particularly interesting is that although Beth has been in the business for years, this was the very first time she actually edited her own work. I think she found the prospect of editing intimidating until she actually did it – and remarkably well.

We are of course, great proponents of the “MMJ” approach (but I think Multi Media is a misnomer – there is only one medium here – produced TV news stories (as opposed to packages)). Our reporters work on their own, just like NY Times (or Boston Globe) journalists work on their own – instead of using a pencil and pad, they use an iPhone.

When you edit your own material you quickly learn to shoot for the cut – that is, to shoot just what you need to tell a story. Our target for our reporters is a 3:1 shooting ratio – 3 minutes of raw for every minute that goes to air. It’s just like newspaper journalists write – 1:1. No reporter for The Globe would write 10,000 words for a 250 word piece, but that’s how TV news generally works now. The waste is astonishing.

So Congrats Beth, for reporting, shooting, scripting, editing and producing a compelling story, and all on an iPhone and all pretty much done in one day,

The post CBS Bootcamps Show What Television News Could and Should Be appeared first on Rosenblum TV.