The mediabistro.com homepage has a “So What Do You Do?” Q&A with CBS’ Harry Smith, Co-Anchor of “The Early Show.” It’s a lengthy inside look at Smith’s experiences in broadcasting over his career as well as the direction he believes TV news is going. A snippet:
This citizen journalist [movement] online and the growing concern that content is no longer king — what does that do to the television news business?
My contention is that reporting will always pay. Presence at a story will always pay dividends. I’ve been at two seminars in the last six months with people talking about the future of news: ‘How is the news going to get paid for? Who is going to report the news? Will newspapers exist?’ What’s interesting is the stuff that’s making money on cable right now is opinion. Fox and MSNBC make money. Those guys are making money. I don’t think that [is] the future of news per se. I think, at least for the time being, there’s got to be room for people who report. I don’t know if at some point there’s some sort of consolidation where there’s a consortium of people, say The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and somebody else got together, and say, ‘We’re going to have a Web site and we’re going to have proprietary [content] and if you want it, you’re going to have to pay for it.’ Maybe that’s the way we can still know that we can still have people on the ground in places where they need to be, like Afghanistan.
Read the rest here.