Interview with Hearst-Argyle’s Fred Young

By Cory Bergman 

TVNewsday has a great interview with Hearst-Argyle SVP Fred Young. He talks about anchor salaries (“we won’t be paying outrageous salaries for people to singletask”), the lack of real differentiation between local TV newscasts (“you can be different on Monday and by Friday everybody looks like you”) and, of course, the web (“we’re working on retooling and refining our newsrooms”).

I think Fred gets it, but I can’t help but challenge part of his answer about the relevancy of local TV news to young people compared to the web:

“The Web and mobile don’t have communicators per se. The Web offers you video in snippets and, if that’s the way you want to watch it, so be it. We still believe that the people who present the news, write the news, produce the news and organize it for the viewer are critical to the process of understanding the news.”

Advertisement

I think the implication here is unintended, but news on the web is also presented and produced. Just not with anchors. At msnbc.com, our team takes great pride in producing the site — selecting a good mix of important and interesting stories and presenting them with context in a compelling fashion. This is very similar to TV, but on a non-linear platform.

Advertisement