2005: “Flashier, Faster” Formats

“It was a year of goodbyes — some noble, some less so — as journalism’s old guard departed from the spotlight. And it was a year when some of media’s biggest institutions started thinking, in earnest, about reinvention,” the Boston Globe’s Joanna Weiss writes.

“The new guard, on many levels, will look different from the old. Already, TV has moved toward formats that are flashier, faster, more personality-driven. Nightline, once a showcase for Koppel’s incisive interviews, now has a three-person anchor crew, one-third of which is unctuous Michael Jackson documentarian Martin Bashir. ABC World News Tonight replaced Jennings with two anchors, Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff. CNN’s new NewsNight, with Cooper at the helm, is swifter, slicker, and more likely to be anchored from the field. And in The Situation Room, CNN has Wolf Blitzer delivering his newscast before a bank of plasma TVs.”

(I’m pretty sure they’re not plasma…)