Former Dateline NBC correspondent John Hockenberry, who also once hosted a prime time show on MSNBC, takes on his former employer. Hockenberry is now at the MIT Media Lab. He is also pegged to co-host a radio show early next year on WNYC. In the January/February issue of MIT’s Technology Review Hockenberry writes:
“The work that I and others at Dateline NBC had done — to explore how the Internet might create new opportunities for storytelling, new audiences, and exciting new mechanisms for the creation of journalism — had come to naught. After years of timid experiments, NBC News tacitly declared that it wasn’t interested. The culmination of Dateline’s Internet journalism strategy was the highly rated pile of programming debris called To Catch a Predator.
Hockenberry, who was let go from NBC in 2005, doesn’t stop there…
• On GE buying NBC: “Perhaps the biggest change to the practice of journalism in the time I was at NBC was the absorption of the news division into the pervasive and all-consuming corporate culture of GE.”
• On then-programming chief Jeff Zucker: “Something about [his] physical presence and bluster made him seem like a toy action figure from The Simpsons or The Sopranos.”
• On the frustrations: “Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns.”