“Don’t know” is not an acceptable answer by television news directors when it comes to multi-media platforms. But that became very clear during Bob Papper’s excellent presentation at the RTDNA convention.

It astonishes me that about half of the TV news directors in the survey “didn’t know” what the traffic was on their TV station website. Another 43% “didn’t know” if their TV website was profitable. Those are unacceptable answers if you hope to reach your viewers on multiple platforms – something you MUST do to survive in the future.

How about training your news staff – assuring that they know and understand the rapidly changing online and digital platforms? Well, 5% of the TV news directors said they “didn’t know” if anyone was training their staff. Another 14% in the RTDNA survey said they “hoped the staff was keeping up” with those trends. Hoping? That is not a strategy. TV news needs leaders not managers. If you are not leading the online/digital charge with your staff you are not the news director of the future.

This is especially important due to another finding that Papper explained at the convention. 48% of the TV news directors surveyed admitted they “have a long way to go” when it comes to training, educating and getting their staffs interested in producing news across multiple platforms. On the positive side – another 38% said they were producing news across multiple platforms. But that means almost 60% of you are getting left in the digital dust!

The survey did notice an uptick in the number of stations using Multi-Media Journalists (Papper referred to them as One Man Bands). 32% of the news directors say they are “mostly using” MMJ’s – up 10% over last year. Another third of the stations are using “using some” MMJ’s. But 21% said “not much.” There is one encouraging sign – while 18% say they “do not use” MMJ’s – that number is down from 29% in 2009.

So – where is your news department on these issues? If you have no idea about your web traffic – that should be job one. Do a personal assessment on where you stand on these questions. If you are on the wrong side of the answers – you need to get onboard right now!

Jim

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 9:04 am and is filed under Willi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.