Can TWIT really become a news channel?

[G+_Vance McAlister]

Can TWIT really become a news channel?

 

I have been listening to Leo Laporte  and Lisa Kentzell  discuss their new direction as a news content generator, hiring reporters to write stories and break news live, etc, not just analysis and broadcasting to the public. I see one fundamental problem with this approach for TWIT: time-shifted listening.  Unlike an internet tech news site, such as the Verge, which writes news on their web site, then later does analysis on podcasts, TWIT has no vehicle for getting the news out to people on a flowing, immediate basis.  There is no website to visit to find this news and people are not (and are not going to be) just watching TWIT live to see what comes in (at least not in significant numbers). TWIT is a series of shows which get time-shifted by the listeners to their convenience, by which time they usually already know the big stories, they just desire some context and analysis.  I am just not seeing how this will work effectively.  What am I missing?

[G+_Tim Box]

My only thought is that Mike is not as quick and fluent a speaker as Tom. Not thought about what you have written.

[G+_John Nichol]

I think they want to grow an audience who tune in live for the news shows, then stick around for the other shows. Whether they're there for Breaking News is incidental.

 

Although I've heard Leo say a few times that he wants twit to be the CNN of tech.

[G+_John Nichol]

I see your point, but then how many people sit with a news channel on all day and only take interest at the Breaking News segments.

 

I live in Scotland. TNT airs live at 6pm, the same time as the BBCs evening news. By then, I've already had 10hrs of 'normal' news so I choose to watch TNT. Of the four or five other twit shows I watch via Roku, it doesn't really matter to me if I catch them live or not. Granted, I'm not your typical audience in that consumption pattern, but I could see me tuning in for 5 mins of tech news to round out my day at 11pm. Like I said, I don't think they're too worried about the breaking news stuff, but they want the news shows to build an audience and become appointment to view.

[G+_Jerry Ham]

As an example, I'd love to be able to watch TNT live. I can only do it about once a week though, as it conflicts with meetings, etc. at work. However, I time shift it to the treadmill at home all the time (via tablet and TWiT Pro) and sometimes to Chromecast (via YouTube). You are right about the web site. The current site it barely adequate to do what they ask it to do today. For news, they will need to do a lot of work on it. It is funny to want to be the CNN of tech. CNN is slowly going out of business as nobody watches them. Hopefully TWiT won't make the same mistakes...

[G+_Rob Hasselbaum]

I've heard Leo say several times on air he wants to move in this direction. What audience are they courting, though? I'm a working professional at a mid-sized company. If I kept a live video stream open to TWiT for multiple hours a day, at best I'd get no work done and at worst I'd get fired once IT saw how much bandwidth I was sucking up. So clearly, I'm not the audience.

[G+_Aldo Merino]

Yeah, I never got it either. I have zero interest in watching live, either. I simply don't have the time or interest to do so; participating in the chat room is hardly a compelling reason to watch live, IMO.

 

Leo and Mike briefly mentioned on the most recent Inside TWIT about a scenario such as the flooding in Thailand impacting hard drive manufacturing (which happened a few years ago) and how, ideally, Mike would actually be in Thailand reporting, but I find the potential value added there being near zero, let alone the feasibility of that ever becoming a reality in terms of manpower and cost. 

 

That said, I'm not going to bother second guessing what they have planned. They'll feel it out and we'll see what happens. I have zero interest in the live coverage shows where they just talk over events as they happen, but some people seem to like them. I'm sure that'll be the case for the forthcoming changes. Different strokes for different folks.

 

And I assume when Leo mentions CNN, he doesn't mean CNN as it is today, but as it once used to be. 

[G+_Dave Trautman]

Long and boring response follows....

 

I haven't seen the video of the discussion mentioned above between Leo Laporte and Lisa Kentzell so I'm just going on what I read on the shared comment.

 

Say we accept the CNN model.  It's a carousel of news desk segments, studio explainer spots, round-table debates, with the occasional interruption for live and breaking stories of a national nature.

 

The round-table and studio explainer segments TWiT already have.  A news desk which rotates into the schedule (say three times a day) to bring people up-to-date on what was announced that day (or the night before) might be something worth thinking about.  It would be like Wolf Blitzer ending and their news summary taking over for a while.

 

It's the 'breaking' stories or the investigative stuff which, for me anyway, seems a little bit of a reach.  I guess it is possible for an audience to form around the idea that whenever there is a tech announcement (or large live event) then TWiT might have something going on LIVE which we could tune in to.  These kinds of announcement events are telegraphed well in advance of them happening and I might choose to put something on a second screen while I was working to keep an eye out for some unexpected development.  Of course the problem is where most of these staged events have nothing surprizing about them and they go on far too long to sustain a 'news' oriented viewer.

 

The idea that TWiT might do "coverage" of something is the only way they could get an audience to check them out regarding specific news events.

 

Say, the upcoming announcement from Microsoft about who their next CEO is going to be becomes the event of the day.  Likely it would happen as a kind of press release on the morning of the event.  TWiT might have someone who could go to a press event (if MS holds it) and report directly to TWiT immediately following the release.  It's similar to reporters waiting for the SCOTUS announcements they know are coming, but have to wait for the papers to be given out.

(just don't do a countdown, please)

 

For large events like CES or NAB or WWDC the TWiT coverage could be periodic and summarized.  They could report LIVE from the floor but be telling us about what might have been revealed/announced in the past three hours instead of trying to keep a parade of tech people at the table while the hours go by.  Periodic reporting would be much cheaper than having a full scale production team on site all day.

 

I cannot imagine the 'news' division breaking in on Windows Weekly to tell us Nokia has just announced a pair of new tablets.  They can wait until the show ends and then step into the stream and give us a review of what was shown.  Then they can tease us to come back in a few hours to see more.

 

The whole thing will take a long time to set up and will require having people strategically located to cover the major stories from the places where they happen.  But the other upside to this is having a 'news' accreditation status which would allow TWiT reporters to be wearing the tags and being in the audience for these kinds of things.  One of the reasons Walt Mossberg was always at these things was because he represented a news organization with considerable clout across the country.  Whatever you might think about Walt, and his opinions on things, you had to realize he had the full force of the WSJ behind him when he made a call or got invited.  I know exactly what that's like.

 

I hope they are smart enough to leverage the Skype™ and video conferencing resources available to all these Tech Companies so they can set up "calls" for comment or statements from the people in PR or even the developers themselves.

 

The advantage text media have over motion picture media is the time domain.  Josh at the Verge can read a release, make a few calls, talk to his own people, check with someone who has the hardware and then sit down to compose a thoughtful piece on the news item.  He has to work fast enough to get it on screen before his rivals, but they all have to pretty much do the same things anyway.  The phone calls to get statements or to confirm facts around a new item are the life-blood of good reporting.

 

If TWiT has operators standing by who can get people to agree to send live video into the studio they could be recording these statements and confirming these facts themselves before the edit suite has finished assembling the stock footage.  Then the clips can be put into the story and run when the next News Break on TWiT happens.  For a viewing audience who are "tuning in live" to one of the scheduled shows they get the benefit of hearing about it within a couple of hours of it happening and being given video of people telling you about it right at the end of a scheduled netcast.  For those in different time zones the clips would be immediately available online and updated as they get massaged by new information.  These clips might also become discussion-starters for some of the pundit shows they do every day.  Instead of just reading the next story for This Week in Google off the computer screen, and showing us web pages of other reporting, they could run a clip and let the roundtable guests go on at length about what it all might mean.  This would mean less rambling and a more structured discussion for many of the shows on TWiT.  The ultimate success of this comes when another tech report quotes TWiT.

 

The news department would – eventually – drive the process across all of TWiT.  All news coming in would be editorially available to any of the other shows, but when it came to deeper analysis or a deeper conversation with the people/principles involved, they would likely agree to be seen on TWiT if they were only asked to address the recent news.  But the Know How... show and the Before You Buy show would get their direction from the news department as they can bring forward some of the background they collected on some new devices or services or technology innovations appearing in the news flow.

 

Right now I don't think a lot of the people who contribute to TWiT are immediately available for comment or are interested in stopping whatever they are doing each day to comment on some security issue or Google innovation, or legal issue.  They would still prefer to operate in a fixed time slot and set up their shows themselves.  But they would have access to a resource which TWiT specifically owns and can use in any way for any shows in their line up.  Less of this getting blocked on YouTube™ for showing other people's stuff.

 

I think the netcast aspect of this will not change.  If people want to get a 15 minute news summary of what happened in the past couple of hours they could click the news stream any time after it got posted.  If it happened in Redmond Washington on a Tuesday morning then people in Sweden might not see it live, but they would have a summary or two to check out when they get up the next day.

 

When you think of the implications this might have for all of us following them on Google+ then perhaps you can see how they could have a "community" with regular items being fed out from the news room which were created by TWiT reporters and editors.

 

CNN (which is where I started this rambling comment) also have a robust online presence.  Right now I can launch my CNN app on my iPad and see both the current items they are focused on as well as a whole slew of video clips from the items they've been 'covering' all day.  I can also watch full episodes of their scheduled programs for a few days after they've aired.

 

TWiT could also have alerts appearing for any of their original news items.  These would be sent out to subscribers on all the various social media outlets with links to either the live feed, the news summary, or the archived clip.

 

I begin to think about the implications as well for the guests they usually have on.  It won't suit for John Dvorak to do his cranky old man routine if the show he's a guest on is dealing with some news TWiT covered directly.  It would also let some others deal only with the story and not have to spend a lot of time explaining what it is they are talking about before we hear their views on it.

 

Perhaps there is also a place for a green screen report like they do on Jon Stewart.

;-)

[G+_Christopher Weeks]

I think TWIT is going through a bit of an identity crisis. They're a post-tech news analyzation company. That's their niche. They're not going to be the breaking news for Samsung, Apple, Google when there are news outlets that is their entire bread and butter. People come to TWIT for analysis on what products to buy or reviews or they feel like they're a part of a niche group that they're invested in and they want to get the most out of it. I.E. Macbreak Weekly, This Week in Google.

[G+_Michael Haider]

Vance McAlister I hate to yell stop to progress, but my gut says this is a huge mistake. I do not want to listen to Elgan wax about wearables. I want the news fuse and concise analysis. I fear the fuse is dead.   

[G+_Daimen Hutchison]

They said on Inside Twit that their breaking news shows have significantly higher ratings compared to their regular shows. I guess they are tying to grow that segment of their network.

[G+_David Celaya]

I believe the answer is money. Sponsors pay more for placement in live content than they do for something thats primarily intended for a recorded podcasts. Anyone know for sure? At least Leo has hinted to that in the past.

[G+_Aldo Merino]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who cringes when Mike perpetually waxes on about wearables;-)

 

I'd say there's a bit of an identity crisis, and I get it. We saw a bit of that with Leo's attempt to kickstart a parallel science based set of programs with Dr. Kiki, which ultimately fell through because the numbers weren't there. Ditto the gaming channel. That's part of the charm, and the pitfalls, of just operating out in the open.

 

I have a feeling the programming show will go the same way, as there are other venues that will likely prove to be better suited and more enduring (MOOCs, Codeacademy, etc) and at greater depths than just the introductory programming flavor of the week.

[G+_George Ramirez]

Depends it worked for the TYT. (The young Turks) I used to tune in live everyday. No so much anymore. They kept moving their times around so i got frustrated and stopped. 

[G+_George Ramirez]

Tom wasn't fired.. Vance McAlister 

[G+_Jordan Shuck]

Vance McAlister I disagree--it sounds as if TWiT/Leo and Tom had a lengthy negotiation during which one party had a set of things it needed and the other party was unwilling or unable to meet those needs.  It's perfectly reasonable for Leo to decide that an in-house presence provides advantages over the skype-only presence that Tom was willing to give.  The two parties couldn't find a way for both of them to be happy, so no deal was possible--I don't think that constitutes a "firing" or "termination" in any way other than the loosest definition of those terms.  

[G+_Michael Haider]

I would love to know what the impasse was. It also sounds like Elgan became available very suddenly.  

[G+_Jordan Shuck]

I suppose we're delving into the realm of the semantic here, but I don't think it's fair to consider this a firing.  Is a baseball player "fired" when their contract isn't renewed because they're not able to come to terms with management?  If so, then I suppose this qualifies, but I wouldn't consider either situation a firing.

[G+_Adam Usher]

Vance McAlister if anybody can do it Leo can

[G+_Christopher Weeks]

Jordan Shuck How important can in the in-studio presence be if Mike during the Inside Twit said he'll only be in studio for six months.

[G+_Adam Usher]

Vance McAlister fired is when they ask you to leave. Tom wasn't asked to leave. His contract wasn't renewed because they need his skill set in the studio for where they are going with TWiT next, and he's in a completely different city. It's not the same.

[G+_George Magdaleno]

Leo mentioned a new website redesign on Windows Weekly. Sadly it will mean some shows will have to go.

[G+_George Ramirez]

For me what sucks is that Tom didn't want to stay on for Frame Rate. Oh well

[G+_Bill Whitman]

How can Leo commit to be a breaking news organization when he can't even get in the Apple events?

[G+_George Ramirez]

Bill Whitman he can't, but his people can. Andy comes to mind