Why TV News Sucks

For the past twenty years, I have spent the majority of my time on an airplane. London, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tel Aviv. Its all in the course of a day’s work.

I live in hotels.

And the first thing I do when I come into a hotel room is turn on the TV set. And the first thing I watch is the local news.

Speak of the Devil

This, from the excellent lostremote.com

For those who think that newspapers are not going to compete with television news in the realm of video. A Washington Post with 50 cameras in DC also makes it potentially the biggest local TV news station in DC.

Behind the scenes of Washington Post’s video efforts

How To Make A Living Online – Lessons From a Swedish Billionaire

In 1990, I was introduced to Jan Stenbeck, the third wealthiest man in Scandinavia. He was a self-made media billionaire, a Swedish Ted Turner – brilliant, mercurial, iconoclastic.

I had spent two years travelling around the world with my small video camera, selling pieces to Nightline or MacNeil/Lehrer. Stenbeck immediately understood the economic implications of the VJ model. He capitalized a company for me, gave me 30% equity and moved me to Stockholm to start building VJ-driven stations. (As you can see from the comment in the article below from Norway, the model works quite well there).

But this is not about VJ… for a change. It’s about how one person leveraged off a technological shift and made (another) billion dollars. Why does it matter? Because, I think, what Stenbeck did with television in Scandinavia in the ’90s, someone will do with video online in the (what do we call them, the ’00s?)