2005 Annual Report - Network TV Newsroom Investment

We had a full discussion of the implications of these cutbacks in last year's report, and we refer anyone who wants to examine this issue in depth to that. In brief, however, some network news professionals we have consulted with argue that counting people does not tell the whole story. The networks in the 1980s, they suggest, were bloated. New technologies have also allowed more productivity. And if one were to compare a network story today to one 20 years ago, the number of elements and video sources that can be assembled into a piece is notably higher today, even with fewer correspondents.

Network veterans who tend to see the cutbacks differently argue that the scale of the cuts exceeds what might be justified by efficiency, that what has been lost is often the institutional memory and skills of veteran correspondents, and that forcing fewer people to do more stories has an unavoidable impact on the time put into stories. It limits the ability to go to where the news is being made and to research, verify, edit and write pieces-in addition to the ability to do enterprise stories off the beaten path, to break news or blaze new trails. On the stump, the networks' political teams used to consist of five or six correspondents; nowadays the number is two or three.

There is merit, we think to both arguments. One can be dazzled by the quality of a nightly newscast on a heavy news day, in particular. It is on the days when the obvious news is not so heavy, and in the ability of the newscasts to sustain coverage over an extended period of time on a major story without fatigue, that network insiders say and our own viewing affirms that the differences become clear.

Andrew Tyndall, a collaborator on this report, says he finds that the cutbacks do not effect the major stories but the middle-tier ones. Iraq and campaign 2004 were both covered as heavily as they would have been 20 years ago. What gets cut is the middle rank story which requires assignment expense to dispatch a correspondent. That is more likely to become a read-only or voiceover video nowadays.