Friday, December 16, 2005
Gathering news must be easy.
Mickey Kaus says:
The NBC Nightly News netcast (available from this page) is a huge convenience. It's the same show that they broadcast. They better hope this doesn't catch on too rapidly--after all, what if everyone got their news this way? Wouldn't NBC be in trouble? It's not that I wouldn't pay money for their product. But they've been protected by their position as holder of scarce broadcast frequencies. Once the Nightly News is just another Webcast, competition will be fierce--barriers to entry in the Webcasting business, it seems, are close to zero. There will be 50 or 500 competing Webcasts, not two. Advantage: Pajamas! I suppose I'm the last guy to have figured this out.Sure, if you ignore all the costs of, you know, gathering and reporting the news. Surely NBC enjoys a protected position from being able to broadcast, but cable television has been around for quite a while now, and there are only so many CNNs willing to make those investments. This is like saying, if Blogger lets just anyone post on the web, wouldn't Mickey Kaus be in trouble? The thing is, perhaps he brings something to the table before he starts typing.
Comments:
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What's CNN's market share? I think Kaus's point has some merit. Even if you're competing against 100 channels of crap, the crap is a distraction to the extent people scan the options, which I know I do. By analogy to entropy, as the number of alternatives to you go up, you would need to be ever more attractive to keep the same number or proportion of eyes on you.
But that's not the way that competition works in this industry. Are there any cable news channels trying to compete with NBC without investing in reporting? FOX does it by investing in opinionated conservatives. CNN does actual reporting. There's no one doing what Mickey suggests.
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