And then what?

I've been think more and more about the future of TV news, and local TV stations in general, but that thinking has been focused on two arenas: what happens next, and what happens way down the road in the future.

Tonight a different question occurred to me: what happens in the mid-term? SO TV stations continue to lose money for the companies that own them and those companies have few options: change their revenue models, sell the stations, or go bankrupt.

Changing the revenue model is a possibility, but most local TV stations are owned by big companies that don't adapt well to change, and the changes needed for these stations to weather the coming economic storm are going to be too drastic for most consultants to admit and too hard long-time news directors to implement. The existing structure for TV stations, and TV newsrooms in particular is built on a very particular style of news that simply isn't selling anymore. See the post on what TV news and coffee have to do with each other for why this painful collapse was brought about.

So, changing the revenue model is exceeding unlikely, so the next possibility is to try to sell those stations. There are a couple of major problems with that, the foremost being that people don't buy failing businesses with revenue negative business models. Not to mention, the people who have the money required to meet the likely asking price of these businesses would be wiser to sit on that money in the short-term than to risk it in this down economy.

That brings us to the last possibility: bankruptcy. Even if bankruptcy is filed, and the stations land on life-support for a while...eventually they will go dark as new investors fail to materialize.

I wonder, then...what happens after that? Are we going to see local markets where local media is done away with, and the nation becomes a group of consumers of network-only broadcasting? Do the nets simply pipe their signal to the local TV master control rooms, and sell advertising through the New York office? Do local newsgatherers form online collectives, breaking stories online and collecting big payouts only on the rare day they come across a piece that 'blows the lid off' some big local story that pushes traffic to their site?

There's a good reason why "news from where *you* live," and all those other platitudes we've been fed for decades as local news consumers are cliche. There *is* a desire for local product...just not the product being offered, and not sold in the way it's always been sold. Local TV stations have made their money by selling a product you can't hold to produce a result that can't be easily verified based on the premise that they were the only way to reach thousands of potential local consumers. Thanks to technology there are countless ways to reach people in your community, and do so in a more targeted, verifiable, and cost-effective way.

What does all this mean? How do you re-make the model of a business that hasn't had to change for decades? How do you re-tool TV news from a product that appears an exercise in virtual sameness across local stations into something worth watching? How do you uproot the sense of entitlement that was showered on our industry by advertisers from 20 years ago into a hungry, aggressive, adaptable fighter that's willing to scrap for every tiny piece of that increasingly shrinking pie?

There are more questions than answers, as they say, but the days when decisions need to made are increasingly closer at hand. The big newspapers are stopping the presses, newsroom staffs are being told to stay home, and the future looks much worse.

What happens after all the dust settles? As strange as it may sound...I really hope to be on the other side, bacuase that's when the real excitement is going to begin. That's when the kind of people who brought television to the world will get to be part of a new revolution. TV wasn't always a foregone conclusion: it took people with the ability to see the amazing potential that lay waiting at their fingertips to plow through problems as they arose, and find solutions to problems nobody else had ever faced. It's part of why the "originals" at CNN are such a tight group: they got to fight this battle together.

A new battle is coming, and it's not the kind of thing that's palatable to people who have grown comfortable with the certainty of a stable paycheck and a guaranteed bonus. It's the kind of thing that doesn't have a guarantee of any kind on the other side...but it offers a chance to really change things. It's a chance to be a part of the next new saga of TV and TV news.

I don't know how or where I'm going to get to be a part of it...but I know this much: I'll be there. There's too many people in the world disgusted and made cynical by jobs they hate. Working in TV is a job I love...perhaps more than just about anything else in my life, and no matter what it takes I want to be a part of it.

Not despite the fact times are going to be hard...but because of it.