originally posted — May 2009

The End Of The Speech

Today's Top Talent React To The Changing Landscape of Cable News.

By Lori Acken

HOW INFO-TAINING!

Asked about the tendency of some programs to confuse celebrity with newsworthiness, and the nigh rock star status of political satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the anchors are circumspect.

"I don't want to be viewed as an entertainer," says King, a former AP Wire writer who proudly uses the front pages of national newspapers as the backdrop for his show. "I want to be viewed as somebody who is a source of information for people, so I am a little bit more of a dinosaur in that I say, 'Why would I do this? What is the news value?'"

"Before we started our show, we were told by a lot of media observers that the news haul for an hourlong show was shrinking more and more," says Scarborough. "So you were getting more stories about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears; now it would be OctoMom. Mika symbolically shredding a 'news' story on Paris Hilton early on really sent a message to the 4 million or so people who saw it on YouTube. And that was that we were going to, in the words of Bill Buckley, 'stand athwart history yelling stop!' It's a radical diversion from the direction we were going not only on cable news, but also on broadcast news."

Still, King believes, the entertainment-based talk and news satire shows have a place in the current events lexicon.

"If there's a kid out there that thinks watching Jon Stewart is watching the news, well that's troubling," he reasons. "But if he says, 'I am going to go on cnn.com once or twice a day and I'm going to watch some CNN programming; maybe I can go somewhere else and watch some news programming. I read a paper, I read a magazine AND I watch Jon Stewart' -- then that's great.

"Life is a mosaic, so why shouldn't news-gathering be a mosaic?"

BIG TWITTER IS WATCHING YOU …

Though the teleprompter is old news, that doesn't mean today's hosts work technology-free. Where autocue monitors once fed them stories and updates, Blackberrys and laptop screens now tackle the job, even in the eye of the camera.

And for Sanchez, it's become his signature.

Like many adults, the baby-boomer dad had dismissed Twitter -- an online utility that allows people to share short bursts of information in real-time -- as a toy for his teenage sons, with little relevance to the mature population, until a conversation with his boss convinced him otherwise. "I got the laptop out and put it on the set where I do the news," marvels Sanchez, "In the middle of the newscast, a viewer got on Twitter and started talking to me. Then I had another 20 and another 20 and before you know it, I had 400 and then 500!"

His ability to trade information with victims of 2008's Hurricane Gustav whose PDAs were their only source of communication sealed Sanchez's reputation as the Twittering News Guy -- and his belief that the Twitter community is not only relevant, but vital.

"Now I go [online] and say, 'Hey! What are you guys talking about?' -- literally participating in their world. And when I say, 'Sorry, guys, I have to go and do my show' they'll go, 'Can we come with?'

"Voilà! Old media meets new media and there's a marriage going on!"

King, however, remains committed to the most immediate form of newsgathering there is: "I travel every week," he says. "It puts me in the face of pain, covering a recession and people losing their jobs and losing their homes and losing their health care, but it informs me so much. And it helps me translate the debates in Washington into the language of the people.

"Maybe it's a little old-fashioned, but you cannot replace eyeball to eyeball. But you can supplement it with e-mail and Twitter, absolutely."

COMING SOON TO … EVERYTHING … NEAR YOU

All agree that the multiplatform model is here to stay, and that budding and veteran journalists alike need to master all tools of their evolving trade.

"There will be no more cookie-cutter anchors who read teleprompters," predicts Brzezinski. "Those will be exposed. Now you will be on the air. And you will be on Twitter. And you will be on a foot camera. And you will be on the Internet. And you will be on all the time because times are tough and they're cutting costs.

"If you don't have something to bring to the table that shows you should be there and you know your material, you won't be there."

Stay tuned.

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