Filling the News Hole: Video News Releases

Robin Sloan - Vice President of Strategy, Current TV

One of the real challenges facing a lot of traditional sort of journalistic products, thinking of newspapers and especially of broadcast TV, the nightly news, is that they've got a half-hour to fill every night and really in some ways, their main goal is just to fill that half hour and they'll do it however they can, however they have to.

Jonathan Adelstein - FCC Commissioner

There's this real rise of these so-called "video news releases" we're seeing it on epidemic levels really where news stations' budgets have been cut back so far that they don't have enough funds to really do the journalism and to fill the so-called "news hole" that they need to fill to put the news on the air. So PR agents are happy to fill the void by putting together their own video news releases that will maybe shill for a drug or for some product they're trying to put on the air. They package it as if it's a news story.

Robin Sloan

This idea that not only will I give you a lead on a story, I'll give you "the" story. And it's well produced, I've got someone on camera, and I've packaged it together and here, it's easy. Just put it on TV.

Jonathan Adelstein

And the problem is that the public isn't always properly told that this isn't in fact part of the news centers' own material. It is provided by somebody else.

Robin Sloan

Most journalists, most editors, most producers know there's something pretty fishy about that. But on the other hand, when you've just got that imperative in a business that's facing some problems, fewer resources than you had before, fewer people, suddenly that's really appealing to just take this thing and plop it on air.

Jonathan Adelstein

And the idea is that the station has every right to do it. Just as it has every right to run commercials, or to run paid programming. But it needs to let the audience know what the source of the funding is so that the audience can make up their own mind about the issues that are being presented based on full knowledge of who is funding it. We find that often the news outlets are embarrassed that they're putting this on the air. There's no other explanation for why they don't want to disclose it.

Shauna Daum - Director of Public Affairs and Community Relations, San Francisco Giants
Journalists want to do an interview, a live interview, with you. They don't want to take the video news release. They don't want to use the press release. They want to use it as background information, but unfortunately with budget cuts these days, and shrinking news rooms and shrinking staffs, they're relying on that information more and more.

Jonathan Adelstein

The real embarrassment is that their news staff has been shredded to the point where they don't have the resources any longer to do their own news gathering. And so they have to turn to these outside agents with their own agendas to fill the news half an hour.

Robin Sloan

That's one of the things I really like about the Internet, and actually about Current TV, you get away from that imperative to just fill the time. Like when we talk about journalism and democracy and media that's actually helpful we're not really talking about filling an hour of TV or filling a half-hour of TV. We're talking about telling a story. And when you're talking about the Internet, something can be as long or short as it needs to be. And on Current, we try to give stories three minutes if they deserve it, or thirty minutes if they deserve it, answer anywhere in between. So the degree we can get more flexible like that, the degree we can not feel like we just have to fill the time, fill the space on TV or on the printed page, I think we actually avoid some of these problems with content from sort of suspicious origins.