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Robin Sloan: 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. 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: There's this real rise of these so-called video news releases we're seeing-- 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. 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 is 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, and I've got someone on camera, and I package 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 is isn't, in fact, part of the news center's 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 just got that imperative, in a business that's facing some problems-- with 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, a station has every right to do it, just as it has every right to run commercials, or to run paid programming. But it needs 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.

Shana Daum: 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 newsrooms, 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. So they have to turn to these outside agents with their own agendas, to fill the news half an hour.

Robin Sloan: That's the things I really like about the internet, and actually, about Current TV. You get away from that imperative to just fill the time. 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 be as long, or as short, as it needs to be.

On Current, we try to give stories, you know, three minutes if they deserve it, or 30 minutes if they deserve it. And, sort of, 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.