Convergence is Bliss?

On the TV Guide Network there is a reality series entitled "Making News Savannah Style". The show is an interesting mix of news and reality that follows the daily trials and tribulations of WJCL, the lowest rated news broadcast in Savannah, Georgia. Apparently this show has been running since the beginning of the summer, but I just caught an episode of this show last Thursday and recognized immediately that there are a number of similiarities between television broadcasts and multimedia news reporting. Truly, it seems, that the newspaper is going away to stay instead of converging with new media and news reporting on the web is converging with television news reports. Could it be that eventually television news will go the way of newspapers?

On the hour-long episode I watched, a news director, producer and reporter were working with limited resources that included: a huge story--a fatal explosion at a Savannah sugar refinery, an understaffed newsroom, an inexperienced reporting staff, and shoddy equipment. Viewers learn that WJCL is a low-market news In one segment of the show, the reporter was on the scene at the sugar factory but, he had only one camera man, the station's newstruck had a dead battery and generator was unable to transmit a feed to the station. To make matter worse, the reporter was surrounded by competing news channels that had adequate staff, camera men, working news trucks, and experienced journalists. My, how his predicament echoes that of the emerging multimedia web journalist.

Emerging "backpack journalists" are currently on their own to cover multiple angles of at a given scene as they interview sources to find out the facts and compose a story, video the scene and interviews, produced their own audio and visual segments, and upload them to the web. The frustations of the reporter on the show are the same frustrations backpack journalists experience. Clearly, bringing a factual complete story to television is just like bringing a factual complete story to the the web.