CNN Sending Eight Times More Staff to Royal Wedding Than to Japan | Hacker News Reader

CNN Sending Eight Times More Staff to Royal Wedding Than to Japan

theatlanticwire.com

119 pointslotusleaf198777 comments

I was having a conversation with an editor I work with about CNN the other day, when the following occurred to me:

I feel like the root of CNN's problem is that they have more or less abandoned the pursuit of "quality" reporting in favor of "popular" stories.

In any publication, there is always this tension between quality and popularity. Consider how much has been going on in the world this past week, in particular with regards to the earthquake in Japan and the uprisings in the Middle East. I've been following those stories closely on the NY Times, which in my opinion has done some excellent reporting on both topics.

Now consider the "most popular articles" on the Times right now:

    1. The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan
    2. The Quad: Grant Hill’s Response to Jalen Rose
    3. Paul Krugman: The Forgotten Millions
    4. Pogue's Posts: ‘Chimping’ and Other Photo-Taking Tips
    5. David Brooks: Social Science Palooza II
    6. Ex-Racehorses Starve as Charity Fails in Mission to Care for Them
    7. William D. Cohan: Degrees of Influence?
    8. Timothy Egan: Frankenfish Phobia
    9. Letter: A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions
    10. SAT’s Reality TV Essay Stumps Some

You know, I probably end up reading half the articles that appear on the Times's most popular list, and I enjoy them greatly. But if the Times just gave up on doing "real" reporting and focused instead on these kinds of "popular" topics -- well, I'm sure I'd pretty quickly lose interest in the publication and go find another source of news and interesting tidbits.

Which brings me back to CNN. I just have this feeling that this is what their business team was seduced by. Somebody looked at their numbers and said, "Hey, we don't get nearly as many viewers when we run an in-depth expose on the state of women's education in Afganistan as we do when we broadcast Lindsay Lohan's court proceedings live. So let's just ditch that newsy stuff and focus on what our viewers really want."

This strategy of following what's most popular probably works in the short run. But in the long run, it can be devastating to your brand if it comes at the expense of quality.

I don't think many people would disagree that this strategy has already destroyed CNN's brand. You don't need to qualify that with can. The long-term implications are already here.

Well, I think the executives who made the decision to pursue this strategy might very well disagree with me. I'm also not convinced that it's common sense to pursue quality over popularity.

In general, following your metrics is the sounder strategy. If CNN were to A/B test the "education in Afghanistan" story against Lindsay Lohan, what do you think would win? I have to guess Lindsay Lohan by a mile.

Unfortunately, I don't have an easy answer for distinguishing between metrics you "should" follow vs. metrics you should not.

It's easy to measure page views, hard to measure how a story resonated with a reader. Furthermore, it's now possible to measure per story, rather than copies of the whole edition (or ratings for the whole evening news).

You improve what you measure.

One of the editors of a major paper once told me that they viewed their primary product as _credibility_, not newspapers.

In chasing pageviews, CNN is pursuing a race to the bottom. They have to compete with HuffPo and AOL and another million sites that aggregate or regurgitate content. I stopped going to CNN.com a long time ago and I rarely see it as a linked site in any discussions online. That's not a good sign if they want to grow their business and uniques (which are a more important metric than pageviews for an advertising-based site.)

This sounds analagous to governing by polls.

With respect to CNN's loss of respectable brand image I have only two words to say: Nancy Grace.

It's not just what they present, it's how they present it.

With the Japan disaster trio going on (quake, tsunami, partial meltdowns), they've replaced some of the reruns of fluff (Piers Morgan's interviews with other former contestants from Celebrity Apprentice) with the live feed from CNN International.

And looking at the CNN international stuff, it turns out that they are still capable of producing a news broadcast which at least looks and sounds like it was intended for grownups (even if the sourcing is ... awfully thin). They just don't see fit to broadcast it within the US.

It makes sense in a strange way. For a disaster or war, you put as few people in harm's way as possible, and overdub the reports in other languages for non-English markets in the studio. Viewers need facts and often the images speak for themselves, and the nature of the situation justifies endless replay of the same bits of footage.

For showbiz/celebratory type stories, almost all the reporting (in multiple languages) is talking to camera because viewers who care about that stuff want the experience of being there, so they enjoy it vicariously via the reporter. Also, there needs to be a much larger flow of material because people who want to be entertained get bored more easily.

There's a huge audience for this sort of thing. I was reading an economics paper a few months ago observing that the wedding of Charles and Diana generated the equivalent of 8 or 9 billion dollars in today's money, over the course of 20 years. This upcoming one is expected to add something like a billion to the UK economy just this year.

To add to your line of reasoning, the wedding is of short duration but there will be thousands of (famous people that your average viewer will recognize) people to interview. The japan incident doesn't have that. It is a much slower event, it is all aftermath and ongoing work on the reactor. While the number of people effected is greater the number of officials, pundits, and famous(to their audience) people to interview on location is much smaller.

Good point, not to mention the fact that sending people to Japan or other disaster would require additional logistics planning or add strain to a damaged local food supply chain.

Have you tried public transport in London ? Or the local food.

As a matter of fact, yes and I found them to be both adequate. The university I attended (USA based) sends freshman overseas during spring break for a ridiculously small amount of money. I chose to go on the London trip.

I've been there twice, and only ever used public transport; it worked fine, much better than in the US. And there's plenty of good food.

Does Japan need any more foreign reporters who don't know Japanese to report on the tragedy?

They encumber Japan less by sending fewer reporters. I see this as a win-win.

They can send more, in-depth, reporters when things have settled so they can do their investigative stuff and give some insight.

Sending people right now would be more or less taking advantage of a fresh disaster story and riding it till it had no more to give.

I don't see how it's a bad thing that they're not sending more reporters to Japan. Keeps the sensationalism down, puts less strain on a strained infrastructure, etc.

  "Earthquake terror figures rise
  Princess Di is wearing a new dress"
  -- "New Dress" / Depeche Mode (1986)

I wonder if the networks' bureau size has any play in this. As large as Japan is, it wouldn't necessarily surprise me if a large part of the 400 staff were based out of London regularly and that the London office were a few times larger than the Tokyo one.

Not that I'm defending this absurd proportioning of reporting, just looking for other factors.

How would the figures have differed if the earthquake was properly announced six months in advance?

Sensationalist bottom feeder People magazine crap gets a lot of attention.

I wish that we as a culture were more concerned about things that really mattered. Unfortunately, we have people obsessed with how they look and what's going on in "famous people's lives", 90% of which is tabloid distortion or outright fabrication.

I blame marketing for this. People are convinced they need stuff they don't really need, and the best way to do it is to say "person you admire uses X". The reason CNN is sending all these people is they know it will make result in great ad revenue.

sigh

"I blame marketing for this."

OK, but why does the marketing work? I'd submit the marketing is more effect than cause. We have significant support in the human brain for tracking social status and the leaders of the (perceived) hierarchy. We don't have very much support for "important long-term risks and issues". It may be unfortunate, it may yet kill us all, but it's not surprising.

Marketing fundamentally is about matching up a solution with a need, and convincing that the solution being provided is better than others.

The problem is that often there are solutions with no need, thus the need is manufactured (becomes a want).

My wager is that celebrity coverage, and the products that advertise on that time are nearly all in the category of wants, and often frivolous/stupid ones at that.

I don't think anyone had to create a need to observe the ranking of the perceived-by-the-brain-as-local social hierarchy. Gossip has been with us for as long as recorded history goes back. This is nothing more than the gossiping impulses translated into modern connected society.

CNN, NYT, MTV et al will continue to trend tabloid as the number of alternative sources of information grows, bleeding away their "serious" audiences.

While it is sad to see this crap get more concentrated over time, it's not really helpful to stress over it. Is the breadth and depth of content apart from television and outside the mainstream getting better? Probably yes.

Cable TV subscriber counts began declining in 2009.

The sad thing about the internet is that you can insulate yourself from any opinion that you might disagree with.

For an obvious political example, I know people who only read sites like The Drudge Report or Huffington Post. They self align with those viewpoints, and anyone who disagrees becomes the enemy.

It's a tribalist resurgence, and I don't see a solution to this - there are no even handed debates anymore.

Why is this? Marketing wants hits, so you get link bait headlines, and anything that will get hits even if it lacks merit gets pushed out the door for ad revenue.

I don't think that's entirely true. For me, the great thing about the internet is that some of these "tribes" are actually pretty diverse in their viewpoints.

They form loose communities based on currencies of quality (thoughtfulness, analysis, originality) instead of specific views. Specifically, I'm thinking of the bloggers/twitter users who write about political/econ topics. A lot of the good ones are non-commercial and ad-free and aren't looking for public acclaim.

It's human nature more than marketing (or rather:marketing follows human nature in this). We're hardwired to be social and care deeply about what people in our group do and what happens to them, especially the leaders.

Unfortunately, we're also hardwired to think that our group consists of those whose faces we see most frequently and the leaders are those we see others pay attention to.

The result: millions of people unconsciously believe that Paris Hilton, Snooki and Charlie Sheen are socially closer to them than most of their family, and thus deserve most of their attention and trust...

And of course that's what makes celebrity news so popular and endorsement marketing so effective.

On another note, I recently checked out some gossip on blekko, and I found out that all the gossip stories originated from one source all the time - usually Us Weekly or People Magazine. (Both stories seemed like conjecture or hear-say, but no surprise there.)

It's incredible how frail your reputation and brand as someone in the entertainment industry can be.

It's like there's a superficial need for gossip and its ilk, but no desire for "good journalism", when celebrities are involved. I know it seems a little orthogonal to the concept of journalism, but maybe there's a void to be filled for gossip that is well-written and -researched.

Gossip is all completely alike, and I don't know why you would need to get it from one of your regular news sources like, say, NYT or CNN. Especially since so many just parrot the rumour-mongerers.

The PBS News Hour is the only real news program left.

That’s been the case for 20 years. There has never been enough quality reporting to fill a 24-hour news channel, and so the time is naturally filled with easy garbage like popular scandals and blathering pundits many with undeclared agendas.

and most people don't watch it all day in any case. The stories must be repeated during the times you have various surges in viewers (6am-9am), (3-6pm), etc..

My local NPR station does a good job filling up 24 hours. There are some repeats of course but very little of it is the crap you'd find on CNN.

NPR doesn’t need footage, their programming is more than half something-other-than-news, they repeat programs a few times, and most importantly they’re funded by subscription and grants, rather than by advertising dollars driven by ratings.

They do substantially better work than CNN, but they’re not really analogous.

Except it appears that, according to an update, CNN is sending 'only 50 "reporters, cameramen and crew"' to the wedding. The WSJ (who first reported this about CNN) is refusing to retract it because, well, that's just the kind of quality reporting you get from the modern WSJ.

John, do you wanna go to London, report on the wedding, live in the nice hotel, eat at the nice restaurant, all expenses paid? Or there is also another job available - Japan, increased radiation levels, hot water and electricity may be available at the hotel,...

I'd pick disaster-Japan in a heartbeat. I'm probably not alone here in that attitude, which is why there's such outrage about this.

would you need 8 morons to accompany you on the trip, or better them being distracted somewhere else?

Ha! Point taken!

I think this makes perfect sense. That wedding has been being planned for a long time; CNN knew it would be the media event of the season.. so they are probably setting up a lot of infrastructure.. sending managers.. etc as this whole to do. The staff going to Japan would necessarily be much leaner.

I wonder how many "journalists" as opposed to "staff" went to Japan vs the wedding.

If you were a CNN reporter, would you rather go to a fancy wedding or a disaster region?

I can't help but think this factors a bit into where the reporters are going. It also saddens me that we as a society are willing drive our attention (and ad dollars) to weddings over disasters and wars.

Do the reporters really have that much say where they go? (Or at least enough to alter their overall distribution?)

Panem et circenses. It's keeping the public's attention diverted from our clown governments comprising the deplorable, the despotic, the despised and the damned.

It's worth considering that the people who watch cable news may very well want huge coverage of a royal wedding. Why not? It's a made-for-TV event. Very entertaining to some folks. Increasingly the people who want better/faster coverage are going elsewhere. Throughout the disasters in Japan one of the best sources of news I found was an individual doing live translations from JP news sources on U-Stream. From there NHK-TV doing live coverage of press conferences. I don't see any good reason to wait around for the western media to spoon feed me information in-between commercials for erection drugs.

I don't think the disaster victims care much for more reporters. Total non-issue.

I've long ago given up on CNN and other cable news networks. All the cable news channels are dumbed down to the point of annoyance. The only exception is CNBC, which of course is financial news. CNBC, perhaps because of its focus on the economic perspective seems to keep closer to the facts, and also gives more interesting analysis. One thing for sure, CNBC, wont be covering the royal wedding. They may at most, show a clip of it, followed by how much it cost the British taxpayer.

cnn is in the business of viewership, not news... you know, kinda like mtv

It's kinda sad; they used to be good, 20 years ago. They really made their mark covering Gulf War I.

Although I suppose I'm not sure whether they were good, or just better than other TV coverage of the time.

Pet peeve: the first Gulf War began over 30 years ago. It did not involve the USA directly, though they were providing military aid to Iraq.

While some people refer to the 1980's Iran-Iraq was as the "First Persian Gulf War" and the 1991 was as the "Second Persian Gulf War", most of the usage I've seen is to call them the "Iran-Iraq War" and "Persian Gulf War", respectively.

If it makes you feel any better, there were a half dozen world wars before World War I and World War II.

That's a horrible, but astute observation. I can't believe I still want to believe that they are doing what they do for journalistic reasons.

i was done with cnn when I saw a segment titled 'who would jesus vote for?' during the last primary, and their anchors were sitting around a table having a debate.

The aristocracy represents the worst aspects of Britain - the cronyism, unthinking deference, inflexible adherence to tradition and gigantic social class divisions. As far as is possible I intend to avoid watching or reading anything about the royal wedding when it occurs.

The traditional media has not been about journalism. It has been about portraying the appearance of journalism, which has always generated just as much revenue at a fraction of the cost. This is why I'll be happy when the old guard finally goes bankrupt.

Let's be fair. Knowing CNN, the analysis will probably be more than 8 times as deep as their analysis of Japan. Don't underestimate CNN when it comes to overanalyzing the most trivial of issues.

Probably for the best, this disaster-porn obsession is pretty sickening.

At the end of the day, we get what we celebrate.

They're only doing this because it's likely that they'll receive 8x the ratings for the royal wedding than for Japan coverage. Sad, but true.

So, the new informal credo for journalism should be "if it blings it leads" instead of "if it bleeds it leads"? Doesn't rhyme, though :(

Does Traffic = Ad revenue?

Viewing = (indirectly post ratings review) = Ad revenue

What's the point of sending English speaking journalists to Japan, where they typically do intro pieces from the streets of Tokyo, then segue into footage provided by Japanese news organizations?

At last in England they'll understand what's going on around them...

Brilliant point. News organisations can really annoy me when they send reporters to the scene of an event just to do the same piece to camera that they could easily have back in the studio, and this is further compounded if they don't speak the languages necessary to do proper reporting.

Also, in a country that's struggling to recover from a disaster, every news organisation sending hundreds of reporters to the region might be a huge drain on resources.

There's a reason why they still send out reporters to get their boots on the ground and try and figure out what's actually happening. Research.

Any lazy journalist can just sit back, crib a whole bunch of feed and stills and press releases floating off he internet and boilerplate it into the column inches without bothering to make even the most cursory check for facts, but there's a word for such slack jawed lacklustre button pushing: churnalism.

People used to complain about news helicopters flying over scenes of disasters such as flooding, saying things like "Why don't they pick up some of the stragglers and ship them to safety?"

The answer is: Because that is not their job.

Reporting on what is going on is. And that means going in there, asking questions, getting the agency to rope in a native speaker to translate where needed, and actually bearing witness to the sort of things that end up on your screen, or in print.

They have to go in there and report, because nobody else is going to - and if nobody else reports, nobody will know how bad things are until that ignorance comes back and bites us.

Journalists - at least the ones truly earning their crust - do what they do because they have a compelling need to show the world what they do not know, and need to know.

They are the ones whose job it is to bear witness.

They're not going to do any significant research in Japan.

They're going to take establishing footage of their personnel, then repeat aloud what they're told while showing disaster-porn imagery.

>then repeat aloud what they're told while showing disaster-porn imagery.

Pretty much standard for a royal wedding then

Yeah, the nuclear reporting in the first couple of days was terrible, someone on the ground would be repeating a few lines they have been given from someone else without the slightest understanding of the workings of the reactor.

Also had 10 minutes of news on an unsubstantiated claim there was another tsunami heading towards the coast, only to be then told there wasn't.

I think there is a big difference between a television "reporter" (i.e. newsreader) going to Japan for some intro pieces, versus, say, a long-time AP reporter who lives there and understands the region.

Sure. But there's little real research an non-native language speaker can accomplish. And even if you speak the language, if you're not from there, well you're never going to get the inside track. And this is precisely the reason why Al Jazeera has so many foreign bureaus and employs a lot of local staff - way more than any other network.

Al Jazeera didn't invent the idea of foreign bureaus and local staff. Many organization have/had these. Unfortunately most have been forced to cut back due to budget constraints, since they don't have Qatar's ruling family footing their bills.

There's great irony in that being financed by oil rich monarchs ultimately allows Al Jazeera to appear more trustworthy to some viewers.

Irony so thick you can taste the rust.

No, seriously, I believe most reputable papers had foreign bureaus until something like the 70s or the 80s (at least that's the impression I've gotten).

Maybe if CNN focused on making important news relevant to the mass public, it would do better.

I think serious papers had them till the past decade or so.

Totally agree about CNN. I think they are bad for the same reason quality of most products has been decreasing - short term, please-our-stockholders thinking.

How do you know they haven't taken the time to learn to read, write and speak the local lingo? Also, those who are still learning can always get a bilingual local to interpret.

Because the few moments of footage showing them touring the area in a rental car, you see them interact with their interpreter for everything. "What are those cars doing over there? Why are we in so much traffic?"

...because the journalists actually do things when they're off camera, like, research the story.

(Disclaimer: I can't speak for CNN as I haven't ever regularly watched it. But NPR and the BBC both have reporters in foreign countries for a reason.)

There's a huge difference between either funding your own long-term deployed journalist, or simply contracting an independent, versus shipping your desk man over for some intro pieces.

Oh come on.. they have Japanese speaking journalists...

As many as British-speaking ones? I'd be shocked if 1/8th of their reporters could speak Japanese.

That, plus the US State Dept is evacuating Americans from Japan now anyway.

Can only upvote. I'm speechless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com