I won’t do it often, but I’ve been thinking. What started it was the aggregator. I looked over there and Brittney Gilbert was praising Bill Hobbs. Seriously doing so. First I thought zombies had taken over her blog, then wondered if I needed new glasses or maybe a shrink, but there it was. So I hopped the iTubes for SanFran. She was talking about something Hobbs had posted at VV on Kleinheider’s last post. (And it was a nice thing for Hobbs to say, btw.) Here’s the line that hit me.

It’s a damned shame that WKRN couldn’t figure out how to monetize the single most valuable political news property in the state.

Then Brittney & Chris Wage talked about TV as a news provider and the evolve or die dichotomy in the comments. Being in “old” media now is something I wouldn’t undertake. They don’t understand the web; they don’t have a good feel for the potential impact (despite political death by YouTube and news spread by viral blog coverage; they don’t see how to make money here; and they’re not wiling to trust in the medium until they come up with a revenue stream. More after the jump.

Like the music industry, which is facing a download death spiral on the Internet, TV stations are clinging to what they know because it’s not even been around a full century and they don’t see how it could die. Stop and think about the music business. When a band releases an album and it becomes a zillion seller, that doesn’t make the band members zillionaires. Much of the revenue is eaten up by various portions of the industry for the parts they played in getting the CD into retailer racks.

But, if the band digitally records and does their own mixing to the music and then gives it away over the Internet for whatever people are willing to freely contribute, the band stands a good chance of making more money. Let’s see. More money, more creative freedom - what’s the downside? No record industry. No, seriously, what’s the downside for the band? There isn’t one, unless the band or singer is so big and loved that the industry machine can pump the publicity sky high.

The music business is a little farther along, I think, than TV media is in the Internet explosion but most TV people aren’t seeing the parallel. Networks have sued YouTube to get episodes removed, parallel to what the RIAA has done over downloads, but other than that, TV is leaving the Internet alone, with exceptions. So what is the answer? I know from my own experience, I skip newspaper sites that require a credit card to be able to see their online news and I’m not alone. There are enough people out there who don’t charge for news so my news fix is filled.  I doubt subscriptions are the way of the future. Ads, as Chris points out in the comments at Brittney’s, don’t work all that great either (unless you’re Google). CBS5 only has one ad. (Aside: Ads don’t work all that great on TV either, but the advertisers haven’t figured out anything better.)

Could the answer be in the past? In the day of Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley & David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, news departments were not profit centers. The news didn’t make a profit and it wasn’t expected to do so. News was something the stations provided both to compete with each other and to serve the public. They sold the ad time, sure, but the news team cost more than that. Other activities covered the rest of the cost of the news teams. In a declining economy, can the stations afford to cover the cost of the news bloggers from other revenue streams while they chart a path to tomorrow? Some are, some aren’t willing to do so. I don’t know what the profit margins are at stations but I would guess that full-time bloggers are less expensive than a newscaster. The answer falls into the range of how much profit is enough profit and how much do we invest in the future. WKRN appears to be investing in the now.

I don’t usually watch the news, local or national. First, it’s all bad news and I’m frankly tired of that. Second, I frequently get home too late. Third, I get enough on NPR and Marketplace. Besides, it’s a family tradition. My dad always went to bed after the late show. For him, the late show was Huntley & Brinkley. I stay up a little later.