“These guys are good” is the slogan of the PGA Tour, but there are really two tours — the one when Tiger Woods participates and the one for events he passes on. Woods’ shocking announcement today that he’s done for at least the season due to knee surgery hurts professional golf more than it can ever admit. No British Open with Tiger. No PGA Championship. No Ryder Cup.

Who cares about tour number two, really?

I was fortunate to be old enough to enjoy the Palmer/Nicklaus era, as I’m fortunate today to witness the athletic phenomenon that is Tiger Woods. I used to enjoy all tour events before Tiger came along, but frankly, he’s so changed the game that a tournament without him is like watching the junior varsity. The PGA Tour has ridden his coattails to record financial years, and it will now have to do without him for at least the rest of this season. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, especially as the announcers struggle to make compelling TV without Woods.

May God bless Tiger Woods and bring him back whole.

Viacom is now distributing its hit shows “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” via Hulu, the NewsCorp, NBCU portal for television shows online. These two shows are but a crack-in-the-door to all that is Viacom, and one day CBS will get on board, too. Hulu has also announced that it’s adding some PBS shows later this month.

I’ve said all along that the only way this really works is if everybody’s along for the ride, because in this way, Hulu becomes “spectrum with spectrum” — a special corner of the Web that’s used for TV shows. It lets the shows compete with each other as if they were competing on cable or over-the-air. It’s the proper use of the Web for this kind of content, and Hulu is establishing itself as the leader in creating an internet conduit that’ll one day (hell, it already is) be served to your TV set, too.

I’m a regular Hulu user, and I think the experience is great. The emotional season-ender of House tugged at my heartstrings as I watched on my laptop just as it would’ve done in my living room.

I also think that local stations should consider doing something similar for news programming, and with the success of Hulu, we may actually see that kind of cooperation some day. I’m not, however, holding my breath.

The Radio and Television News Directors Association quietly demonstrated much-needed leadership this week by bringing together broadcast news executives and journalists for a “background only” session to discuss the serious challenges facing the news business. It wasn’t a meeting of CEOs or business types; it was news people talking about what they can do to help themselves and each other in the wake of relentless expense reductions and layoffs.

With the war museum of the McCormick Foundation in Wheaton Illinois as a backdrop and the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Edward R. Murrow’s famous “wires and lights in a box” RTNDA speech as inspiration, attendees spoke of challenges and brainstormed ideas to overcome them.

The off-the-record nature of the event prohibits me from identifying conference participants or attributing quotes to anyone at this time. The RTNDA hasn’t fully decided how the information will be disseminated, but watch for something from them perhaps this fall. The idea is to create a plan exploring general principles that need to be preserved. That plan will go to the RTNDA board and then to general membership.

Everyone, I’m sure, came away with their own thoughts, for we tend to “hear” only what we’re capable of hearing, based on our own background and experience. For me, the gathering was a fascinating demonstration of the deep longing to hang onto the past, while reluctantly acknowledging that such clinging may not be possible. The clash of the old and the new was visibly present in the room, although the new was represented more by pain of the old than a physical presence. This clearing of the air I view as significant and healthy.

This “summit” was in many ways a visible demonstration of a modern, colonialist (I’m smart…you need me) institution trying to stay relevant in an increasingly participatory, postmodern culture. That was evident in attempts to maintain the status quo, while admitting that the quo may have lost its status.

After several scripted sessions, we broke into groups to tackle specific issues and make recommendations.

We admitted we have an audience problem and that we may have actually fed that problem. There is nothing new about our news programs, and many employees don’t even watch. Yet, we continue to do the same thing, and this we agreed makes no sense. We agreed that we need to go where people are today and not try and make them come to us. There was a sense that we’ve gotten away from “real” journalism and are morphing into a utility that may not be relevant to the people in our communities. At the same time, there was an acknowledgement that there is a great deal of really good work being done in the industry, especially during times of crisis or breaking news. We need to research the people formerly known as the audience (TPFKATA), because we’re just not smart about how people are consuming media these days.

While conceding that our product has strengths, we agreed that it needs experimentation on-the-air and that the repurposing of that for other media forms is self-destructive. We talked about presenting news in a raw form during working hours (Continuous News) and how well that serves the audience at work. As such, we felt that formats other than the “finished product” concept of a newscast might better serve the information needs of the community. We asked if personalities will drive the news presentation of tomorrow and discussed the role of “citizen contributors” to the professional news organization.

We agreed that news departments must get involved in the business side of television stations, and I found this to be the most refreshing discussion of the entire summit. We’re smart people and while it’s necessary that sales not dictate what happens on-air, there was a strong sense that we may be able to make valuable contributions on the sales side as well as the content side of our business. At several points, there was discussion about lowering the wall of separation between news and sales while maintaining the integrity of newscasts, although no one knew exactly how this could be done. We’re comfortable with news-as-a-profit-center, but we feel helpless that station sales people seem to be having difficulty selling it.

One of the recommendations that bears repeating is that we need to prepare for the day when we don’t have a network affiliation any more.

In discussing our future approach to journalism, there was much talk about definitions and that perhaps we need a new definition of “news” itself. The terms “objective,” “fairness” and “balance” all need clear definitions. The team assigned to this area felt that anything not “objective” should be clearly labeled as such, but that “analysis” and “opinion” have their place. We need to get out of the pack mentality that seems to be driven by a “punditocracy” and begin to think for ourselves.

There was a great deal of discussion about the need for training and an acknowledgement that our industry has historically been very bad at this. I heard the term “culture change” many times and that everyone — from employees to executives — needs an immediate education in how other forms of media work. This is something the RTNDA will take an active role in implementing, I’m sure.

Like everybody else in media, the associations that represent them are struggling. The RTNDA is dealing with a shrinking membership and declines in convention attendance and magazine advertising, so they are as eager to figure this stuff out as the next guy. Look for a name change for them in the near future, as they come to grips with the reality that an organization named “Radio and Television News Directors Association” might be too narrow to represent the paradigm changes before us.

My hat’s off to the RTNDA and the McCormick Foundation for arranging this event. That we are in the midst of a new “Gutenberg moment” is becoming more evident every day, and it was truly encouraging to hear those directly involved in the broadcast news business honestly talk about it and what to do about it.

Murrow would’ve been proud.

(First published in AR&D’s Media 2.0 newsletter)

(UPDATE: Deborah Potter has posted her thoughts)

I’ll be in Chicago (actually, Naperville) next week for a “news leadership summit” produced by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation and sponsored by the McCormick Foundation. The title of the event is: “Wires and Lights in a Box: Murrow’s Legacy and the Future of Electronic News.” This year is the 50th anniversary of Murrow’s famous “wires and lights in a box” speech, which explains the title of the summit.

Participants are a Who’s Who of broadcast news managers and leaders at both the network and local level. Edward R. Murrow is the patron saint of broadcast news and a powerful figure in broadcasting history, so you can usually expect good attendance when asked to meet in his name.

There’s a session on Murrow’s legacy, one on entertainment versus news, another on ideology/partisanship in the press versus an impartial press, and my panel, “What is the business model of the future?”

Here are the questions we’ll be exploring with my panel:

• What will financial success look like in the future? What is the business model of the future?
• How does the industry address the ethical and credibility concerns raised by the intersection of news content and advertising? Even Murrow had sponsors.
• Will news operations continue to put news and public service over profit? How do news operations serve the public’s right to know and still say in business? Can public service journalism survive?

We’re also going to break into small groups (what would a conference be without small groups?) with the goal, it appears, of coming up with journalistic principles and standards to preserve for the future.

In all, it’s a pretty heady event, and I’m honored to be a participant. This has been my life’s work, and I appreciate the chance to share my thoughts. Besides, I really like to hear myself talk.

I’m always a little nervous, though, when an institution that’s being disrupted gets together to talk about the future. Broadcasting isn’t casting broadly anymore (to borrow a cool phrase from Scott Collins of the LA Times), so there’s a niggling sense that we’re heading for mediasaurus land. It’s natural that we’d turn to each other to try and figure things out, but it might be better to talk with those who are actually doing the disrupting.

I like to use a whale oil industry metaphor. Let’s go back in history to the annual whale oil industry conference, with the industry in the midst of disruption from electricity. Rather than seeing that they’re in the home lighting business, the whale oilers can only see electrical power in ways that will help them either extend the whale oil business or do it more cost-effectively — for example, by creating an electrically-powered harpoon (it cuts the manpower costs significantly, you see). So rather than invest in electricity for home lighting, they press forward to protect the bottom line. Nice, huh?

I’ll blog as much as I can from Naperville, and if you’re going to be there, I look forward to saying hello.

I’m coming up for air from a few days of writer’s block, and I think it’s because there’s just so much to write about these days. The moment I start concentrating in one area, something even more compelling pops up. The bane of bloggers isn’t a lack of things to say; it’s having too much to say.

So I’m just going to go through some things quickly, beginning with the networks getting together to offer a video-on-demand service that encourages people to not use TiVo. The point? They want those same people to watch the ads! Call me a nut, but this is too little, too late.

The business of The New York Times offering an API for its content is intriguing and smart. I hope it sends a message to other companies, and while I fully endorse the concept, it’s still about keeping users inside the walls of The Times. We’ll see.

One of the brightest minds in media, Jack Myers, took a shot at media company ownership this week in his Media Business Report. I’ve been saying this kind of thing for a long time, but Myers is above my pay grade, so his commentary carries significant weight.

…most executives remain committed to outdated and dangerous mass-media-dependent economic models. Media companies today - even the largest digital media companies - are in danger of following the railroad industry model and becoming Industrial Age mass distribution vehicles rather than Relationship Age™ interactive brand and human connectors.

Nice, and absolutely spot-on.

The L.A. Times painted a chilling picture of the future of television in an article called Broadcast Networks Under Siege that examines the shocking ratings’ declines in May.

Broadcasting, simply put, isn’t casting broadly anymore. As the sweep suggests, the TV networks are losing not just their viewers but also their sense of specialness. They’re becoming just the lowest numbers on the multichannel dial, rather than the last outposts of mass culture. It’s true that this evolution has been happening for years, but this year a tipping point was reached, a Rubicon crossed. Broadcast exceptionalism — its supposed immunity from the market forces afflicting all other media — is finally dead.

Right, and the problem is that tipping point is, while acknowledged, problematic in terms of reacting, because we’re deep into a cycle of expense reduction. Broadcasting still makes a lot of money ($70 billion last year?), and more eyes are focused on salvaging that than actually responding to technology and changing consumer behavior. It’s a tough place to be.

Finally, there’s this gem from Robert Lichter in the American Journalism Review:

“I think there’s a feeling that journalists have overstepped their boundaries,” he says. “People don’t look on [journalists] the way journalists like to view themselves – as the public’s tribune, speaking truth to power, standing up for the little guy. They don’t look like the little guy anymore. They’re part of the celebrity culture.” Increasingly, he says, “people like the news but hate the news media.”

Go read the whole article by Paul Fahri. It’s filled with lots of good stuff that I’d love to comment about. However, I’ve got this writer’s block, see?

I spend a great deal of time challenging my assumptions, as most of you know. It’s a part of the pomo in me, I guess, but I find the practice useful in times like these, especially in the world of media. And I do a lot of this at 30,000 feet. Perhaps it’s the view. Perhaps it’s the altitude. Perhaps it’s how insignificant I feel up there among the clouds, for insignificance is a fine form of humility that helps keep me balanced.

To be a television broadcaster, one requires a special license. Those suckers are scarce, so it stands to reason that everything about TV would be determined by those in TV. It is, after all, their little corner of the world.

To be a newspaper, one needs a printing press or a ton of cash. That makes newspapers scarce, so it also stands to reason that everything about the newspaper business would be determined by those in it. You wouldn’t go to Kroger to ask how to run a newspaper, right?

But that’s all different on the Web. The Web and all its intricate applications were created by the tech community. Every piece of software solves a problem that the nerds of the world have discovered, and since the only license you need to create things for the Web is one’s own creativity, the growth and development of the Web and its applications has been at light speed.

It’s into this world that traditional media companies have come to do business, but here’s the fundamental problem: we want everything done our way, and that’s not necessarily the way of the Web.

In the early days, the Web consisted of static sites built by static HTML pages. This was the era of the browser, when people “traveled” from point A to point B to “discover” the world that was out there. AOL made it easy by putting a form of “everything” inside its walled garden, but eventually, most people grew tired of the training wheels.

Search basically supplanted browsing, but traditional media companies never adapted. We stayed put, and so began a serious disconnect with reality. Since we liked static sites (they served our needs well, thank you very much), we saw no reason to move on, and when the Live Web came along with its unbundled content and interactive applications, we were trapped in the past. The extent to which this continues today is remarkable, especially since the Web has now moved past search and into the world of subscribe.

So here are a couple of fundamental mistakes that most media companies make in their assumptions:

One, we don’t actually “browse” websites, and we never have. The browser sits on your desktop and brings documents or portions of documents TO YOU. These documents may reside in code form on distant servers, but your browser doesn’t “go” anywhere; it brings everything to you.

This is such an important web fundamental to understand, because it will help you recognize what’s taking place in the unbundled world of the Live Web. Our browser can now bring a little from here and a little from there, all depending on what we want, and this understanding will be critical as the Web moves to its next iteration, the Semantic Web.

Two, the Web is no respecter of sites — all are just points in the maze. Just because you’re a big, bad media company doesn’t mean that you have any special place online. There’s nothing special about your URL that makes you different than any other URL, in the eyes of the Web.

The algorithms that Google uses to rank sites respect the amount of content that is “under” that URL, but they also deeply respect inbound links, because that is viewed as more important than just size. Yahoo may be an enormous “site,” residing on multiple servers, but its URL is just a URL, and the structure of the Web treats it no differently than any other. This is the central factor in Google’s use of the entire Web as its platform. More URLs are better than just one, so Google encourages the growth and development of sites, and monetizes them for builders and owners through its brilliant Adsense program.

The above is part of why I keep encouraging the NAB and other organizations to bring the tech community into its conferences about the future. We’re blinded by our online business models, but the nerds of the world — those people who actually built the Web — aren’t so encumbered, and it’s about time we started listening to them.

A Business Week article caught my attention, because it speaks so well to an ongoing issue that I encounter with media companies. The issue is whether it makes more sense to run digital operations from a centralized unit or to give freedom to individual properties to do their own thing.

Each has its merits, but I’ve always come down more on the side of local control. That’s because I think all of the flexibility for making money exists there and that nobody knows a market like the people who work therein.

The Business Week article looks at new strategic moves by Best Buy that the company believes will better equip it stores to handle the current economic uncertainty. At the crux of the decision is moving control of many things previously dictated by the corporate offices to the hands of the people running the stores. This has had a rather significant impact on business.

Lately, however, the employees at this store (Baytown, Tex) have noticed a different stripe of shopper: Eastern European workers from cargo ships or oil tankers, temporarily docked at Baytown’s busy port, are spending their precious shore hours scouring the store’s aisles. They take a 15-minute cab or shuttle ride to stock up on iPods and Apple laptops priced cheaper than back home. To speed their shopping, the Baytown Best Buy has moved the iPods from the back corner of the store to the front, paired them with overseas power converters, and simplified the signage. Since the changes were made over the holidays, cash register receipts for the boat workers have ballooned by 67%.

This moving around of stock would not have happened in a paradigm of top-down control. As a result, Best Buy’s “centricity” strategy is producing projections of healthy revenue growth at a time when the price of gas is soaring.

This is a fascinating look at a company that is trying to shift control over certain things to the local level, and it’s exactly what media companies need to be doing as well. Any corporate media strategy that forces, for example, a certain kind of niche vertical on all of its properties without regard for their local relevancy is sacrificing localized niche revenue opportunities in the name of uniformity. That kind of thinking may have worked at one time, but today, its value is certainly open to debate.

Let’s give control of how we make money online to the people in the best position to know where the money is and how to go about getting it.

Despite all the evidence that the Web is different, there are those who are still trying to turn it into a form of cable television. These folks are happy with what they’re doing, and there certainly are elements of the Web that can function this way. But if you’re going to try and make cable TV out of the Web, then you cannot count on the norms of the Web being relevant to your product.

An Online Media Daily article today is headlined with what appears to be an “Ah-ha” moment: Research Contradicts Myths About Online TV Shows. The research is from Futurescape, a London-based digital entertainment R&D firm, and it appears to disprove the “myths” that with viral marketing, engaging and well-produced content will distribute itself online.

“It’s what we we’ve dubbed the ‘viral fallacy,’” explained Futurescape Director Colin Donald. “Producers are adamant that launching a show requires a full-scale promotional campaign, possibly employing broadcast television.”

As a result, said Donald, “total budgets will rise to reflect promotional costs, unless the producer has been commissioned by a social network that can be the promotional vehicle.”

Mr. Donald also refutes the “myth” that it’s cheap to produce online television and provides production cost numbers to prove it.

Here’s my beef with all of this. Futurescape’s “findings” are not findings at all, for what do you expect when the producers of online TV only see the Web as a form of cable TV? The “myths” of viral marketing and cost that the company cites cannot be applied to traditional television online, and, to be frank, I’ve never heard anyone make these assertions anyway.

What I see here is the conflict between web video and television for the Web. They’re two different animals, and what I fear is that false arguments such as those posed by this “research” will spread to media companies trying to figure out what to do in the wake of declining ratings and ad money shifting online.

The processes that are a part of making traditional television aren’t disrupted by the Web, for the creation and distribution of programs for the mass media world are the same whether online or off. The “myths” to which Mr. Donald refers are all part of the personal media revolution, a phrase coined by J.D. Lasica in his book, Darknet, Hollywood’s War Against The Digital Generation, and these people have a big dog in that fight. Rather than dealing with it, however, Hollywood wants needs to keep things as they are. Hence, “revelations” like those painted in this “research” are self-serving and, therefore, useless. The disruption is much deeper than people shifting viewing habits from one place to the next.

The Senate, with the full blessing of our two Democratic candidates, is about to put the skids on the FCC’s decision to loosen cross-ownership rules, whereby media companies can own both a television station and a newspaper in the same market. Damn those big media people, huh? They want to control the voices in our communities, so we can’t let them narrow choices “for the American people.” Word.

Given the realities of the current media conundrum, however, this strikes me as a bit like waving off the RMS Carpathia on its journey to rescue the survivors of the Titanic. I mean, really, folks; who cares if big media is owned by one person? It’s all drifting slowly into the sands of yesterday anyway.

The issue is over independent and varied voices, which is a BIG part of the disruption in the first place.

Odd that I find myself actually siding with Kevin Martin.

The New York Times sued the government to get 8,000 pages of documents that prove those retired generals who function as expert analysts for network news programs and beyond are, in fact, pawns of the government! Oh no! The “hidden hand of the Pentagon,” they’re called. While most news organizations are falling all over themselves with this juicy piece of news manipulation, my initial reaction is, “Move along. There’s nothing to see here.”

Having just finished George Creel’s 1920 book, How We Advertised America: The First Telling Of The Amazing Story Of The Committee On Public Information That Carried The Gospel Of Americanism To Every Corner Of The Globe, the idea that the Pentagon would brief retired generals on what to say is hardly a bulletin. It’s been taking place for 100 years (and probably longer). And, of course, the press has no right to object, because it has been a willing participant for decades. As I have tried to communicate on many occasions, the father of professional journalism, Walter Lippmann, and the father of professional public relations, Edward Bernays, were both members of the Creel Committee.

Perhaps this “revelation” by The Times will be a good thing, but until the press accepts its duplicitous role beyond such currently unpopular themes as the Iraq war, it’s not going to mean much, for the “hidden hand” of the cultural elite includes the press.

The AR&D gang is westbound on a heading to Las Vegas for the annual conference of the National Association of Broadcasters and the Radio Television News Directors Association. It’s a good thing American Airlines is back on schedule, or we would have a pretty big problem on our hands.

I’m not on any panels this year (*sob*), but I’ll be around. We have many appointments scheduled for our suite and the Bellagio, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to spend at the actual conference. If you want to hook up, just drop me a note.

My book will be on sale at the bookstore in Pavilion 11 at the Hilton. All copies will be autographed, so if you don’t have yours, that’ll be a good place to get one.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for CBS. First, its local station group reduced expenses by cutting 150+ people, including some very well-paid anchors. Observers expressed astonishment, and overnight, every local news anchor began to squirm just a little bit and discover that those expensive office chairs at the anchor desk aren’t quite as comfy as they used to be.

Then this week came word that the network is continuing talks with CNN to take over some of its newsgathering. Observers gasped again. “What’s the world coming to?” they may have asked. Jeff Jarvis, on the other hand, cut to the chase with the provocative headline, “CBS is leaving the news business.”

We don’t need three evening newscasts exactly alike except as a repository for erectile dysfunction commercials. So let one or two networks win the ratings. Let CBS put more resources into investigations on 60 Minutes. Let CNN cover breaking news — with more help from witnesses with cameras.

Ouch! And now comes word that CBS appears to be giving up on Katie Couric, something that 99% of Americans have seen coming since the day she was first brought into the fold. CBS is denying the CNN and Couric stories, but people view that with the same raised eyebrow that accompanied “I didn’t inhale.”

And so the entire tribe of media observers stands poised to pounce, because CBS seems to be blazing a trail that others will have to follow, and everybody’s got an opinion about that.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia TV columnist Laura Nachman writes of a panel discussion in Philly involving the state of local television news, quoting WCAU-TV news director Chris Blackman.

“In my 26 years in news, I’ve never seen things as dicey as they are now. With layoffs, shrinkage, and downsizing, we need to reinvent ourselves.”

“We are not relevant the way we used to be because viewers don’t need us anymore,” Blackman said referring to mobile devices and the internet.

Blackman proved his point when only a handful of people in the audience of around 150 television professionals raised their hands when he asked if anyone needed to watch local television stations to get their news.

What Mr. Blackman is feeling is the same thing that the CBS observers are feeling, and that is the enormity of the disruptive innovations brought about by technology and a shift away from the modernist, colonial culture that spawned traditional media in the first place. Put a fork in it; it’s done.

Oh, mass media will be with us for a long time yet, but it will never again enjoy the status it once held, and to think otherwise is just nostalgic denial. And I would add that the reinvention process is so pressing that we don’t have time for blame assessment, nor do we have time to do a lot of research. An industry run by bean counters has little chance when entrepreneurship is what’s required, so we need to take a few chances along-the-way.

I’m reminded of the wonderful lament by Henry Adams, “The law of nature is change (chaos), while the dream of man is order.”

Embrace the chaos of change; it’s our best hope for tomorrow.

I just did an interview with the AP about the CBS O&O stations firing high-paid anchors (Chicago, LA, Boston) in a dramatic cost-cutting move. The reporter asked, “So what does a station do after it has fired its own face?”

Good question.

I saw this one coming in 2003 in my essay “News Anchors: An Endangered Species.”

The industry’s obsession with celebrity and the easy marketing thereof is meaningless in a Postmodern world that has demystified the industry and its hype, rejects elitism and doesn’t need its information spoon fed by good-looking faces anyway. As the world of video news shifts to a broadband environment, where users can pick and choose what they want to watch and when they want to watch it, there are powerful forces at work that will make news anchors unnecessary.

What will the CBS stations do? I don’t really know, but I do know that the move must have every anchor in the business sweating bullets. If I were an anchor, I’d fully embrace New Media and use my leadership position to make a difference.

(Note to all my broadcasting critics who told me I was crazy five years ago: It’s going to get worse.)

Articles like this one by Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation tug at the heartstrings of anyone who has been around media very long. What’s happening to newsrooms is sad. Every day seems to bring more bad news. The CBS O&Os laid off scores of people yesterday, even high-priced anchors, because business has gone south. Newspapers have been buffeted for several years now, and it’s taking its toll.

Osnos writes of the morale in newsrooms as if comforting an old friend.

…the real problem is something deeper, I sense. It is a belief that no matter how good your work, how thoroughly reported and influential, it isn’t going to matter in protecting your newspaper. Because of the revenue declines and cutbacks, the mood of proprietors and managers, on the whole, is near panic. Outstanding work by their staffs, the newsroom has become convinced, isn’t going to make a difference in the outcome of their institution. The effort at morale-building in the stream of front office memos announcing departures, the cheerful exhortations to survivors to do great work, only adds to the cynicism that pervades.

News people are by nature skeptics, and given to grumbling. One of their missions is to find fault. Self-criticism in newsrooms is standard, and so is defensiveness when the criticism comes from outsiders. None of these characteristics are at issue. The problem is that the prevailing mood of a declining and deteriorating industry is so pervasive and so discouraging that it reinforces itself. “What’s the point?” is a debilitating attitude, and it is very difficult to reverse.

What’s happening hurts, but I believe it’s the same necessary kind of hurt that comes with the death of a loved one. And I think we would all do well to think of it as such.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of grieving, and they are as appropriate for this situation as any.

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

We’re past denial, although who can argue we went through that? We’re also past the anger phase. Professional news people lashed out at anybody they could tag, beginning with the blogosphere. That’s gone now, as is the stage of bargaining. If we could do this… If we could do that… Sorry, folks we can’t talk our way out of this one. Besides, to whom does one bargain for justice anyway?

I think what Osnos is describing is textbook depression, and that’s the stage that we’re in now. Television may not be as advanced as our newspaper friends are, but it’s there just the same. “What’s the point?” is the behavior of an industry depressed.

But look what comes next? Acceptance. That’s where we need to be, because minds who have fully accepted that those nostalgic days are gone and are not coming back are minds that can actually move forward. It’s the darkness-just-before-dawn syndrome.

As my friend Gordon Borrell likes to say, “Things are very positive where I work.” Indeed. Growth is on the web side, so let’s all get on board the Cluetrain. Historians will write what they must, but we’ve all got work to do.

Market share should drive local television station online revenue efforts, not budget goals or growth. That’s one of the key findings in a new television benchmarking study from Borrell Associates released this week at the annual Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) conference in New York. While local stations have gained market share in the past year, that share still pales in comparison to local newspapers, which have been at the game longer and more seriously than TV stations.

Local online ad spending is projected to increase by 40-50% in the next year, so even a station that grows its local revenue by 35% will be losing ground in terms of market share. Of course, the big gainers in local online revenue are the outside-the-market internet pureplay companies like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.

This strategic approach to attacking the existing ad marketplace is foreign to television stations who are used to competing only with each other over the airwaves. That sense of competition is carried into the online world, and it is one of the things that is keeping stations from reaching their online potential. Online, it’s not about WWWW-TV versus KKKK-TV, for that “market” is an illusion. The real market is vastly bigger and includes many, many other players, so when station managers compare their revenue only against what the other stations in the market are doing (and even the newspaper), they commit a form of self-delusional business suicide.

Total online ad revenues for local TV stations this year are projected to be $1.1 billion, according to Borrell Associates CEO Gordon Borrell. That’s a 45% increase over the $770 million last year.

Another key recommendation for broadcasters is to adopt a niche mentality for the Web.

Some 90 percent of the respondents to our survey say that at least two-thirds of their TV Web inventory remains unsold. That’s likely because the “mass” appeal of news, weather and sports pages aren’t as attractive to advertisers as pages that contain content specific to their business (think health care, real estate, and automotive content), or to their customer base (think young adults, women, or suburban communities).

One of the most striking differences between this benchmarking study and the one Borrell has done for newspapers is the complete lack of stations who perform in what Borrell calls “the green zone,” those local media companies who have a market share of 28% or higher. This demonstrates how far behind local stations are in their competition with their print counterparts for local online revenues. All broadcasters need to study this green zone approach, for these companies approach selling the Web very differently than traditional media account executives.

Green zone performers have dedicated online sales people, work with non-traditional clients, have an amazing thirst for data, use a consultative sales strategy, can’t get enough training and set much higher rates.

The salespeople at these sites seem to understand that this is an early-stage medium, so you can’t just go out and plop a proposal down on someone’s desk and expect them to understand what they’re getting. They look for data — loads of it, on traffic, Internet usage, the rate of online ad spending by the type of advertiser they’re approaching — anything that will help the advertiser understand what’s happening with the Internet and how they might take advantage of it. And of course the consultation — they ask the advertiser questions before blurting out what they have to sell him or assuming they want a massive broadcast and online reach. They do not.

Television stations with at least one online-only salesperson achieve an average of 26 percent more online revenue than their counterparts who rely solely on broadcast salespeople to sell the Internet.

Every day we’re reading stories of company after company laying off people and tightening belts, because business for local media companies is going south. The remarkable thing about this, to me, is that this is an Olympics and election year, the kind that normally produces significant revenue growth for stations. Unless local stations do something with the only market that’s actually growing (online), it’s hard to rationalize how they will survive 2009.

Gordon Borrell understands this like few others, and we need to pay attention to what he says.

Wayne Friedman writes for MediaPost that NBC’s Jeff Zucker is thinking that the number of hours produced by the network for the network might be going down. NBC hands affiliates 22 hours of prime time, while Fox offers only 15 (guess which network is tops?). Zucker thinks that fewer hours may give Fox an advantage.

But Friedman finds a fly in the ointment.

If NBC gives up any program time, it won’t exactly be good news for TV stations. Sure they’ll get to program what they want and keep all the advertising time. But the increasing downside is that programming will be even more expensive to produce and market.

Perhaps stations and syndicators should try and resurrect the 1990s one-hour weekly drama business of a few years ago, with a slew of new “Baywatch”s, “Star Trek”s, and “Xenia: Warrior Princess”s.

Many stations might also convince themselves that an extra-early evening hour — attached to their already lucrative 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. time slot (6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Central Time) — could be built for all-family TV shows. TV pressure groups have complained the networks have abandoned the early evening, so-called family hour. Still, convincing advertisers is another story.

I actually think such a move could be a windfall for local stations, depending on how they approached it. Local stations must continue to develop local programming, ‘lest they find themselves out in the cold when digital distribution makes them irrelevant for network-level scripted programs. An hour a day could help begin moving us in that direction.

So I got home last night and my cable wasn’t working. Not to worry; there’s always hulu.com.

I watched a couple of episodes of House and then searched for an episode of Law & Order, SVU that my daughter had recommended.

Imagine my surprise to discover that only “clips” are available from the Law & Order franchise — no full episodes.

So now I know that hulu isn’t what it could or perhaps “should” be, and I’m altering my view of its potential for success. If Fox can satisfy me with House, why can’t NBC do likewise with L&O? I’m sure they have their reasons — perhaps even legal — but it undermines the value proposition of the site and casts doubt on how serious NBCU is about it. You can’t pretend to provide a portal for professionally-produced information and entertainment programming and then withhold the best that you’ve got.

It would be like Disney deciding they wouldn’t provide any coverage of football on ESPN.

Sorry, folks, but in this case, it’s all or nothing.

Although late to the game, many anchors at television stations are beginning to blog. While each has its own flavor, most are of the “behind-the-scenes” genre. Some anchors “get it” more than others and use the Web to build a personal brand in the market.

I try to encourage anchors to just be themselves, and nobody I’ve encountered does that better than Sherri Talley of our client in Shreveport, KTBS-TV.

Sherri is loved and respected in the market; there’s no doubt about that. But the “real” Sherri is something far beyond what people see on TV, and her blog reflects that. Not only is Sherri involved in life to a degree beyond most, but she’s one of the funniest, wittiest people on the planet, and that’s front-and-center in her blog.

“I like this on so many levels,” she told me. “First, it’s a creative extension of myself. As much as there is still out there for me to learn about blogging, there’s also room for me to invent/create along the way.”

She says there’s a real similarity to anchoring and blogging, because they’re both very intimate. “I talk on the air as if I’m speaking to one person and do the same when I’m blogging,” she said. “That way I’m not announcing to an audience nor blogging for masses, but just having a conversation…ha…one where I hope someone responds.”

A while back, she found an old oil painting from the mid 20th Century of two babies. The thing is pretty ugly, because back then, painters would “touch up” photographs to make the babies look more adult. She bought the picture and made a cut-out copy of the two babies. She’s named them “Hazel and Jimmy” and they play a role in her blog, often showing up in the background of photos. She makes no reference to them other than in the cut line of her blog: “sherritalley.com, it’s good enough for Hazel & Jimmy.” Readers are in on the joke, and it gives the blog an automatic edge, for people are always waiting for the next reference to the two babies.

Sherri is unique in that she has an inherent self-effacing ability to see the humor in what she does and to take people behind-the-scenes in colorful and compelling ways. Readers are fully engaged, and most entries include a regular group of commenters, which gives the site a community feel. Sherri’s not trying to “be” anybody other than herself.

“I actually almost resigned several months ago to take a marketing job,” she told me “because I didn’t see much of a future in the direction of television anchoring and reporting in the traditional sense. When I realized our station had such a progressive approach to internet development, I asked to get involved. Now, I’m more passionate about my work. I feel more engaged than ever with viewers.”

Sherri’s blogging and her insatiable thirst for knowledge have elevated her status with the web team at the station, and she now plays a leadership role in newsroom online efforts.

Her advice to other bloggers, especially anchors? Be positive, invest yourself and have fun. “Some bloggers get frustrated because they can’t think of a topic. Just like everyone and every situation has a story, there’s always a topic.”

So do yourself a favor and drop by her site. Read the entries and the comments, and I think you’ll agree that if it’s good enough for Hazel & Jimmy, it might just be good enough for you.

Young Broadcasting’s WRKN-TV in Nashville has terminated Adam Kleinheider, effectively ending a remarkably successful experiment in blog aggregation, VolunteerVoters.com — lovingly known in Tennessee political circles as v-squared. I’m sure nobody is happy about this, and it should rightly be viewed as a victim of what’s happening to mainstream media companies, and not about the quality of the political aggregator. It is, in my opinion, the type of site that local media companies need to be running for a whole lot of reasons.

As one commenter to Adam’s last post wrote, “If a mainstream news organization can’t sustain an objective political dialogue online, then I fear the horizon holds nothing good.” The site got respectable traffic numbers, but beyond the reach, it served a valuable function in the political journalism firmament in the state of Tennessee. I doubt the vacuum will exist for long.

There are some real jewels in this five question interview of Richard Honack, Assistant Dean, Chief Marketing Officer and Adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

One of the first things newspapers need to do is step back and look at the world around them to realize that their customers are not waiting for “news” that happened on a deadline-driven cycle. The majority of “news” customers are past “what happened”– they want to know “how it happened.” The days of the “Front Page” have been gone for a few years. We live in a “nanosecond” world and newspaper buyers now read the paper for comfort when they have time. For the most part, the majority know the news, scores, stocks and anything else deadline-driven almost instantaneously on their mobile phone, computer or 24-hour cable news channel…

…to the owners and publishers who still consider themselves “newspaper people” one can only say, “Change or go out of business.” They need to accept the fact that they play a different role in the global communication world. There is still a need for newspapers but in a different form, frequency, etc. The Internet works 24/7/365 and that should be the core from which the newspaper, magazine, news services, etc., fall out in a given period…

…If you think like a “newspaper person” you get “newspaper think.” If you think like an “information provider” with assets that can provide new products or services you start to think about technology, real estate, creative services.

Excellent stuff and spot on for broadcasters as well as newspaper people.

Professor Honack is appearing at Strategic Leadership: Making Radical Change Happen May 12-15, 2008, in Chicago