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.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Postmodernism, Broadcasting, Disruptions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.