The More Things Change...

The more they stay the same.

Budgets and staff are being cut. Enterprise journalism is expensive and rare. Competing in the ratings race eats up lots of time, effort and money. You have to be creative to win and the mantra is still - "do more with less." Isn't there a better way? Can't stations still support hard news and enterprise journalism on a budget?

That was 1997 and the beginning of NewsProNet.

Sound familiar?

Our idea back then was to bring economies of scale to the hard news ratings struggle by putting together a team of award-winning journalists, setting them free to do the stories they always wanted to do but their former TV station employers couldn't afford - and then making it available for pennies on the dollar to one station in each market as a strategic content source. We called it SweepsFeed - even though we produced it 12 months a year and it wasn't really a feed.

We took it one step further when we started - we did audence research on dozens of topics and only produced the stories that came back with the highest interest levels. We also delivered each story as a package ready-to-track - no narrator. And to substantiate the journalism - we included in-depth contact sources for each story.

It was and is a hit. Hard news, promotable stories that stations would do themselves if they had the budget - easily localized and journalistically sound.

What was true in 1997 is even more true today. The recent cutbacks at local TV stations will probably only continue and the need to keep the viewers has only gotten more urgent. And while staying focused on local, local, local is still essential - SweepsFeed has always delivered stories that impact viewers no matter where they live. Now more than ever its the quality of the information that matters.

And now there's another distribution platform that is also attracting viewers in large numbers - and also benefits from quality content - the Internet. I'll get into that subject in another post, but the same dynamic applies - the more things change...