FEED: What other changes in viewing habits have you observed?
“IT’S QUITE EERIE, SEEINGALLTHESE EMPTY ROOMSANDYET THE MACHINESAREALL BUSYWORKING”
CARL SWANSTON: Talking to people who are close to me, some people have stopped watching the news altogether; they watch Netflix or other CBC programmes. I’m wondering if that’s going to be a bit of a trend, especially with our younger demographic. RUBA IBRAHIM: All VOD has increased significantly during the pandemic, because people are at home. Normally people are out doing activities, so definitely, it will change.We know that whenever there is big news, our viewership peaks and then it goes down. During wars or during the football leagues or the Olympics, it goes up then it goes down. It’s the nature of the consumption of news. Even before the pandemic, it had changed from watching a big screen to watching your mobile or your iPad.They will go back, most probably, into more digitally oriented mediums. MARK PIZZEY: One thing that I noticed is, we’ve gotten used to a different kind of news coverage. You couldn’t have guests come into your studio, but there was all this online communications technology available. If this happened 20 years ago, you would hear a voice on a phone or you’d use the old ISDN communication. Now all you need is a laptop and guests can communicate with the anchors in the studio, using Zoom or Skype orTeams. We’re used to looking at things on these very high-quality screens – even our phones are great quality. But we’ve adapted to this poor video quality very easily. I’ve heard many presenters say, “I’m sorry, but your picture is breaking up or the audio is breaking up, we’ll have to come back to you later,” because of poor bandwidth on the guest’s end. And on all the major networks, the interviews are of somebody on a consumer communications platform. And I’m still struggling to accept that. TOM DICKINSON: Something that’s stood out here in the US is that breaking-news fatigue is real.There’s a point where I want to go back to a documentary. I want to have somebody tell me a detailed story that’s not just the daily grind. I’m fearful that breaking news is blocking the real stories we’re not reporting on, because we don’t have time for it.What else is happening in the background that we’re going to look back on and say, “Wow, we
totally missed this bigger story because we were dealing with pandemics and elections”? I hope we see a shift back to other types of stories and not just the drumbeat of what’s been happening in the last five minutes. RAOUL COSPEN: That’s a very good point. If you want your news to be watched, you need to be on all screens. Everybody understands that. But you also need your content to be personalised for different platforms, experiences and types of consumers. You want those same stories to be to be shaped differently depending on who is going to watch it. I think this is one of the big issues for us as suppliers having to also adapt our editorial workflows.We need to get away from thinking of the old newsroom rundown, withTV first and then doing digital.We need to give that freedom to the digital teams – to take the lead on putting stories together and going digital first. I’m not aTV producer, but I think that if news organisations don’t adapt their production workflows to this, the future is looking bad for them.
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