by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: September 26, 2009   Last Updated: November 01, 2009

Three killers were arrested as the prime suspects in the murder of Network News. The Internet, radio shows, and audience dispersal.

The Internet is the primary source of news for a vast number of Americans. Every major newspaper, magazine, and even the networks has an on line version. Every major search engine will pop out information from thousands of sources when a major story breaks, and as additional reports come in. Every major wire service, the mother lodes of news, publishes on line as soon as the material can be written, edited, and uploaded. There is so much archived news that the background of any event can be accessed. There are so many encyclopedias, geographic, census, and historical sites that an individual can put together their own comprehensive article and publish it in a blog within an hour.

In addition, any eyewitnesses with cell phones and digital cameras can film, narrate, and upload visual records to YouTube and other on line video caches before the networks can even put a basic story together.

This creates an independent and fast moving form of competition, much of it free of the influence and interruptions of advertising, which is necessary for income at the networks.

The second suspect is radio. The twenty four hour opinion, talk, and news reporting formats have been the primary source of news for many Americans for decades. A person can turn on the bedside radio, listen for a while, and have the top stories of the day before they get out of bed. The car radio fills in the rest on the way to work or school.

The problems that radio give to the network news lies in the larger-than-life personalities of the newsreaders and talk show hosts add to the reports. These individuals sit, hidden from the public eye, and boom out with the voices that promise a lot more profundity and attractiveness than reality will allow. Radio newsreaders are allowed to express more emotion, throw in more opinion, behave outrageously, and even lie through their teeth, and the audiences just eat it up. A frozen, fixed, over controlled newsreader at a network is no competition for the wild wild world of radio news.

Audience dispersal is the final suspect. There are so many options for getting news these days that audiences split their time between internet, radio, and television broadcasts. There is no singular bloc of viewers who have to set aside the time and wait patiently for the evening news, with it's more frequent breaks for advertising than at any other time, anymore.

All suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty, of course. It is to be seen whether the victim, network news, can come back from the dead in new and better forms to regain enough audience for profitability.

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