A Canadian news and television station, CHAT-TV, has formally shut down after 70 years on the air.
One of the things I have long advocated for in the news landscape is a digital transition for legacy media companies. What I mean by that is for traditional outlets to have a strategy for attracting an audiences online and how they can prosper online. The reason I say this is because when I say having a strategy for online, a lot of traditional media types dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know their operations because they are “already innovative”. For them, they have already got this whole internet thing down because they have an online presence through a website. That box was ticked, what more do you want?
Why do I know this? The simple answer is that I have worked with such people in the past. Having an online presence is little more than a box ticking exercise. They put their content on the web and that’s good enough. Maybe some journalists actually go the extra mile and post it up on their social media accounts, but that is generally the extent of what they do. Their marketing is offloaded onto their staff who voluntarily post it up on their X/Twitter account, Facebook, or Instagram pages. There might be an advertising campaign done to promote the organization on something like Google, but such campaigns are usually small, fleeting, and promoting one specific event.
Conversely, they consider either television or radio their main bread and butter. They will run promotions (especially on radio) to retain an audience (because people are very likely not there for the god awful “music” they broadcast all day). There are various events that they host on the air waves, they spend whole meetings discussing their strategies for broadcast TV or radio, and the like. Even then, they generally rely on people putting in extra hours to put out more than the bare minimum because they don’t want to invest in their teams more than they have to. Still, there is some focus on putting together a broadcast at least.
One story that sticks out in my head when discussing the digital transition revolves around a new position that opened up at my station that was called the web journalist position. At the time, I was in my early years of Freezenet, I had already acquired well over a decade of experience, and, in my head, unless they got some engineer from Google to apply for the job, I was pretty much a shoe in to get that position. You can imagine my genuine surprise when I found out I didn’t get that job.
Naturally, I asked why and the explanation was that they weren’t looking for a “techy guy” like myself. What they were looking for someone who would just paste the news stories from the TV scripts onto the web and do just the journalism stuff afterwards. The only reason the position opened up was because people higher up the corporate food chain (rightfully) decided that news stations needed a better web presence, so therefore, it made sense to hire someone devoted to the web. Management I was dealing with decided to take full advantage of this by scamming the higher ups into getting a higher budget just to get another journalist on staff and having that person be the “web guy” in name only. Apparently, a decade of experience meant nothing to them as they had a person with a very specific background in mind (and I didn’t fit that exact mould of coming from a specific school, etc.).
As I told a colleague at the time after, I said that they were making a horrible mistake. It’s not necessarily that they didn’t hire me in particular, but they way they were having a web journalist on staff in name only. Someone in that position is researching the Google algorithm, figuring out best strategies to increase the websites presence, getting a better reach on multiple social media platforms, and so forth to future proof the news station. Someone like me, who actually got the news organization onto Google News in the first place, offered nothing of value to management because that’s just not what they are looking for. Again, the web was nothing more than a box ticking exercise to them as they felt the internet was just some silly fad that is causing a nuisance to their routines. The reality is that they needed not just one full time guy looking at how best to move the website forward, but a small team of people trying to make that happen. They were moving in the exact opposite direction of this.
This is far from the only story I have of executives at news stations rejecting the modern internet in favour of old traditional media technology, but I thought it perfectly highlighted the real attitudes many had.
It is also why I have precisely zero surprise whenever I see these same TV stations either get themselves in financial trouble or are forced to shut down due to financial problems. As audiences increasingly move online only, audiences for traditional outlets dwindle due to the technological change that has been happening over the last 20+ years. One station that recently shut down was CHAT-TV in Medicine Hat Alberta. From the CBC:
A southern Alberta television station is going off the air after nearly seven decades, the parent company said Tuesday in a statement.
“It is with heavy hearts that we announce the closure of CHAT-TV, a trusted local television station that has served the Medicine Hat community for the past 68 years,” Pattison Media said in a post published on Chat News Today.
The Kamloops, B.C.-based media company cited operational losses, economic pressures, and reduced support for local television as the main reasons for the closure, while expressing regret.
“We’ve tried to hang on as long as we possibly could,” Pattison Media president Rod Schween told CBC News in a phone interview Tuesday.
“Revenue here has been very challenging for a long period of time and COVID only made that worse.”
Schween said the writing was on the wall some time ago.
“We made a decision a couple of years ago to keep going, to give it a little more time to see if it would turn around but we just don’t see where this operation would ever get back to even a break even standpoint, never mind something we thought was viable in the long run.”
The statement that was made cited, surprise surprise, dwindling audiences as one of the reasons for the closure:
It is with heavy hearts that we announce the closure of CHAT-TV, a trusted local television station that has served the Medicine Hat community for the past 68 years. This decision was not made lightly, as we have explored every possible avenue to sustain operations. However, due to the contraction of support for local television, intense economic pressures, and continued operational losses, we have reached the difficult yet necessary conclusion that CHAT-TV can no longer continue its broadcast operations.
Despite employing a variety of efficiency measures and, the financial challenges facing CHAT-TV have proven insurmountable. The local television landscape has undergone significant changes in recent years, leading to diminishing economic viability. These challenges have placed an unsustainable strain on CHAT-TV’s ability to continue fulfilling its mission of delivering impactful news stories to Medicine Hat and surrounding communities.
So, they tried to hold out for as long as possible, hoping for a turnaround that never came, and that led to what we see today.
I know there are those that argued that the Online News Act, which was always a sham and a shakedown, was supposed to be what saves the industry. Clearly, the implementation of that didn’t save this station either – not that this is really a surprise given that it is more focused on shovelling money to the largest stations while leaving everyone else, at best, with scraps. If anything, the Online News Act likely hurt stations like CHAT-TV with Meta being forced to drop news links altogether, slicing off a major avenue for news organizations to reach their audiences. So, I sincerely doubt that helped the cause of CHAT-TV, either.
So, business as usual and scoffing at the internet has, once again, ended in tears. I doubt this will be a big wake-up call for the surviving TV stations to start treating the web seriously, but personally, I think it should. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if other closures happen further down the road after the media types got everything they demanded from a legislative front.
(Via @Fagstein)
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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