Embrace Social Media?

The Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin writes about TV News needing to embrace social media and interviews CNN’s David Bohrman…

The fact sends chills down television reporters’ spines even as they compulsively repeat it: Last year, earthquakes in Japan, China, Los Angeles and San Francisco were first reported not on TV but on the Internet’s Twitter social-networking site.

”It tells you something about the far-reaching tentacles of Twitter and Facebook and the other social-networking sites,” muses David Bohrman, CNN’s Washington bureau chief and senior vice president. “And it tells you something about some of the challenges facing TV news.”

Amid the daily obituaries for the newspaper business, where bankruptcies and layoffs have become a grim daily routine, there’s been comparatively little notice that television news confronts many of the same problems: declining audiences, aging demographics, fierce competition from new digital media and a broken business model.

”Everything needs to be deconstructed,” Bohrman says. “Everything is going to be changing.”