Costs Money To Bring The News To The Public

By Author: Amandda
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It costs money to bring the news to the public. Because a notepad, pencil, and tape recorder cost far less than a camera crew, it is cheaper to gather news for a newspaper or magazine than for television. The more costly a story, the more important it must be before it will be covered and published. In the 1970s, Dan Rather, then a CBS reporter, wrote about this constraint and about Thomas Sabo Bracelets how it affects investigative reporting: "A newspaper can commit a so-called 'investigative team' to a story and tie up the time and salaries of maybe a half dozen reporters. But that's all. If a television network commits to that kind of assignment, the cost can quickly run into six figures and above." Such costs explain why investigative reporting is more common in the print media.

Stories that are written but not published ("overset") are not as costly for newspapers as for television. An unused set of stories costs a newspaper its overhead plus the reporter's salary. An unused taped segment can cost thousands of dollars. Consequently, although a newspaper ...
... assignment editor stores overset for possible use on a slow news day or in Sunday's larger paper, a television producer must be more certain that what is assembled can be and probably will be aired. Yet more television stories are gathered for use on the evening news than are actually aired. To cover their costs, networks try to find other places for these segments. A segment that does not air on ABC's World News Tonight may air on tomorrow's Good Morning America or be fed to affiliates for use on their local news shows. When a network is on the air twenty-four hours a day, it faces the opposite problem. For example, MSNBC frequently re-airs material aired earlier on its sister broadcast network NBC, and much of the content found in one half hour of CNN's Headline News will reappear the next hour as well until it is displaced with "new" news.

The competitors to national network news mentioned in Chapter 1 have influenced newsgathering decisions. The video news services offered by CONUS, Associated Press TV, Reuters, CNN, and other similar organizations are comparable to the national and international news wire services. As a result, many independent (unaffiliated) stations are using material from various satellite services to report on world and national news. The networks have responded to such competition. In addition to establishing satellite links that allow their affiliates to share locally produced news stories with one another, the major networks have offered to help their affiliate stations pay for satellite vans that are like mobile television stations.

In return for such subsidies, a network has the right to use its affiliate's van when a significant news event occurs in the affiliate's area. These vans, with their satellite dishes, enable local stations to cover national and international news; as affiliates' vans are used by the networks, they extend the areal coverage of the networks as well.

Similar factors influence the coverage of foreign news. To cover and report foreign news, a newspaper or network must support Thomas Sabo Charms a foreign correspondent and, for same-day coverage, incur the cost of transmitting videotape or photographs by satellite. Such costs were important in the coverage of the Vietnam War, and they are one explanation for the small amount of news we receive from Africa and Central and South America, despite the frequency of newsworthy events. Once an expenditure has been built into the system, however, it is more likely that the persons and equipment will generate news stories, no matter how newsworthy the events. For example, a network or news-paper maintaining London correspondents is more likely to report news from Great Britain and to seek British reactions to events in the United States than is a network or newspaper without a London correspondent. As the heavy coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis illustrated, however, the number of stories also is related to perceptions of relevance for die U.S. audience.

In addition, the declining cost of portable, lightweight cameras and portable satellite uplinks has not only contributed to their use but also increased the likelihood that CNN will broadcast breaking news from around the world, live.