How television news is
being transformed by a class at Ball State University - and by
the click of a mouse. . Photograph by Ann
E. Cutting.
HUDDLED AROUND A 42-INCH
MONITOR like kids gawking
at the latest iPod, Ball State
University students are eager to see what the future of television
looks like. The group began gathering at 8:30 that morning to hash
out the day's stories for a daily newscast that's aired on Indiana
Public Television, and the spirited discussion in their news
meeting is the only thing that closely resembles what we might
consider traditional television news.
HERE IN THE SCHOOL'S COLLEGE of
Communication, Information, and Media, students and professors
alike might be tempted to call the linear broadcasts we currently
see on
ABC,
CBS, and
NBC a bit, well, archaic.
What's different about this five-minute newscast, aside from its
being produced largely by students, is how it lets viewers casually
troll for information, much like the Internet does.
As the anchor, Chris Bavender, a slender woman in a red pantsuit,
delivers a story on problems having to do with overdue toxicology
reports in Muncie,
Indiana, instructor Vinayak Tanksale stands in
front of the screen, using a remote control to show how viewers can
learn more about the effects of alcohol in the bloodstream merely
by clicking on a button at the bottom of the screen. A click from
Tanksale sends Bavender to the lower-right-hand corner of the
screen, and up pop several graphics that explain how alcohol levels
are tabulated and that illuminate the tragic story of how a Ball
State student (who may or may not have been drinking) rammed his
vehicle headfirst into a minivan.
This is the future.
Last year's Pew Internet & American Life Project
study cited that more than 50 million Americans get the bulk of
their news online. This information, paired with the fact that
people are now looking beyond immobile TV sets for entertainment,
to laptops, iPods, game players, and PDAs, is indication enough
that the consumers expected to sustain TV news tomorrow won't want
to watch it - they'll want to
use it.
"Interactivity is definitely the future - across the board," says
Timothy Pollard, the Ball State associate professor of
telecommunications who last year began offering an
interactive-television class, which was met with both celebrated
glee and downcast skepticism (oftentimes from his own colleagues).
"These kids are trained now to multitask. They have their
headphones on, their iPods, cable and satellite hookups, a DVD
playing, video games at the ready, and all the while, they're text
messaging and grabbing for their cell phones with Facebook open.
They need that kind of stimulation. They're getting away from TV
because it's a one-way experience. You need to keep their eyeballs
there. And the way you do that is let them interact with it."
Thus, Ball State initiated the bold move of offering a
semester-long course that's designed to head down the ambitious
path we all know exists but are hesitant to tread because it looks
so unpaved, so bumpy - so unknown.
INSTEAD OF DELIVERING the news as we have
come to know it, with an anchor introducing a story and then
handing it off to a reporter, an interactive newscast allows the
viewers, or, better stated, the users, to pick and choose the
topics that most interest them, creating a kind of news à la
carte.
What the viewer sees is the typical anchor filling up the screen -
but accompanied on the left, on the right, and at the bottom by
visual links to items such as the day's top story, the national
news, the local news, sports, the weather, stocks, and story
sidebars that are filled with graphics. If you've perused the web,
you have a good idea of what this looks like.
Viewers use a remote control to click on the links and buttons that
are lined up alongside the video of the anchor or reporter. They
also have the ability to return to the main newscast and watch
more, continuing right from where they left off. Even the ticker
along the bottom of the screen can be paused, rewound, and
fast-forwarded; it can also be brought up as a series of blurbs in
order to give a viewer time to see all of them at once.
Like the Internet, this sort of interactive navigation is designed
to give consumers what they want, when they want it. It's also
designed to develop futuristic-media students, who around Ball
State are referred to as hybrids, because they are a sort of bionic
student built from parts of journalism (including journalism
graphics, broadcasting, and telecommunications) and computer
science. They're often on the scene of a story along with the field
reporters from NewsLink Indiana, the university's broadcast news
service and convergence program for which students spend a semester
working full-time on a daily newscast that's aired on public
broadcaster WIPB.
Tanksale, who has a master's degree in computer science from Purdue
University and previously worked at
Microsoft, is one of the three
instructors for the interactive-television course, which is filled
with a kind of all-star lineup of 24 (or so) students, handpicked
from various majors. Jennifer George-Palilonis, a former
Detroit Free Press and
Chicago Sun-Times staffer, coordinates the
journalism-graphics sequence at the school and is another of the
instructors. The third is
telecommunications expert John Dailey,
who, like Pollard, once worked for
CNN. They all feel like
scientists trying out a new experiment, correcting themselves as
they go.
Dailey remembers firsthand the pounding
CNN
Headline News took when the 24-hour news network thought it,
too, had figured out the future of television news: It dressed up
its looping segments with tickers and so many modules that viewers
went screaming from the screen.
"The feedback was awful," Dailey recalls. "People were turning away
in droves, saying it was too much information on-screen. They had
three crawls going. The design aspect was dizzying."
Here, viewers customize. They can take away, add, or, if they like,
watch a linear newscast, with just the anchor. "On CNN, we gave
them no choice," Dailey says. "With this, the viewer is saying, 'I
want this' or 'I don't want that.'?"
What the students are doing, says George-Palilonis, a Ball State
journalism grad, is "taking the strengths of a newspaper, which are
depth of coverage and breadth of coverage, and, with an expertise
in those areas, doing what broadcast isn't able to cover in a
one-minute package. And I think it really strengthens broadcast and
the ability to tell a well-rounded story."
She continues: "It doesn't change the fact that all you have is
minutes, but what it does is uses a new interface and adds an
interactive component that gives you more in the frame of that
30-minute newscast. If you want to keep watching after the news is
off, you can, because that footage lives."
Exactly how Ball State's bold foray into the future of television
is being played out off campus is hard to tell. More than a year
ago, the instructors presented the findings of their first
interactive class to the Radio-Television News Directors
Association convention in
Las Vegas to mostly amused, curious
attendees. The trade magazine
Television
Week published a story for a media-and-technology special
report under the headline "Future of TV News Taking Shape as
Viewership Drops," as though the concept was a kind of cute
phenomenon.
The problem is, it's tough to take interactivity seriously when the
technology infrastructure is not in place to make it doable
now. In order for interactivity to work,
you need to have software that people can develop and distribute to
a mass audience. The people who control that software, and the
hardware, are your individual cable operators and satellite
companies - and they are all on different systems.
Plus, not knowing what this seismic shift to interactive television
means is unnerving to some. With TV and the Internet blending more
each year, this marriage will mean major changes for companies that
distribute content, for advertisers trying to reach consumers, and
for viewers.
"As we go across multiple platforms, it's not a broadcast network
or a cable network anymore; it's a network of people," says Albert
Cheng, executive vice president of digital media for Disney-ABC
Television Group. "What we're seeing is sort of an increased amount
of social connectivity - maybe based around shows, maybe based
around brands that have now become what I call participatory
entertainment."
INDEED, THE NETWORKS are already making
prime-time shows (
Desperate Housewives and
Lost, among others) available online,
either on their own sites or through services such as iTunes. Some
have even created programs exclusively for the web, a step that is
already making the Internet a proving ground for television
shows.
When Ball State sought funding ($25,000 of which came in the form
of a grant from the Discovery Group, a local foundation made up of
community women) to support its interactive endeavor, it didn't
need a fistful of studies, even though studies are readily
available.
It's clear that we're spending as much time in front of the
computer as we are in front of the TV. Adults spend about 14 hours
a week watching the tube and another 14 online, compared with the
11 hours they spent watching TV and the 10 they spent online two
years ago, according to JupiterResearch, which analyzes Internet
use. College-age consumers average about 10 hours a week online,
two hours more than they spend watching TV. Many students
interviewed for this story said that they didn't have a TV in their
dorm room but that they couldn't function without a laptop.
"I kind of passively watch the news," says
Austin Arnett, a senior
computer science major who is part of the interactive team. "Often
I'm trying to catch the first 30 seconds, to get teasers. If
anything interests me, I'll go to
Google News and be done with
it."
Suzanne Plesha, assistant director and communications officer of
the Center for Media Design, the campus-based, independent-research
think tank that used portions of a $20 million grant to help fund
this pursuit, says the question is how to make things more
appealing for truly digital natives, or young media consumers.
"They are so engrossed in all this," she says. "They have totally
different flight patterns surrounding digital usage. We're the
immigrants who are popping into the digital world midway through
life. When we make judgments of what will be appealing to these
populations, we're wrong most of the time. They're working at the
ground level. They know what they want, where it's going. They know
the ticker thing was bothering them. And they were going to find
the solution."
Of course, not everyone is so sure that the solution of
interactivity is better, even right here at Ball State. While Steve
Bell, a professor at Ball State and the longtime ABC anchor who
filed the first live satellite report from
Vietnam, applauds
interactivity ("It's just another media revolution I'll have to
live through," he quips), he has his concerns.
"If you're not careful, the audience will set the whole agenda," he
warns. "People are only getting what they want. Well, you don't go
to the doctor to only hear what you want. You don't go to a lawyer
to only hear what you want. The role of the journalist has always
been to not only provide people what they want and need but provide
people with what they didn't know they wanted. But you, as the
professional, determine they do need to know about it. And if you
present it in the right way, they will come to know and appreciate
this editorial service you're providing for them."
To others, like Mark Glaser, who writes extensively about how the
Internet affects media, the biggest shift can be seen in the
mind-set of the journalist.
“There’s the old way of your being the bringer of the truth. You’re the one who said this is the way it is — whether you go on TV and say it or you write it,” says Glaser. “I think what’s happening now is it’s being democratized. The journalist has to think more like, ‘This is how I see it, this is what I’ve come up with, what do you think, what can you add to this?’ It’s more of a collaboration and less of ‘this is the answer.’ There are a lot of answers, and it’s about coming up with what the best one is. It’s kind of scary for a lot of people to deal with that.”
Glaser applauds Ball State but wonders if viewers actually prefer TV to be a one-way experience. Pollard doesn’t think they do. He was at CNN during what he calls its Chicken Little news days, “when no one knew what we were doing.” It simply wasn’t what everyone was used to.
None of this fazes the Ball State instructors. They have the blessing of their dean, Roger Lavery, who is overseeing a new $21 million facility that will expand the college’s reach. Lavery said having a product in hand is enough to douse doubters.
Watching as students buzzed around him during a visit to the TV studio, Bell looked both proud and perplexed.
“Frankly, this is way beyond me,” says Bell, who retired a few weeks after this interview. “I have no idea how it’s going to play out. The simple fact is, we can’t stop the viewer from being involved. It’s happening, whether we like it or not.”