KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa, California, is hurting. The station is currently owned by media behemoth, Clear Channel, and serves the Sonoma County area, covering San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose in addition to Santa Rosa. Rather than continuing to dwindle in obscurity, the station has opted for a decidedly avant-garde move: ask people in the community to provide programming.
As always, the devil is in the details. In this instance, the details have not yet been released. So many questions remain: Will citizen journalists be paid for content? What kind of accountability will these citizen journalists have? What about quality equipment – will the nightly news now become an endless stream of grainy cell phone video clips? Any one of these issues, handled clumsily, has the potential to derail this novel little experiment.
Photo Courtesy of Amko BuildingsKFTY General Manager and Vice President, John Burgess was less than inspiring in making the announcement, characterizing the bold move as merely "a business decision we had to make." Ho-hum. Where's the revolutionary zeal, Johnny boy?
This isn't exactly the type of move that you can "kind of" do. There has to be a firm commitment and extensive outreach or the quality (and viewer retention) won't be there. In perusing the KFTY website for more than five minutes, there was no discernable link for potential citizen journalists to learn more information about contributing to the station. Are you kiddin' me?
I'm going to go out on a limb here.
KFTY, as it is currently constituted, has no intention to implement the move. The announcement was just a good ol'-fashioned trial balloon to pique public curiosity. In this case, the station itself is in limbo with respect to ownership because Clear Channel has announced that it is "going private" and will soon sell all its TV stations.
The demographics of Santa Rosa are relatively conducive to the cultivation of citizen journalism, and it is a bold initiative. But instead of hype, there has been relative silence. My guess is that KFTY is merely positioning itself for a more favorable buy-out. Instead of bidding on some no-name laggard in the Bay Area, the same discerning investor now has the ability to bid on an innovative station with a streamlined staff and a virtually unlimited upside. That's actually a pretty shrewd way to artificially inflate the value of a failed station.
A long way around to get to a pretty shrewd point, at the end. Wished you'd gotten there faster.