News Not Working

Posted by:
on September 6, 2006 at 4:28 pm

Never wanting to miss a moment of history, we watched Katie Couric’s debut on the evening news last night. While basking in the glow of history in the making, we made an important discovery: though no fault of perky little Couric, the evening news is incredibly, painfully boring. Why? Because it’s just a re-hasing of information already readily available on the internet.Clearly, some people in this country don’t use the internet. They need to get their news from somewhere, and (for the many of them who are probably older) they’re home at the ungodly early hour of 6:30. It’s a nice little set-up: Internet for the people who use it, network news for those who don’t (they’re just about 36 hours behind in the news cycle). What is baffling then, are the constant touts during the broadcast for the CBS website. Do they understand that if you were capable of going to the CBS website, you would already have accessed all the information presented on the news, and would therefore not be watching? It’s baffling. But now we totally understand why their audience is shrinking. Most people don’t want to have news they’ve already heard read at them, and the people who haven’t heard the news have to spend 10 of their precious 30 minutes of news time listening to someone blither about a technology they have no intention of using.

As for Couric, she didn’t blow any socks off, but she wasn’t half bad.

For more reviews of Katie, try here, here,here, and a bunch linked here.