Chairman's Column: Be a Leader in the Digital Conversation

Bill Roswell

There has been a great deal of buzz—as well as some annoying static—over the past several months about the digital transition that our viewers and listeners are facing. Broadcast journalists, who are the human links between the technology and the people who use it daily, should be at the forefront of trying to explain what the future holds.

As nearly all of us on this side of the transmitter know, everything’s going digital. Local television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting their analog signals by February 17, 2009, which is the Federal Communications Commission-imposed deadline for transition todigital TV. (The deadline for Canadian stations is August 31, 2011).

Listeners are finding a growing number of HD radio stations in the U.S., Canada and Europe, as local broadcasters compete with satellite radio and digital music players. Radio broadcasters don’t face the same sort of FCC deadline for digital transition as their TV counterparts, but a handful of media bloggers have urged government action as one way to speed up the growth of HD radio.

For the past several years, RTNDA has produced convention sessions and special panel presentations to help electronic journalists understand and manage the digital evolution underway in TV and radio newsrooms. Key points have included tips for field photographers and reporters, lessons learned from digital TV and radio programming, and how to use the new technology to look and sound the best to our audiences.

But have broadcasters done as good a job in telling the digital story to our listening and viewing public? Probably not.

One of my colleagues says she learned first-hand about the lack of information and confusion over the digital transition during a recent visit with her parents, who are good barometers for what the rest of the public is thinking. They asked her the one question that many consumers are—or will be—asking in the coming months: Will my TV work or do I need a new one?

Television viewers in an estimated three-quarters of all U.S. households who have cable or satellite service should survive the digital transition with little or no inconvenience. But the Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV), a trade group based in Washington, estimates that more than 20 million homes in the United States rely solely on over-the-air reception of TV signals.

“We’re encouraging stations to promote their over-the-air signal,” says Bruce Franca, vice president for policy and technology for MSTV, which formed in 1956. “It (digital television) is worth the relatively small investment, and the signal is free.”

But despite these aggressive promotional efforts, some lawmakers appear as uninformed as thousands and thousands of viewers and listeners. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) is chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. He’s introduced a bill that would make big changes in the digital television transition, including a mandate that broadcasters carry public service announcements.

This appears another faulty effort by elected officials to dictate what stations must broadcast. As TVNewsday editor Harry Jessell wrote in his column of October 9: “Let’s keep things in perspective here. This is not life or death. This is not a matter of national security. Osama doesn’t win if a bunch of people are deprived of TV for a little while.”

True, this is hardly the doomsday event the ticking clocks might suggest, but we should be doing our best to serve our audiences, folks who have a lot of questions. RTNDA is here to help you as electronic journalists provide answers. The digital uncertainties will come up when a local TV news anchor speaks before some civic organization, or a local radio reporter is out on the street covering a story. RTNDA will continue to be a valuable resource to those of you who will be a resource for your communities.

Who better to tell the digital story than the people who are seen and heard by the public every day? We are the people whom the audience hopefully trusts and believes to be credible sources of information. We should not depend on some government bureaucrat or some sales clerk at an electronics store to tell the digital news story. That’s our job.

—Bill Roswell is the director of digital news and media for KYW-AM in Philadelphia. He may be reached at roswell@kyw.com.

Originally published in the November 2007 issue of Communicator. All rights reserved.

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