Happy Cyber Monday to all my readers. And what better way to spend Cyber Monday than by getting a great deal on your favorite Substack newsletter?
Then, once you’ve subscribed to that one, you can get mine at a discount for up to one year, too:
That’s 35% off an annual subscription or a monthly subscription for up to 12 months. It gives you access to paywalled posts, exclusive content, and the comment section. But time is running out!
Eric Medlin at Arc Digital has a suggestion for people suffering from too-much-information burnout:
Social media news has obvious benefits, but even more obvious flaws. Since each social media platform is an information ecosystem with its own distinctive themes and discourse patterns—indeed, with its own collective history and official and unofficial norms—it’s critical to cultivate sources of information that are not endemic to social media. An often-overlooked source that should be an established part of every news customer’s diet is a short curio that is older than the NATO alliance.
The World News Roundup, broadcast on the CBS Radio Network and the Audacy app, began in 1938 and has continued on a daily basis ever since. It was a pioneering radio program that distilled an entire day’s worth of stories to a 10-minute piece. The program has won numerous awards, including a Peabody Award, and has been rated the best newscast many times by the Radio Television Digital News Association. The Roundup often carries reports from leading correspondents around the world as well as brief clips from interviews and segments of CBS shows such as CBS Mornings and Face The Nation.
The Roundup is not a final source for all of the news that a person needs. It is not even the only quick news summary that is available. What this source provides is a distillation of what “the news media” is covering at any time. It is similar to a summary of AP newswires or the front page of The New York Times. But it is better than many of these sources because it flies under the radar. The Roundup has not faced the back-and-forth discussion that has targeted NPR or the Times in recent years. There have been no accusations of “liberal bias” or obsessions over headlines. That’s allowed it to carry on, undisturbed by the culture war acids that have left so many other discourse platforms in ashes.
One limitation of social media news is its algorithmic spotlight will be directed by the interests of its most committed users. If that happens to be a younger audience who are more susceptible to hyperbole such as, say, the kind displayed in the Polish missle debate … that’s not a feature you want in your exclusive news provider. The World News Roundup, by contrast, gives listeners a fresh perspective that they may not hear if they’ve spent all day refreshing a famous journalist’s Twitter feed.
CBC, NPR and the Beeb all have hourly newscasts available online, and whatever one might say about the ideological lean of these outlets, the news summaries are pretty straightforward. There’s something to be said for checking in now and then and getting the top stories instead of constant doomscrolling.
And then there’s the old standby: the nightly network news shows, which actually draw much higher ratings than the 24-hour news channels, though you’d never know it from what gets all the attention on Mediaite.
In fact, over-the-air television might be making a bit of a comeback, as people who give up cable and then cut back on streaming services realize they can still get TV for free with a cheap antenna. And they don’t even have to go onto the roof to set it up anymore:
E.W. Scripps Company, one of the old-line names in publishing and broadcasting, recently provided an overview of the latest developments in the digital TV antenna market, and Jon Marks, the company’s Chief Research Officer, helped further illuminate their analysis. First of all, for the many that still have visions of rooftops in their heads, two-thirds of digital TV antennas sold today are indoor units – small, flat, square discs that are easily attached to a wall near a TV. These antennas won’t bring you traditional cable networks the way outdoor dishes do, but instead are an inexpensive tool to receive over the air (OTA) broadcast signals, which today include not only the core broadcast network affiliates but a host of broadcast “diginets” (more on those later).
The antenna business is real and growing. According to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), U.S. consumers purchased 8.5 million antennas in 2021 alone. This seems merely a blip compared to over 200 million TVs sold globally last year, but it’s pretty impressive when you realize that DISH Networks, which has been in business for nearly 30 years, has a total of roughly 8 million satellite home subscribers. In fact, as Scripps and CTA point out, nearly one-third of all U.S. TV households now have a digital antenna, and half of those homes rely solely on antennas for their receipt of broadcast signals. Scripps projects (leveraging insights from Nielsen and CTA) that the total antenna marketplace in the U.S. will exceed 53 million homes in 2025. By that time, that is likely to be fairly equivalent to the total number of U.S. traditional cable and satellite subscribers (which has obviously been declining for years).
[…]
Scripps identifies households that combine streaming apps with free content from antennas as “self-bundlers.” The company calculates that these households typically spend roughly $58 per month on their video versus an average of over $148 per month for those who combine cable or satellite packages with streaming services. In an inflationary environment, where the value equation is only getting more important, this is massive saving for many consumers. On a NATPE panel earlier this year, Sinclair’s SVP for Growth Networks and Content Scott Ehrlich described these self-bundler households as “among our fastest growing businesses.” He simply noted that “consumers will always like free.” That is a troubling proposition to the ComcastCMCSA +0.3% and the cable/satellite distributor world as well as a host of traditional cable networks that survive based on their stream – no pun intended – of monthly sub fees.
This isn’t entirely a business slam dunk. There are significant issues of market education to take place, both among consumers and advertising executives. The power of inertia remains strong in the ad-buying community, and traditional broadcasting and cable networks are likely to retain a disproportionate hold on advertising for some time to come. But the perfect storm of rising prices for cable bundles, oodles of free content, and a weakening economic environment will likely cement the digital antenna’s place in the TV firmament. And you don’t even have to be afraid of heights.
I got one of these square antennas for ten bucks, and after some trial and error, I was able to find a spot on my living room wall where I can pick up all three OTA channels (CBC, CTV and Global, though the latter is a bit shaky) in Halifax. And because they’re broadcasting HD content digitally, the picture and sound are great.
The problem is, since my family bought its first VCR in 1984 (a Beta VCR, and for the record, we never had trouble finding new release rental movies for it) I’ve become accustomed to watching television on my own schedule. Unless it’s a big live event like the Super Bowl, I don’t want to fit my schedule around whatever is on TV.
Broadcast TV might stick around, but “Must See Thursday” and “TGIF” are gone for good.
Shot:
Chaser:
(Also, is she not giving $8.00 per month to Elon for that checkmark? I can't keep up.)
At least she didn’t get an electric Mercedes. Personally, I think she should have Bought American and gotten a Mustang Mach E, because it’s not like Ford and its founder have any historical baggage, right?