Twelve years after helping to start It’s All Journalism after completing an American University digital media class, Megan Cloherty finds herself back in TV — now in Colorado — and asking some of the same questions about the state of the journalism industry.
“Twitter, blogs were a big thing. There were so many different ways to put a new lens of transparency on what we were doing” as journalists, she says from her home in Colorado Springs where she’s a reporter and fill-in anchor for the city’s NBC affiliate. “The thing is, I don’t think people want to watch the whole press conference. They don’t want to read the whole interview. You do have your Niemans and your Poynters and your startups and labs doing really great stuff, focusing six months on an investigation. I don’t know that people are reading that.”
Instead, despite the ever-increasing menu of journalistic platforms and products, people still want to get their news and information from someone they like, trust and possibly share views with, much like their allegiance to one local TV reporter or anchor compared to another.
“This is something I think TV gets a bad wrap for; it’s personality-driven,” Cloherty says. “People watch a certain channel because they like that anchor or that weatherman. Even when I was getting into TV; who cares who’s on TV? We’re doing good work. Why does it matter if I share personal stuff on TV? It does matter. People connect with you. They want to hear the news from you.”
Journalism comes down to sharing information, but people aren’t looking for in-depth coverage; they’re looking for what they care about. There’s just too much other noise out there to be as well-read and well-informed as people used to be, even those working in news.
“It’s great to have all these different platforms and changing it up and having people come at journalism from a different perspective, but there’s so many places now,” she says. “Even as a journalist, it’s part of your job to be well-read and know what’s going on. There’s real-time journalism, 24 hour news networks, Trump’s tweeting at 3 a.m. It’s so fractured the industry into a million pieces that people really don’t know where to go. I’m going to go with my guy I like to listen to in the morning.”
Megan Cloherty, senior reporter and 10 p.m. anchor at KOAA5 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, talks about her experiences as a broadcast reporter, digital journalist and one of the founding producers of It’s All Journalism.
