Life should be all about change. But some things shouldn't change. And my three-piece suits are one of those things.
I am very careful not to wantonly encourage people to join my industry, or to aspire to work in TV. I am certain that, generally speaking, the wage pressure in the television news industry is downward.
I think we - "we," meaning the media - have generally caused Americans to consume news in smaller, less contextualized bites. I think we have sugar-coated the news. I think we have provided news that is consumable, at the expense of news that is more important. I think we have created a world in which extreme views push out moderate views.
The weakness of cable news is that it chases its audience around. Your audience wants fast-paced, popular news. It needs real news. Cable news changes its stripes based on audience reaction. Viewers are reacting well to breaking news? You probably do more breaking news than you need to. The struggle is building something so that people will come to you, as opposed to constantly changing what you are because you're unsure of where the audience is.
I think Canada has stayed true to its news roots better than the United States has, in many ways. So I think Al Jazeera America is going to look a lot like the news that Canadians are used to: longer stories, more investigation, deeper analysis, less partisan.
The beauty of TV is that it does not have to be live. In this case, rather than spending an hour or two hours staring at a door and waiting for somebody to come out, we can just tell you after it has happened.
