Media Orchard always has found it ironic that journalists are considered so "liberal." Because when it comes to the thing most important to them -- their profession -- they couldn't be more conservative.

Journalists hold their traditions dear. Some of these traditions are admirable and important; others are just silly. Remember the debate in 1997 over whether the New York Times was right to add color photography and "kill off" the Gray Lady?

Guess what? Gray was great in 1897. In 1997 -- not so good.

Considering such Luddite impulses, you can imagine how difficult it has been for the industry to navigate the era of the Web and, now, citizen journalism. Newspapers have added blogs, but as a group they aren't impressive. We've come across blogs from major dailies where the writers appear to think we care what they had for lunch. (All the important stuff, after all, is covered in the paper, right?)

Now Web 2.0 -- make that Media 2.0 -- is entering the world of TV news. And TV news traditionalists don't like it.

Specifically, KRON in San Francisco has launched a highly innovative -- highly 2.0 -- initiative.

As Grade the News describes it:

This season the San Francisco station has embarked on a radical -- and some would say risky -- journalistic experiment. It is the first major-market TV newsroom in the country to supply nearly everyone with hand-held digital video cameras and laptop computers, allowing them to produce stories all by themselves.

Through this innovation, KRON has quadrupled the number of cameras it has on the street to capture stories. Its video journalists -- or "VJs" -- are cranking out packages left and right.

Pretty cool, huh?

Unfortunately, Grade the News -- a respected media-monitoring project by the journalism schools of Stanford and San Jose State and public TV station KTEH -- doesn't seem to think so.

On the contrary, it suggests KRON's innovation is the desperate act of a "flagging" station. Some excerpts from its piece:

Sometimes you might see a smart story, but be distracted by a hand on the screen or a disembodied voice. Other times you notice great video, but thinner reporting...

Many of the VJ stories this fall seem to have been assigned only to test the new equipment...

Citing the ongoing effects of newsroom disinvestment and lowered standards, some of the station's most experienced journalists have left the station this year...

Several longtime staff placed the journalistic heyday of the station during the leadership of Mike Ferring, the news director from 1981 to 1987...(Ferring) remains skeptical that one-man bands can work as well as traditional TV newsgathering techniques...

Reporter Greg Lyon, who worked at KRON from 1977 until this year, recalls the Ferring era wistfully... "Overall, it's a tragedy what happened to that station," he said...

You want to know what's really a tragedy? It's a tragedy that this article -- a product of two schools that are producing our future journalists -- is imbued with such short-sightedness and pointless nostalgia.

Media Orchard has an old friend at KRON -- Brian Shields, online news manager for the station and the author of its blog, The Bay Area is Talking. We asked him what he thought of Grade the News' blistering assessment.

Here's what Brian (pictured above) wrote back:

I didn't work in television in the 1980's but I had friends who did. It was a time when owning a television station was quite literally a license to print money. Each local station was guaranteed at least 25 to 30% of the audience. There was no such thing as the Internet. Cable penetration was just beginning and there weren't 500 digital stations. If you wanted news and information your only choices were newspapers, radio, and local television... and television ruled the landscape.

That meant that newsrooms had more money to spend than they know what to do with. In some cases that led to terrific journalism ... but also led to a whole lot of crap.

Now it's nearly 2006. The landscape has changed forever. We recently added up the shares for all of the local stations doing news at 6:00 p.m. in San Francisco and it totaled about 10% of the overall audience. If people want information, they have a zillion sources to get it exactly when and how they want it. That's what Media 2.0 is all about.

Television is the ultimate 1.0, 'We talk, you shut up and watch' industry. That means the business model of local television news is fundamentally out of date. It's based on the concept that you're going to wait until 6:00, then we'll show you some things you may or may not care about, show you some commercials, show some more stuff you may or may not care about, show you some more commercials by which time it's quarter after the hour and lucky you, Scott, now we'll tell you the weather. Of course, now you get the weather when you want it online or on the Weather Channel or by RSS or...

So now we have a choice as an industry. We can sit around like many of the people quoted in this article, break open the scrapbooks, and pine for the good ole days of local TV news' mythical golden era. Or we can try to create something new that makes sense within today's economics and that at the same time fixes many of the existing problems with the genre.

Ask anyone outside our industry and they'll tell you, local television news SUCKS. It's the same stories, told in the same way and the only things different from one station to another are the blonde and the graphics package. Despite all of the money they used to have, television news executives never really changed the format from "the guy at the desk with the box over his shoulder." Despite the extravagances of the old system, it was still just six crews covering the market on any given day... never taking risks... just getting the easy stuff... the crime and the regurgitated newspaper story from that morning.

The VJ concept is, to me, a good try at fixing that. We use the technology of today, small cameras, laptop editors, tech savvy people, to deploy VJ's around the market, to get to know stories and work territories like real reporters without the requirement that they turn stories everyday.

I went through a week's intensive training as a VJ. As you know, I was an on-air radio reporter, so the voice work didn't scare me. I'm a pretty good writer for broadcast. So that meant could I shoot the camera? Frankly, it's not my strong suit. Still, the training was sufficient that I can get a good image from it and while it's shaky sometimes, the storytelling I hope makes up for that. I'm linking to the stories that I've already turned so that you can judge for yourself.

While I'm turning occasional VJ pieces, my primary responsibility is the online side. I'm the manager in charge of both kron4.com and thebayareaistalking.com. We are just weeks away from a complete revision of kron4.com into a 2.0-friendly site, with aggregators and flash video and designed for RSS and multiple points of entry. We're adding blogs to give the VJs ways to get story ideas and feedback from the people in their regions. The Bay Area Is Talking is designed to position ourselves as the MSM outlet that gets this new world by listening to and supporting the conversation that's already going on in the blogosphere. Unlike most MSM blogs, it's not about how cool we are cuz we're in TV, it's about how cool the bloggers of the Bay Area are.

I hope I haven't gone on too long here, but as you can tell I'm passionate about this stuff. I believe that KRON is the most exciting place to be in local television news in the entire country. We are either going to save the industry, or drive the final nail in the coffin. Either way, it's a great place to witness history.

Sounds like it.

Here are a couple of the VJ reports that Brian referenced:

Splogging

BrainJams Unconference

Technorati tags: Web 2.0, TV News, Blogs, Websites, Journalism, Marketing, Television, Media, Home Video, San Francisco, KRON