One of the features of Sites’s online reporting is the reader and viewer feedback posted on the site. (Padavick says he sees the venture “as sort of the bridge between the mainstream media and the blogosphere.”) A response to his Iranian coverage lectured Sites that his “trip in Iran was like a blind man with no knowledge.” For his part, the correspondent readily acknowledges that the biggest problem he faces is “the very steep learning curve” required in many of the countries he visits. “You do make errors and you omit things,” he says. “We want to be transparent.”
Sites says that his Yahoo! tour of duty has shaken his own perceptions about the world. “Before I came on this thing, I thought I’d seen everything,” he says. “I haven’t. I’m definitely humbled by the expression of people being able to overcome their suffering.”
It helps that he sustains a journalist’s open mind. “I don’t have a political agenda. I do have an agenda to let people see what I’m seeing,” he says. “If you get that privilege and you don’t share that privilege, you’re an asshole.”
Anchor duet at ABC
While most of us are still burning the early-evening oil at work or watching Everybody Loves Raymond reruns, that creakiest of big-media dinosaurs — the nightly network news broadcast — is changing dramatically right under our noses.
NBC, the only network that actually had a succession plan in place, made the most conventional move, replacing Tom Brokaw with Brian Williams, who, like his predecessor, has a likable everyman kind of appeal, even if he tilts a little more NASCAR and Middle America than Brokaw did. CBS, who temporarily filled Dan Rather’s anchor chair with graybeard Bob Schieffer — and was pleasantly surprised by the results — is making big noises about taking a very expensive gamble on the biggest news/infotainment superstar out there, Katie Couric. For better or worse, Couric would instantly change that network’s news brand.
But while CBS dreams of big changes, ABC — whose hand was forced by the death of Peter Jennings — has already made them. Not only did they opt for the dreaded co-anchor duo — selecting young and telegenic Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff, they’ve also shaken up the old studio formula by frequently sending one, if not both, of their anchors on the road. (This week Woodruff is in the Middle East while Vargas stays in New York.)
“This is more of a change than people appreciate, really, what we’re trying to do fundamentally,” the Associated Press recently quoted ABC News president David Westin as saying. “It will take some time for people to get used to it and understand it.”
The formula has some flaws. Last week, Vargas was in Los Angeles and Woodruff was in San Francisco to co-anchor a newscast that led with the ominous news of Osama bin Laden’s new warning about terrorist attacks in America. That was an old-fashioned “big news” story that should have come out of New York, or maybe Washington. But there was Vargas in an LA studio and Woodruff talking from some sunny location in picturesque San Francisco. The presentation seemed to lack the requisite gravitas. That, we can pretty much chalk up to bad luck.
