An article in the New York Times this weekend announced that Christiane Amanpour will be hosting a daily news program on International next year.
I’ll ignore the obvious-for-this-blog question — when is Michael Ware going to get his own program?? — because I’m not at all sure he would even want one. But it does make me wonder anew about something that has been puzzling me for a long time.
Friday will be the third anniversary of the start of the website, and I am still surprised that CNN has not stepped up with better archiving for the work of its reporters. Not that I want to be put out of business, mind you — but I wonder why the work of television reporters is given less historical weight than that of print reporters. After all, every article that appears in Time is available online; why are the reports from CNN allowed to vanish into the ether?
Granted, it’s a daunting task. Perhaps at least the major issues could be archived — how about all the reports out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Surely this is something that will be studied for years to come; indeed, I have heard from many teachers and professors from different parts of the world who use my site in their classrooms. Shouldn’t this material be accessible? Or how about starting with the Senior International Correspondents? (I believe there are only three — Christiane, Nic Robertson, and Matthew Chance — although I may be overlooking some since we so rarely get international news here in the States anymore!)
Or how about giving the reporters themselves encouragement to start sites for their own work? Rather than banning personal websites, why not make it easy for them to have their work available? This isn’t something that will lose the company money, since there are not DVDs being released of this material. Let’s get it on the internet on a more permanent basis than what is now posted on CNN.com, which necessarily focuses on current news rather than archival records.
It may already be too late to do something on, say, all the work coming out of the Baghdad bureau throughout the war if CNN does not keep internal archives. There used to be a third-party company that provided copies of programs, although they folded that service earlier this year… had they charged less and made the programs available for download rather than utilizing the slow and expensive process of burning and shipping DVDs or videotapes, I’m sure they would have been more successful. (Around this time last year, I calculated that it would cost me something around $10,000 to get copies of all of Michael’s work. Although two of the three pieces I tried to order from them were not even available despite one being on the domestic network’s flagship evening program and the other a Breaking News story of some significance.)
This is not something that will make the company money, but it also wouldn’t cost much money, either. And it gives weight to the importance you yourselves place on the work you do. The students of the future will not go to a library to study history and current events; they will go to YouTube. Surely CNN can provide a better foundation than that? With all the inroads to online social networking, surely someone can see the value in displaying how good your people are at what they do? Jim Walton, Tony Maddox … someone?
