An Afternoon with Tom Brokaw: In conversation with Geneva Overholser drew a packed crowd May 28 as television journalist Brokaw and School of Journalism director Overholser discussed topics such as the role of young people in the news industry.
"Young people — they're engaged in media," said Overholser, speaking at the Los Angeles Central Library as part of the ALOUD series. "In some ways they're reshaping journalism in very interesting ways."
Brokaw said media trends are shifting partly because the younger generation has a smaller attention span and many wouldn't read a multi-part story that in the past might have had a greater impact. Overholser disagreed, saying they consume media differently than older generations.
"This time in their lives is making (young people) stop and think they need to make some tough choices," Brokaw said. "Teach for America has more applicants than ever, and that's because they can't go to Wall Street anymore. ... Young people want to know which information is relevant, and that's a common ground."
Overholser asked Brokaw how long the evening news would survive, and he said the last nine months have shown not only a stabilizing in ratings, but a growth. He noted Katie Couric is in a distant third for evening news ratings, but Couric's show still has more viewers than popular TV personality Bill O'Reilly.
"The evening news is good to go for the foreseeable future," he said. "I don’t know how prominent it will be. It’s not going to be what it was, with people rushing home to see it. At the end of the day, the evening news is more in depth and more analytical so you have a better understanding of what you’ve been hearing about all day."
He said many Americans lately have been pretending what happens in the world doesn't count, but that it needs to change.
"It does count," he said. "The way you find out about it is daily journalism."
He also said daily journalism is the driving force behind blogs and news aggregators such as The Huffington Post.
"If we go away, what are they going to do?" he asked. "Without us, their economic model doesn’t work because they ride on our backs. We have to remind people that journalism is a necessary component of our lives."
He said it will be difficult to change the myth in the United States that information is free to produce. He said an upcoming interview about the 65th anniversary of D-Day with President Barack Obama in France will require a satellite truck in Paris, a crew in Paris and a crew in Normandy.
"It's not free," he said. "It's expensive, but it's what we should be doing."
"We stood around generationally with what could only be described as a benign arrogance about what they were saying when they were saying it. We should have had a far more aggressive attitude toward that. We needed to be much more aggressive about the pricing model of it. We could have monetized it on a scale at a reasonable number."
He said in the future, people may have to pay for information online.
