THE SECRET OF FOXNEWS ACCORDING TO JEFF JARVIS

FoxNews is 10 years old this week and Jeff Jarvis explains why it is a success:

I had a ding moment about FoxNews in 2003 when CNN’s Jeff Greenfield interviewed me about bloggers.

He came trailing a show producer, a field producer, a cameraman, and a soundman, plus unseen editors behind the scenes.

I’d done such segments over the years and never thought anything of it — this is how the pros do it, this is how TV is made — until I came to contrast this with FoxNews, which didn’t have armies of field producers and produced pieces.

That’s when I saw the true genius of Roger Ailes, which had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with money.

Ailes was creating a third cable news network with little money and so he built it around not producers and their pieces but around conversation and personality.

It made the news a helluva lot cheaper to make; it was, as it turns out, a lot more compelling (or entertaining or enraging, if you prefer).

And it gave TV news a voice. This wasn’t the artificially inseminated humanity of network anchors or local news morons.

This was opinion and sometimes passion. And it worked. It drew a huge audience; it made money; it set agendas in both politics and media.