Charlie Rose does these kind of long form interviews. Problem is, if you aren't interested in the interviewee, you click off the interview pretty quick.

I haven't watched the uncut web version of the Maddow/Stewart interview yet, but I think the broadcast version was pretty intact.

Rachel really seems to defend that she isn't really a news reporter, she's a news analyst. She says she see's her job as to take the news of the day, aggregate it, and wrap it with commentary and a point of view. She also states in the interview, correctly, that there are plenty of places people can get straight news (newspapers, internet, magazines, etc.)

I almost have to agree with her.

Course, if like for many American's TV is their primary source of news, then yeah, it's easy to identify with Stewart's position that TV is doing a crappy job of doing news.

TV though, is inherently an emotional medium, telling things from a visual and emotional point of view is what the medium does best. It's hard to hold mass attention in linear video medium for long periods if you don't appeal with imagery and emotions.

If they were to go into a 10 to 20 minute in depth report on something, more often than not I'd probably just switch the channel because the topic probably wouldn't interest me.

What would work better, is not TV news, but Video news arranged on an internet experience like below.

Longer form pieces in a scroll that I could easily start, stop and skip to the next.

Now the above, while it works visually, is still the same crappy content that is on TV for the most part, but fill this format with good longer form content from a range of sources that I pick and i'd think you'd have something. (Youtube can do this with subscriptions, but they really don't have all the content.)

Sortof like Daily Show sends you to the net to see the extended interview, I'd really like a video rss feed from multiple sources, so that I could have my own custom news. Ideally I could vote it up or down too which would help surface it in my friends feeds as well.

It will get there, then the 24 hour news pundits won't be back to back amplifying conflictonators, they'll just be a scattering of voices mixed into my more general/balance feed.

I use posterous sometimes, cause it's easy, but my full blog is here

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