I have spent most of my spare seconds over the past few days grinding my teeth over a post on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog that hailed a daily noon webcast by The Newark Star-Ledger as the pretty much the second coming of video journalism. Why? It seemed mostly because it was done by that bastion of progressive thinking in journalism–a newspaper! “Ledger Live” features a no-nonsense approach to video news presentation, a youngish looking guy at a desk in the corner of the paper’s newsroom delivering news stories produced by freshly trained newspaper reporters armed with video cameras.

For this, Jarvis gushed “I have seen the future, and it’s in Jersey.” I might have been able to stomach Jeff’s breathless pronouncement, were it not for the fact that Jeff used to work for paper and it’s owner and then when the Lost Remote blog then teed up the topic and some broadcast television types let it rip on the “Ledger Live” webcast, it prompted Jeff to postscript back on his own blog– “Let get this straight people, Local TV news sucks. It is no model for what newspapers or anyone should do in video online. It’s cheesy. It’s unbearable. I’m delighted that local TV news priests don’t like what the Ledger did. That’s best indication of success I can imagine.”

Well as usual, everybody seems to have missed most of the points. So I’ll make a few that I haven’t seen so far.

Good for the Star-Ledger I say. Anyone, and I mean anyone, who tries something new deserves some praise for taking a risk in a world that is becoming more risk unfriendly by the day. Unless you have wooed the venture capitalists with some silicon snake oil, convincing anyone that “old media” can do anything new is next to impossible. Yes the production of “Ledger Live” could use some help from some experienced television hands, probably in much the same way that if a group of television news types tried to put out a newspaper, they might be able to learn from folks who have putting news on the presses for more than a day or two. (Why is it that the thinking is that everybody who can hold a camera can make good television, but not everyone who can hold a pencil can be a “real” journalist?)

BTW, newspapers doing video? It isn’t all that new an idea. Tribune’s Orlando Sentinel had newspaper reporters on television as part of Time Warner Cable’s “Full Service Network” (an early on-demand cable experiment) way back in the early 90s. The folks at the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas have been doing news on their own cable television channel for longer than they have been putting news on the internet, which they have also been since 1995.

Of course the only people even slightly more paranoid about their future than newspaper folks (including their bearded pundits) would be television news types. So the race to dump all over the “Ledger Live” was kicked off by Lost Remote’s Don Day, who pronounced the effort in Newark as “another boring webcast”, which wasn’t completely wrong–but it sounded like a knee-jerk reaction to the effort. Terry Heaton now has played the part of Rodney King in all of this by woefully pointing out that the television types were quick to dump on the newspaper sticking an online toe in the once exclusive lake of television news, and confirming the worst image of the Soviet-bloc thinking by pointing out “this continuing mindset that only broadcasters can do television or do television right.” I respect Terry (hell, I still respect Jeff and all the players in this little skirmish) but you can almost hear the plaintive wail, “Can’t we all just get along?”

News flash: What the Newark Star-Ledger is doing is NOT, I repeat NOT television news. It’s a video webcast. Will it hasten the death of television, or in more specific terms, the death of local television news? Not really–that seems to be happening on it’s on, despite the efforts of many talented people who are trying to figure out just what the fickle public, awash in media choices really wants these days.

Are newspapers still sore about broadcasters daring to do news from way back in the 20’s when they tried to keep radio stations from accessing the Associated Press wires? Nah, that couldn’t be why there is still a two class system of members in the AP, one of newspapers and another of broadcasters, could it?

Saying local television news sucks is pretty much like saying that the only thing worth doing with any local newspaper is to line the bottom of a bird cage. Seriously? That’s the best we have–a school-yard bout of name calling about who is more worthy to be deemed “journalists of the future”? It’s as if we were all wearing chefs hats and aprons, and were standing in for Gleason and Carney, stammering through that classic “Honeymooner’s” episode. This kind of verbal jousting is going on, while media owners are figuring out how many heads will have to roll to preserve some kind of profit margin that will keep Wall Street from devaluing and delisting their companies faster than the major airlines have gone into their tailspin. And isn’t it funny how the whole “converged newsroom” craze of a few years ago, where newspaper, television and online journos living and working in the same newsroom hasn’t produced a way to stop the madness–for any of the combined outlets?

The best barometer of where things stand today is in the shuffle going on here in Connecticut amongst the Tribune properties now owned by Sam Zell. Zell’s army–led by one-time media maverick Randy Michaels, has swung the ax at The Hartford Courant–whacking 60-plus jobs and 25 percent of news pages, This as co-owned Trib tv station WTIC-TV is hiring over two dozen new staffers for its newsroom as it begins expanding daily television newscasts from three to eight (or more) hours a day.

So Jeff, yes–Local TV news may suck (in your humble opinion) but its still making money. And in many markets, it is now a local TV station’s website that is seeing more traffic growth and longer visit times than other media owned websites. Maybe that’s because there is more video available on a TV station’s web home–but then it would only make sense that newspapers would be pushing more into the video world, wouldn’t it?