One thing that I believe media companies need to change in their approach to delivering news and information is their relationships with the viewers, and how easy the access is to make that relationship. When news is beings delivered you are giving the employees of the news team’s names and their job descriptions. Then it goes on into the news where these people that you have never met are telling you what is going on in the local area around you. Some people might not care who these people are, but if they got to know them better, then maybe they would listen more, or even more benefits could result. Media companies are, however, trying to make an effort to do this. You can go online to some news channel sites and look up information about the people who work there. The problem is that this information is not always on the home page.
Take WQAD for example. On their home page at http://www/wqad.com/ , they provide a lot of information about the top stories, the weather, and even provide access to WQAD’s Facebook, Twitter, and mobile apps for your phone. Now these are good sources of information to get to know the news station better, but it doesn’t really focus on the people that are doing all the work to get you the news. There is a page that does give descriptions of the news anchors, reporters, sports guys, and meteorologists, however, you have to go through two different links on the page to get there, and it is not very clear at first how to get there. This is something that needs to change. The homepage should include the information about the workers, and it should be clearly telling us that it is what it is.
Now after looking at the different links that talk about the employees, I noticed that it only talked a little about who these people were. The information provided is not really enough for viewers to really get to know who these people really are. WQAD needs to use one of their original ideas with Facebook and Twitter, and have each of the employees put there profile pages and Twitter pages on as links next to their names. With these two social networks, people can really get to know who the people delivering the news to them really are. Also, with the socialization between viewers and reporters, new stories can be talked about or found from anywhere or anybody. If a reporter has many different friends on Facebook, he or she can look through the social network and see if there is anything interesting that deserves to be put onto the news. Twitter also will be a good tool for reporters to look through. People may put up weird or interesting events that have happened recently in the local area.
After looking at both WHBF (http://www.whbf.com/) and KWQC’s (http://ww.kwqc.com/) websites I found that they were very similar in the approaches they took to give the viewers information about there news teams. They did not include this information on the home pages, and there were on different links that were not clearly labeled. I truly believe that if these media companies changed this aspect of their delivery of news, many more viewers will watch. Also, viewers will watch with a better respect for the employees who deliver the news now that they have been able to get to know the news team better. The news channels will also benefit from the extra sources that they will now be able to use. With local people using different social networks that are connected to people in the media companies, news teams can report more information, especially information that viewers can highly relate to.