Jobs in website content and management

Today, there was an email telling me that KCBS and KCAL, the CBS-owned TV stations in Los Angeles, are hiring an Assistant Managing Editor for the website CBSLA.com. The job description includes the following:

• Supervise local editorial team by assigning work, editing stories and regulating workflow amongst website producers.
• Track engagement metrics to determine what stories are working and which ones are not, and making publication decision based on them.
• Collaborate with the national editorial counterparts on overall editorial site strategies by taking part in conference calls, communicating and carrying our corporate initiatives and putting together content plans around them.
• Produce daily content for CBSLA.com, including writing and editing text taken from scripts and wires, cutting and posting streamed video, optimizing imagery, creating slideshows and adapting other TV material for the Web.
• Writing original feature stories relating to travel, food, entertainment, etc. And performing basic editorial duties from time to time, relating to section, including maintaining editorial calendar, communicating with freelance writers and editing submitted work.

Wow, have times changed. It wasn't too long ago when TV and radio stations didn't have websites or didn't care about them. Today, websites are an integral part of a news organization with radio stations and newspapers putting video on their websites and even hosting "TV-style newscasts" on their websites. And for TV stations, the websites have become a 24/7 TV newscast "anchored" by simulcast of the regular broadcast TV newscasts and then additional video reports are added to the site for additional on-demand viewing.

It won't be long before web content not only mirrors broadcast radio and broadcast TV content for companies such as CBS, but web content will even surpass what is available over the airwaves. There are just more "channels" or content streams available via the web than there could ever be even with digital radio and digital TV stations.

And it appears that CBS is recognizing that.

By the way, it was about a year or so ago that CBS decided to consolidate the web content of all of its news outlets into CBSLA.com and that was done for both branding purposes as well as marketing and advertising-sales purposes. Instead of having KNX-1070 compete for audience and ad dollars with Channel 2's website and Channel 9's website, the content resources of the three are funneled to CBSLA.com allowing for a larger market presence and share which no doubt also increased ad revenue through the combined operation.

Look for more of this to happen... and look for more of these jobs as these broadcast companies realize that their web units require a different skill set. For example, the standard minute and a half TV report must be cut down to 30-seconds for web viewers and especially mobile web users. And complex TV graphics that are appropriate for a big screen TV at home need to be reduced for a laptop or wireless phone surfing the web.