Boston TV Station Tweets About the AFCCG Using an Old Aaron Hernandez Photo
A news service that provides WCVB some digital content accidentally posted a pic of Aaron Hernandez in connection w/Pats AFC champ win on our social media. It’s embarrassing & unacceptable. We apologize & are working w/team to correct so something like this never happens again.
— WCVB-TV Boston (@WCVB) January 22, 2018
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This is one of those Old Media vs. New Media moments that begs the question: How do these outlets still stay in business? I mean, we focus on how newspapers and magazines operate on the old model that delivers content on harvested trees days after they happened in a world were everyone has a device in their pocket that instantly tells them everything. But we forget that local TV news still exists. And not just to cover fires, town council races and weather events, they still actually try to cover sports like it’s 1977 all over again and Champ Kind is giving San Diego the score of the Padres game.
I feel bad for saying this, because I’m friendly with a few of the Boston sports anchors. But make a Venn diagram with two circles. One of the people who still get there sports coverage from the local sports news anchor and the other of Twitter users. What would you say the subset of those two is? One, maybe two percent? My mother-in-law still gets her updates from the 11 o’clock news and literally only has the Irish Rose’s number programmed into her phone. So there is literally no point to Channel 5 in Boston Tweeting out that the Patriots won because everyone who doesn’t know that already isn’t on Twitter. And yet they pay some outside firm actual money to post this stuff for no earthly reason.
And just a head’s up both to all the stations who still waste their money on this and the “news services” they pay to do it, your target audience can handle almost anything. We’ve been beaten bloody with Spygate, Deflategate, talk of rifts and cliffs, fake news, made up scandals, suspensions, stolen draft picks and the whole country hating us. The one thing we are a little sensitive about is the guy convicted of murdering one guy who probably murdered three and then hung himself in a jail cell. You could literally have picked a picture of any other player from any other Jaguars game other than this guy from 2011 (the MHK patch should’ve been a dead giveaway) and no one would have noticed. Instead you redrew the big, indelible scarlet letter “A” for AHern that we’d just as soon forget all over this franchise. Just to tell your audience news nobody didn’t already know. But keep up the good work. In whatever time your industry still has left.