Cable news has functioned as the harrowing background soundtrack to much

of 2015 and 2016. In covering terrorist attacks, protests against the police and
a presidential election whose daily antics seem tailor-made for the overheated
ethos of cable, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC have all wonhuge increases in
viewership.
But as they say on cable, weve just gotten word of some breaking news and
its not pretty. If youre watching on mute (which says something by itself,
right?), you can consult this helpful Chyron: Facebook to Swallow TV News,
Just as It Has Everything Else.
That, anyway, is the best way to interpret what happened last week, when the
biggest story in the country was dominated by live-streaming apps made by
Facebook and Twitter.
Historians of television news often cite the 1991 Gulf War as the
breakthrough moment for cable a conflict that proved there was a market
for round-the-clock coverage of the sort that CNN was offering. For most
humans, last weeks police shootings, the subsequent protests and the mass
assassination of police officers in Dallas were a tragic commentary on modern
American race relations. But for that subspecies of humans known as
television executives, the events might also have functioned as an alarming
peek at a radically altered future.
What we saw last week was live streamings Gulf War, a moment that will
catapult the technology into the center of the news and will begin to
inexorably alter much of television news as we know it. And thats not a bad
thing. Though it will shake up the economics of TV, live streaming is opening
up a much more compelling way to watch the news.
Consider the video posted by Diamond Reynolds, who began streaming on
Facebook Live right from the car in which her boyfriend, Philando Castile,
had just been shot by a police officer. Or the horrific scene as the gunman in
Dallas began his rampage, captured and instantly broadcast on Facebook by a
photographer named Michael Kevin Bautista. Or the clip by DeRay
Mckesson, one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement,
whocaptured his own arrest in Baton Rouge, La., this weekend on
Periscope,Twitters live app.
These scenes suggest that streaming apps dont just have the potential to
bring us stories more quickly than TV can. They also greatly expand on the
kind of stories you normally see. Streaming news stretches our collective
point of view, showing us perspectives from people who might otherwise have

been ignored by the news, and from places where television cameras would
never have happened to be.
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I think we saw last week that Facebook Live could become the most
intelligent cable news network ever built, said Jonathan Klein, a former
president of CNN, who now runs a digital media company called Tapp. With
more than 1.65 billion users, he said, Facebook effectively has one and a half
billion news bureaus to capture news, and theyre capable of doing things that
a cable news network could only dream of doing.
Yes, Mr. Klein is speculating about Facebooks potential path. At this point,
neither Facebook nor Twitter is anything close to a TV news network.
Facebook Live was started just a few months ago in partnership with several
news organizations (including The New York Times, which receives payments
from Facebook for producing Live videos). Until last week, it was best known
for gonzo journalism involving weird tricks with food. Twitters live service,
Periscope, is older, but it too is better thought of as a series of one-off clips
than a comprehensive source of news.
But you can bet both services will expand their horizons. Twitter announced
this week that it was streaming the Democratic and Republican conventionsin
partnership with CBS News. It also announced a plan to stream Bloombergs
TV shows, and it has a deal to show National Football League games later this
year.
Its not clear yet what shape Facebooks plans for Live will take, especially
since the company has been reluctant to think of itself as a news company.
Yet it wouldnt take many deals and product changes to turn Facebook into a
worthy substitute for one of the cable news networks.
Soon you might log on to Facebook and see, right at the top of your feed, a
collection of videos produced by professionals and amateurs and tailored to
your interests breaking news and analysis related to topics you like, all of
which load instantly in your feed, ad-free, and without any of the constant,
interminable waiting for stuff to happen that characterizes traditional cable
news.

As a business matter, this might be a danger for TV. As Matt Rosoff explained
last week in Business Insider, live coverage was supposed to be the industrys
steadiest bulwark against the internet. Thanks to online networks like Netflix,
people are dropping cable subscriptions as if they were toxic; one of the few
remaining reasons to keep paying a monthly fee is to watch live news and
sports, which are both difficult to get online.
Now that rampart is disappearing. If you turned on one of the cable news
networks last week, you would have most likely seen videos lifted straight
from streaming apps playing in endless televised loops. If you watched for
more than a few minutes, you would have been forgiven for wondering,
Wait, if all this video is coming from Facebook, why am I watching TV?
Then theres TV newss demographic cliff. People who regularly watch cable
news are old. According to statistics compiled at the end of last year, CNNs
prime-time audience was the youngest in cable news with a median age of
59. The median age of Fox Newss prime-time audience is 68. (TV news isnt
alone here. The median age of a subscriber to The New York Timess digital
edition is 54; for print subscribers, its 60. But of course, we all know that
with age comes sophistication.)
In the past, an aged audience might not have raised red flags, because it was
generally the case that younger people grew into their parents news habits.
But as online alternatives improve, the less likely that is to happen.
The next generation just doesnt ever intend to watch the 6 oclock or 11
oclock or any other newscast, said Andrew Heyward, a former president of
CBS News who is now a visiting researcher at the MIT Media Lab.
Its possible to make too much of the threat that live streaming poses to TV
news. Citizen journalism has gotten a lot of attention from techno-optimists
in the last decade, but blogging, tweeting, podcasting and everything else
havent replaced traditional journalism so much as they have expanded its
tone and range. Thats likely to happen on TV too; streaming apps wont kill
CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, but as the apps become more popular, they will
force TV news providers to shift their approach to coverage.
The more chaotic and unstructured the world of onl