The 6 p.m. news as we know it today is woefully outdated, and the networks are to blame for its eventual demise, says Current CEO Joel Hyatt.
"They brought it upon themselves," Hyatt said, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. "There's been no innovation in forty years. I grew up on Walter Cronkite. And the only thing that ever changed on the evening news was his tag line, 'And that's the way it is.' If you asked my sons -- both of them are in their 20s -- to respond to the notion that somebody is going to tell you the way it is, it's like speaking Greek . . . It's just not the way a young generation is willing to receive its information."
Of course, Hyatt stands to win if the networks lose. Programming costs for Current TV, a user-generated video news network, are probably a fraction of traditional network news budgets. And as an added benefit, viewers tend to be far more engaged -- the user-made commercials that run on the channel tend to be more effective than Madison Avenue-produced ads, according to Hyatt.
