Fox Only Network Providing Live Coverage of Iran

Inside the highly competitive world of cable television news, programming decisions taken in the middle of events like those now occurring inside Iran can lead to significant business advantages over the longer term. Audience spikes during a crisis inevitably contribute to audience growth even after public interest in the crisis passes.

The audience growth will include some converts who like what they see while the competitors are asleep at the wheel — thus the competitive advantage. Therefore, it is notable from a business perspective that for several hours on Saturday, Fox News Network was the only major American network providing live, continuous coverage of the escalating political crisis that is shaking Iran, not only in Tehran but in cities across the country.

Some will dismiss this programming decision, and the attendant investment that the network is making, as due to an ideological bias that competitors like CNN and MSNBC don’t share. If so, this is an example where having a point of view can be good for building your business.

Execs at CNN and MSNBC chose to go on auto-pilot when Fox went global. They aired canned programming about “money matters” and the like. (Perhaps apprehensive of the kind of criticism they got last Saturday for being absent from the story, CNN has since returned to the air with live programming as I write this post.)

Most of the coverage at both Fox and MSNBC is now focused on using photos and videos released by people inside Iran to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and additional social media. Both networks also bring their staffers who are monitoring social media sites on the air to evaluate the latest material.

All of this implies that a brand new business model is emerging in mass media — call it user-generated content, crowd-sourcing, social media, what have you. Anchors at both CNN and Fox are, therefore, reporting that story this evening — that a new business model is coming to life right before their eyes.

In this way, the cable giants are on-message with what we have been reporting the past week here at Bnet. In my many years as a journalist, I don’t recall so much attention being publicly given to our industry’s business model. Then again, the events unfolding before our eyes represent one of the most momentous political upheavals of modern times, and the first in the age of social media.

Once the outcome of the confrontation between Iran’s government and a significant portion of its population reaches a resolution, maybe someone will be able to tease out which came first — the chicken (Twitter) or the egg (Iranian uprising.) Either way you assess it, the media industry will never be the same.