24-Hour Cable News Will Grow; That's Good   

It may still have a small audience, but a profitable, big role in journalism.

Ted Turner is losing his unique status as the maverick entrepreneur of cable and air, now that others are joining him in his own personal mediaspace and now that he is merging CNN with megacorp Time Warner.

ABC is the latest to announce that it will start an all-news cable channel. When it does that next year, it may be the first of the old major networks to get there. NBC has announced its plans. So has Rupert Murdoch, who has much less to bring to the news table and substitutes mutterings about the need for a conservative 24-hour news channel because of the "liberalism" of CNN.

Let there be applause, then, for ABC in 1997, if it has gotten its potentially news-corruptive connection with Disney under control by then. A big "if." And a key question remains: whether ABC and the others will staff their 24-hour news operations on the cheap, using their aces (in ABC's case, Jennings, Donaldson, Sawyer, Walters, the nonpareil Brinkley and a few others) but giving separate 24-hour chores to low-wage journalists. On another level, CNN has proved this can be done, and sometimes it has been embarrassed accordingly.

Still, said the journalism dean, all this looks like jobs for journalists. Real ones. Let us hope that many of the the newsroom round-the-clockers will do actual reporting and editing, not just processing.

And hark! The return of the lobster shift, perhaps the quickening of the second and third shifts, maybe even the awakening of those lucky people who work "regular" hours. (Remaining a romantic, I perhaps really believe this. I do know that nearby bad-coffee-and-steak-sandwich joints for the overnighters will be no more, gone with the copyboys, gone forever, gone with the wind...)

The coming of more 24-hour news is good for General Electric (and, it now would seem, good for Bill Gates) and for the country: more voices, more angles; although, of course, more mistakes. (As for the last of those: This profession is, after all, more professionally hazardous, difficult and complex than rocket science, brain surgery or carburetor-fixing.)

But this hallelujah must be put in perspective. CNN probably averages less than one percent of the households who are connected and could watch, rising much higher on special occasions such as The Trial of the Century. (What if Jesus had had this kind of coverage?)

Even so, 24-hour cable news is inexpensive and can make money. That's the bottom line of the bottom line. A sub-revolution may bring us more local 24-hour cable news channels.

The impact on daily newspapers and broadcast news is not clear yet, given the modest size of cable news-watching. It may be good for the big newspaper-grounded companies.

Who else invests so heavily in news gathering and seems so well-prepared to jump into an enlarged sea of cable news and farther into cyberspace? As an example, the Orlando Sentinel, not a huge national newspaper, employs 370 reporters, editors and other professionals in its news-editorial work. It's a big content-provider.

Note to Mr. Donaldson:

Play it, Sam.