Brave new world or not, “we know that people will sit back and watch or listen to things for at least 30 minutes,” Eklund says. The Internet will not change human nature such that nobody any longer wants to “relax, have a glass of wine, and watch the news.” If it doesn’t have to be the same news everyone else is watching, or at the same time, so much the better.
Douglas makes the argument from the perspective of a broadcast-news insider. “There will always be a place for free, over-the-air broadcast TV and local news,” he says. The problem lies not with the content or the format of the 10 o’clock news but with “the limitation of television as a medium,” which is that it can’t be personalized or customized.
As for the Internet, he says, the current model for finding news on the Web is “daunting, and not very efficient or satisfying.” Much time is wasted in hunting though oceans of sludge for “that one relevant nugget of information.” In many ways, a traditional TV news broadcast offers more convenience and utility.
The “next logical level,” Douglas argues, is to let the viewer decide which stories to watch and when. And to do it without having to sit through another erectile-dysfunction commercial—at least, until that becomes an issue.
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Paul Douglas Still Does the Weather Singular Logic isn’t the entrepreneurial Douglas’s only current venture. His abrupt exit from WCCO-TV in April helped jump-start yet another new business. A state-of-the-art weather-broadcasting studio under construction in Singular Logic’s Excelsior offices was expected to be finished in time for the June launch of an enterprise called WeatherNation. WeatherNation will offer localized video weather broadcasts to Web sites (including those optimized for mobile devices) and TV stations across the country. Most will be one- or two-minute snips for clients (newspaper sites, for instance) that want to provide forecasts for, say, fishermen in the Florida Keys or cabin-goers in Minnesota. WeatherNation differs from Douglas’s previous concept, MyCast, in providing video reports, and in being able to send them to any Web site, broadcaster, or mobile device. WeatherNation’s first client is La Crosse Technology in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a maker of handheld and backyard weather devices. Also envisioned as clients are small- and midsize-market TV stations that might incorporate WeatherNation reports into some or all of their regular newscasts. This could save the cost of hiring their own weekend or backup meteorologists—or any meteorologists at all. WeatherNation is structured as a separate corporate entity from Singular Logic, with Douglas as CEO. Singular Logic’s new CEO, Todd Frostad, will serve as president. Still, Douglas says, “there are synergies” between the two entities. Singular Logic’s on-demand advertising technology could be incorporated into WeatherNation’s services in the future. And the broadcast studio obviously could provide custom weather reports to support NoozMe, the Singular Logic service offering custom news, weather, and sports. |
