Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine posits the notion of high priced anchors being too homogenized and floats the idea of replacing them with more opinionated personalities. Money quote…

Is it still worth the money to have expensive anchors on TV? They supposedly added trust to the news, though Dan Rather burst that balloon. They also supposedly put a human face on the news — a voice. But they became so homogenized that they added no voice at all; they became background noise, Newsak. So imagine instead having various people giving us news with various perspectives. I don’t know whether that would work; we still like consistency and this, too, can create expensive stars (see: Bill O’Reilly). But I believe that the explosion of news will lead to a lessened dependence on high-priced faces.

I’m not sure I would agree with this entirely. While it is true that there has been a trend away from hard nosed anchor/journalists, particularly in cable news where looks seem to take a front seat to solid journalism backgrounds and incisive interviewing, I would argue that there are still anchors out there who either have their own voices or project what I like to call “authoritative confidence” in delivering the news which isn’t a skill that is easily learned (as evidenced by the glut of monotone anchors out there who are little more than glorified newsreaders). If I were to put together a (not at all definative) list of anchors who either have their own voices or have solid journalistic backgrounds which have translated well to TV it would include people such as Aaron Brown, Lester Holt, Peter Jennings, Brian Williams, Sheppard Smith, Elizabeth Vargas, Ashleigh Banfield, Jim Lehrer, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Jansing, John Siegenthaler, Harry Smith, Katie Couric, Dianne Sawyer, and Brit Hume.

Say what you will about the above list and I would acknowledge that some have their detractors for various reasons. But you can’t argue that they either haven’t put their own imprint on their news delivery or they don’t have strong journalistic backgrounds which come out during their broadcasts. You know what you’re going to get with these people. Whether a given person finds a particular anchors’ style and delivery agreeable or not is another matter but that, like a lot of things in life, depends on the eye of the beholder. But the viewing public is diverse enough in its tastes that they all can co-exist in the same medium. News organizations can’t put a high enough premium on talent like that because they rise above the usual anchor “background noise” which frequently inundates broadcast news.

So while I would agree with Jarvis that anchors have become homogenized to a great extent, I think there’s enough quality talent out there to differentiate from the “clones” so to speak, that the position of authoritative anchor will not die out anytime soon because News Organizations still recognize quality talent when they see it. And they will pay the money necessary to retain that talent.

Addendum: I thought about the Dan Rather comment for a while. I wasn’t originally going to say anything about it because Rather was on broadcast news and ICN isn’t about broadcast news really. But Jarvis’ implication came across to me that Dan Rather’s self-destruction lowered the bar for every organization including cable. So I decided to comment on it after all.

I don’t think Dan Rather “burst” anything other than Dan Rather and, by extension, CBS News (which already had issues regarding credibility among some sectors of the public). For example, did Dan Rather’s demise damage Brian Williams? Or Peter Jennings? Or Sheppard Smith? Or anyone else outside of CBS? The answer seems to be no.

One could argue that the viewing public is able to differentiate between what goes on with one network versus what goes on with other networks. Unlike say the media chattering class, which is always overreaching in predicting collateral damage when one network makes a mistake. And then there is Bloggerdom, which is somewhat compromised by its own self-serving agenda regarding the demise of “traditional news” and has a quasi dubious tendency to label each mistake as a watershed event in the death knell of the MSM, only to wind up being vexxed by the MSM’s continued dominance. This isn’t to say that Bloggerdom and the chattering class don’t have salient points regarding the MSM; just that they have a tendendy to overreach which I attribute to the inherent rivalry between Bloggerdom/the chattering class and the MSM. The same can be said of the MSM’s somewhat dismissive tone towards Bloggerdom. The former seems to argue that the latter’s day is done. The latter seems to argue that the former’s day hasn’t arrived. Reality is somewhere in the middle I think.