VITAMEDIAS
Embedded in Iraq: The high cost of the war to the 24-hour news networks
Before the war began, CNN spent over $1m on security training. Now the running costs are piling up. It costs $1,500 a day merely to link a channel up to a geo-stationary satellite from a phone on the ground.
CNN is understood to be spending $1m a day covering the war, and to have put aside a $25m war-chest. “But it is clearly going to cost more than that,” comments one CNN insider. John Stack, vice-president of news-gathering at Fox News, which has just over 100 staff in the region, says his war budget runs into “tens of millions of dollars.” The BBC, which has over 200 people in the Gulf, feeding both its 24-hour news service in Britain and BBC World, its international channel which is running non-stop news, is said to have earmarked some £10m ($15m) for the war. Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, estimates that the additional cost will run to roughly $40m-60m for the American news networks, about 10% of their annual news budgets [...]
The American networks could be forgoing some $3m-7m a day in deferred and cancelled advertising.
The implication of all this is that some news networks may have to find ways to share costs.
Networks Add Up War Cost, NBC at $50 Million: Goldman Sachs has estimated that, depending on the network, the war could cost up to $20 million a day. Tom Wolzein, a Sanford Bernstein analyst and former NBC News executive, pegged the potential cost increase to network news divisions at anywhere from $40 million to $60 million for the year.
But those forecasts were in the early days of the conflict [via Ponto Media]
The televisual war: more than 500 journalists are “embedded” - that is, living with the troops, filming and reporting the grunt's eye view. Nearly 1,500 more journalists are covering the war independently. This changes the balance between reporters and the armed forces [...]
Now, the problem is that so many journalists are broadcasting snippets from the front, it is hard to get a broad, accurate reading of what is happening. The Pentagon had hoped the process of embedding would educate correspondents in the realities of war and reduce their tendency to obsess about disasters. So far, the results have been mixed.