New Jersey television viewers who tuned into the newly created NJTV Sunday morning for the latest on Hurricane Irene instead saw the talking heads of the national political roundtable "McLaughlin Group" or Steve Adubato Jr. interviewing local journalists about politics. That's because the successor to New Jersey Network provided no live coverage of the storm until Monday night, when...
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New Jersey television viewers who tuned into the newly created NJTV Sunday morning for the latest on Hurricane Irene instead saw the talking heads of the national political roundtable "McLaughlin Group" or Steve Adubato Jr. interviewing local journalists about politics.
That's because the successor to New Jersey Network provided no live coverage of the storm until Monday night, when it devoted the half-hour news program "NJ Today: Summer Edition" to Irene’s aftermath.
The lack of live coverage outraged Assemblyman John Burzichelli (D-Gloucester), who said NJTV officials should be embarrassed.
"At a time when New Jerseyans needed to have a focus on New Jersey, we had to rely on New York and Philadelphia to fit us in where it was convenient for them," Burzichelli said Monday.
The politician’s anger grew yesterday, when he issued a statement further criticizing the network.
"Its absence was glaring and unacceptable during a time of great crisis," said Burzichelli, who has been critical of the state’s decision to allow WNET to operate the former NJN. "NJTV promised to focus solely on New Jersey, but residents got nothing from them during the hurricane."
Neal Shapiro, president and CEO of Channel 13/WNET, the parent company of the nonprofit organization that operates NJTV, defended the coverage, saying its nightly public affairs program, "NJ Today," ran bulletins every hour starting at 3 p.m. Saturday and continuing Sunday. Known in the industry as a "crawl," the station provided information about the storm while regular programming was broadcast.
"As we said in June, our video gathering capability and distribution wouldn’t be ready until after Labor Day," Shapiro said in a statement. "With the small staff we have, we were still able to devote Friday evening’s broadcast to preparations … and (Monday) night’s broadcast featured the aftermath."
Shapiro said Monday night’s half-hour program included reports from South Jersey, Camden, Newark and Hoboken. NJTV has six full-time employees, and officials expect that number to grow to 15. NJN had a staff of 130 full-time employees.
"We’re proud of the coverage of Hurricane Irene that we have provided so far with the resources we have," Shapiro said.
Most public broadcasters do not cover local news, but New Jersey’s public broadcaster has a different mission, said Ellen Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers University in Camden who studies public media.
"I think NJTV has a special situation, the expectations are higher and the needs are greater because there is no commercial station," Goodman said. "It has a mandate to do local. And stories don’t get much bigger than this."
New Jersey was hit by a weekend storm Dec. 26, a blizzard that rocked the state. NJN was still on the air at the time, and it covered the storm in a fashion similar to NJTV, using a crawl to update viewers but not bringing in the entire staff.
But Burzichelli said NJTV promised more and better coverage and he wondered whether the state is getting its money’s worth. New Jersey is giving NJTV more than $4 million in federal grants and lease payments as part of management contract with WNET.
"I have to question how that money is being spent and whether it’s time to end this experiment and find a way to return quality New Jersey-centric news to our residents," he said.
Calls to the governor’s office were not returned.
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