By Steve Fink, Managing Editor WCBSTV.com

Earlier this month I attended a panel at Manhattan’s Paley Center for Media called “Television Writing In The Internet Age,” a discussion that brought together four brilliant bigwig brains behind four brilliant bigwig shows: Rory Albanese from The Daily Show; Jim Downey from Saturday Night Live; Al Jean from The Simpsons; and Peter Tolan from Rescue Me.
 
I found the chat entertaining, yet very disappointing and unconvincing at the same time. It failed to live up to its name, and perhaps should have been re-titled as, “Television Writing, And Hey, Go Shove It, Internet!”
 
Apparently, digital media to these guys is about as useful as a “Don’t Honk” sign in Times Square.
 
The writers spent the better portion of their 90 minute banter downplaying the influence of the digital era and, at some points, unintentionally insulting enthusiasts like myself who hoped to gain some insight into how they’ve adapted to today’s overtly observant audiences.
 
“The Internet, other than porn, is not a positive place,” said Albanese, explicitly stating that digital media simply “isn’t a factor in any of our heads right now.”
 
In other words, our opinions, our comments, our creative responses, make little, if any difference at all to these guys.
 
Really?
 
I attended the discussion with an old friend who also works in the business, a significantly less-enthusiastic digital geek than me, but someone eager to learn from the talented group. She agreed with me that perhaps the biggest problem with the panel was that moderator Virginia Heffernan, a TV and digital content critic for The New York Times Magazine, struggled to connect with the foursome. She failed to engage them, though not without a lack of sincere effort, in a conversation that we imagined the rest of the audience had also come to hear: How do our digital voices affect you guys?
 
Yet time and time again, each writer adamantly declared: “they don’t!”
 
Downey even chimed in early on that he didn’t even own a computer. Why was he even there then?
 
Their negative response left Heffernan at times rambling on in rehashed attempts to get just one of them to jump up in glee and praise our dear Web, beholding the digital era as an inspirational information renaissance. My friend and I squirmed in our seats in an uncomfortable awkwardness, tugging on our imaginary turtlenecks for air.
 
At one point, Albanese even cut the skeptical Heffernan off and joked, “Just tell us what it is you want us to say and we’ll say it!”
 
To Heffernan’s credit, her brightest moment came when she boldly stated she didn’t believe that our digital media – our constant Tweets, our Facebook fan pages, our viral YouTube spoofs, our radical blogs – didn’t at least “semi-consciously” affect how television programs are constructed today.
 
And I have to agree. Yeah, the digital era is loud, it’s obnoxious, and it’s unavoidable. If you want to look at it in a negative light, fine. It’s an obese hairy guy in a speedo sunbathing at the beach. It’s a meddling mother-in-law. It’s a backseat driver. Avoid it all you want, but today’s digital generation knows how to be heard, knows how to be seen, and any TV exec who opts to put the digital channel on mute needs to get with the times, or in this case, ‘net with the times.

Albanese described listening to digital media users as reading comment posts on blogs or viral videos and finding himself engaged in a frustrating waste-of-time comment war with an anonymous user masked under the screen name “Purplepantsguy.” I guess to him, at the end of the day, we’re all just random, useless, Purplepantsguys.
 
I don’t think social media users or online bloggers necessarily expect TV writers to write specifically to their liking or mold a segment of a program because the writer asked them to. Each exec agreed that they’re not thinking about viral videos when putting together a program, and yeah, that makes sense. But why not listen to your digital audience or, at the very least, find a way to creatively respond and play along?
 
We are seeing the change in newsrooms today. Our newscasts are interactive. We promote our Facebook fan pages for feedback. We ask our followers to tweet us and we, in turn, tweet them back. The voice of the audience is louder than ever, and digital media enables all of those voices to be heard. They’re there to be taken advantage of, to say to the audience, “Hey, we’re listening to you. And we appreciate you.”
 
In TV news, I think we’ve hopped on board, and I think it’s working. We’re still learning how to listen, and we’re still learning how to turn the digital voice into both a meaningful and a profitable one.
 
The panel was called “Television Writing In The Internet Age” for a reason. We’re busy behind-the-scenes too, TV execs. And we may not fully get it quite yet either, but hey, at least we’re listening. We have to.
 
Purplepantsguy wouldn’t have it any other way.