Today is the first day of the summer gathering of television critics in California. Members of the TCA meet twice-a-year to hear presentations from the TV networks, attend a few parties and hopefully snag a few exclusive quotes.

I'm not there and while I've written a great deal about the TCA in the past, I had some serious reservations about weighing in on the subject one more time. But after talking to some of my fellow critics at last week's Comic-Con, I'll give this subject one more shot.

To be blunt, I think the current TCA has outlived its relevance. This isn't to say that there shouldn't be an organization of TV critics, or that the current leadership is doing anything wrong. But the current arrangement doesn't reflect the massive sea changes that have hit the media industry in the past decade. The TCA is perfect for 1999. But in 2009, both the networks and the critics deserve something better.

The Television Critics Association exists to serve its membership of full-time TV critics, most of who do not live near the entertainment capitals of Los Angeles and New York. The twice-yearly TCA press tour, then, represents an unparalleled opportunity to gain access to the people who make television. The reporting our members do at press tour creates story material year-round as well as valuable face-to-face contacts with network executives, producers and actors.

The problem with that mission is that it was perfect for a time when the networks launched the majority of their new shows in the fall and each TV critic's audience was limited to the people who could physically buy their newspaper.

In that environment, stories and interviews could be held for months before publishing and no one was the wiser. Two hundred critics might all have the same quotes from the same panels, but the local readers never saw anything except what their local critic wrote. But with every critic's work as accessible as the closest computer, all of that repetition is noticeable to the readers and to the bosses of the critics. If everyone is essentially writing the same stories, then why bother to send anyone to the press tour at all? Why not just use coverage from one of the larger outlets and save that TV critic's salary?

As for the networks, they were able to front-load their publicity efforts into a two-week period in July and about ten days in January. It was a cozy, seamless machine and it worked pretty well until the rise of the Internet.

Many TV critics complain about the web, and bemoan the fact that every scrap of television news is now instantly disseminated the minute it's released. While that's true, that's always been the case for news in almost any other category. Sports writers don't have the luxury of hearing in July that their local team is going to trade someone in November, then hold the news until the date arrives. Financial reporters aren't afforded the luxury of preparing pieces on stock market crashes that won't take place for months.

So this instant gratification method of reporting is certainly frustrating. But there's no going back to that old way of television coverage. And attempts to convince the networks to hold news until the TCA is just bound to fail. Networks have moved into an almost 52-week-a-year schedule. And if the twice-a-year press tours can't reflect that, then it's the critics who will have to change.

When it comes to the networks, they certainly see the promotional challenges presented by these press tours. Every time I've written about them in the past, I hear from individual publicists and network executives who talk about their frustrations with the current system. But no network wants to be the first to completely drop their TCA presentations. So they simply dial back their time devoted to panels, offer up a few more set visits and hope for the best. For many networks, the bad press they would receive if they dropped the press tours still outweighs the annoyance of the tour.

Frankly, for most networks the TCA press tours offered a limited promotional boost even in the golden years. The critics tended to write the most about shows which least need the coverage. Everyone wants to be there for the HBO panels, but the smaller cable networks and second-tier broadcasters get scant appreciation. Most networks would be better served by focusing their attention primarily on less traditional outlets and individual critics who tend to write more frequently.

So given all of this, how should the TCA press tours be rebooted?

Since I'm not a TCA member, it seems presumptuous of me to tell them what to do. And I certainly am not going to try and speak for the networks.

But aside from my duties as a TV critic, I've spent a lot of time working with news organizations on how to optimize their coverage for a digital audience. I've worked at local TV stations where we've had to completely upend the way stories are written so they can easily and quickly be shared across a variety of platforms. I've had a lot of experience with disruptive news gathering and I think that experience is why I'm so fascinated with the TCA and with the way networks promote their shows.

I don't have any particular axe to grind in this discussion. But I've written so much about the TCA and network publicists because I know from personal experience how much the media landscape has changed. The current TCA is increasingly a relic from an older way of doing business. This doesn't mean they can't change. But it does mean that their window to do is shrinking every year.

The networks continue to shrink their commitments to the press tours and at some point, one or more will use the economy as an excuse and walk away completely.

It doesn't have to be that way. But if the changes we've seen in all sorts of other journalism fields are any indication, changes will come whether TV critics want them to or not.