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If you have been paying attention at all the last few years, you know that newspapers have entered the video business, big time. Most major newspapers now include video on the home page of their websites and many are using their reporters to write and voice stories.
There is one big problem: almost none of these people know how to read a story so that it is more exciting, or even better, than that cobbled together by the media lab of a sixth grade class. The voicing is universally flat, boring and uninteresting. They keep right on trying, day after day just the same.
Most likely, there is a kind of reverse snobbery going on here. Since newspaper reporters have been raised for the last fifty years to hate television and “television people”, not being able to do a television style report is a badge of honor. Or, reverse honor. You show you are still a real newspaper reporter at heart, even if management forces you to do new things you don’t like, by not learning how to do them properly.
I spent my whole daily reporting career with newspaper people over my shoulder, usually looking at me with disrespect and unmeasurable contempt (some of them were my friends, too, at the same time). The assumption was the television and radio reporters weren’t real reporters, but pretenders who got most of their story ideas, even their story lines, from newspapers (that was partly true because newspapers have such larger staffs than broadcast outlets that they cover more stories better).
In any case, the newspaper guys and gals are getting their comeuppance now. I will tell you this: I am a better pure reporter and news writer than these guys are at trying to do my old job. It turns out, after all, that there really was something significant to being a broadcast reporter, that however rushed the staffing and demands of broadcast made us, we actually were doing something that not everyone, especially newspaper people, could do or do well. Maybe that was why they hated us in the first place.
It is quite true that the good voices and nice appearance of television reporters and anchors can put a patina on professionalism on a shoddy product that makes it merely seem to be worthwhile. Yes, the pig is still a pig, even with lipstick, or whatever makes it look good for a moment. But there is more to television news than the facade, even though many people don’t want to admit it and countless newspaper and magazine stories have been written attacking television reporting.
The best reporters in television have a rare combination of reporting ability, writing talent and broadcasting skills to make it all come together on the air, often live and with developments coming in at the moment. In broadcasting, the reporters are much more deeply involved in the process of pushing and pulling the story together to put it into a presentable package. It is much different than handing in your copy and having an editor yell at you. Video integration, the editing and organizing of stories, is a hands on, all-in process in television and a lot of people would simply be lost trying to handle so many tasks at once. In many cases, broadcast people have to act as their own editors, finding and correcting errors on the fly, even live during a newscast. A good news anchor can find a mistake in the copy and either correct it verbally or read around it, without the viewer at home even noticing that anything intruded into the program.
Newspaper reporters are, still, more qualified as pure reporters because they are given, in many cases, more time to develop stories and, on breaking events, can draw on the work of many others to file a single, unified news story. “The best version of the truth” that comes out of radio or television reporting is often a truncated and misinterpreted version of the truth. Why would anyone with any intelligence and sincere dedication to the reporting craft willingly work in broadcast? Because, for one thing, they discovered along the way that they had a talent for doing this particular job. Now, it is the turn of newspaper reporters to learn that this means something.
Doug Terry, 8,17.10
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