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The WashPost has a good story today, Monday, 2.8.10, about how television news is trying to get by with one-man-band news crews. Well, it  is actually more than that. Shoot. Report. Then, edit. Then load onto your PC. Then, transmit. Then, go live from your laptop. Then, fix dinner for the news anchor and weatherman. Well, maybe not the last one, but, heck, why not? Anything they can load on to a single person and get more action for the lowered pay.

Anyway, it is an interesting story. (Hey, Kurtz: more reporting, like this story, and less opinion, maybe?) The link is below my comments, which follow as posted on The Washington Post online:

I worked for almost two decades as a television reporter and news manager. Toward the end of that time, I tried to convince one of the networks that very small handheld cameras presented some major opportunities for more casual, intimate news coverage, but never was able to win the argument. I am pleased to see these points being made as part of this story. However, it should be noted that the loss from not having a professional camera person is great. I am trained to do both, but I don't like relying entirely on my own shooting, even though, on some occasions, I can get better results overall. There is no replacement for a professional shooter who does that and nothing else. These are truly separate jobs and functions.


There is another big problem with the "old way", however. A lot of camera people don't like their jobs and don't like the reporters they work with. It is a rare and wonderful thing to get a reporter/camera pair who are on the same wavelength and who compliment each other well on stories day by day. A significant number of camera and other technical people spend their whole careers fighting against their stations or networks and trying to dictate how and when they will work. I can understand their problems, because they are workers in a star maker business As one camera guy told me  once, a lot of camera people, particularly at the network level, like to believe and act like they are the police, the cops on the beat, keeping everything straight in the news business.

As for the results being overall better, phooey. A reporter cannot do both jobs, plus editing, and turn out higher quality work. It can't be done. I could see a reporter and a field producer or a reporter aided at key parts of the day by an editor or camera operator. The results might look better at some points, but reporting is about more than that. It is about details, facts and accuracy. Gradually, a reasonable method of pulling off the one man band might emerge, but it is going to take work and concentration, not self congratulations on downsizing news crews. The station general manager at channel 9 might have said, more correctly, the story can be better if you have an experienced, totally dedicated reporter/shooter and everything falls into place just  right. Would you want one-man-bands covering an event like 9-11?

The newer, small digital cameras are great and so is the associated gear you can load onto a laptop. But one important aspect of professionalism, in both equipment and personnel, is the fail safe margin that comes from(drum roll, please), being professional. That applies to the people, their background and the number assigned to a task and to the equipment they are using. A lot of the newer digital equipment is not designed for heavy duty news work and will break at terribly inconvenient moments. When you throw away the margin for error, you invite, first, times when things don’t work they way you need them to work and, second, potential disaster when everything starts to break or when the reporter is too busy with the other tasks to gather the required information.

MORE:

As for my own problems of working with camera crews, I know a lot of it had to do with the way I put together my stories. A lot of reporters have the script written in their head on the way to a news scene. Camera guys (they are mostly guys) generally want the reporter, acting as a producer, to tell them what the story angle is before they arrive at an event. I prefer to go and discover what the story is at the time, not write it ahead of time in my head. I want to be surprised. It makes for the best stories.

I always have figured if we, myself and the camera person, have already laid out what we are doing, shooting and interviewing, then there isn’t much room left for discovery, is there? To camera people, this approach can seem disorganized and wasteful and they can easily conclude, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing”. Hey, that’s part of the point: to leave oneself open to discovery. Yeah, it’s messy and sometimes causes a lot of trouble, but I think it puts the story first and the process second. Most camera people, and a lot of reporters, would rather get the safe story done and in the can than risk spending time on something that might not pan out or make their jobs more difficult.

When I go out these days with my own camera, I don’t have to translate my emerging vision of an event and then try to get someone else to buy into it. Nor do I have to run across a street and ask a camera person to please take a shot of this or that. Hey, I have found I am not bad as a shooter, I have my own strengths and weaknesses, but, again, there is no replacement for someone who has made shooting his or her life’s work and who is open, dedicated and hard working. Anyone who tells you there is, doesn’t know beans.

Doug Terry

THE LINK:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/07/AR2010030702506.html?hpid=news-col-blog

AN ADDITIONAL COMMENT:

The old style of television reporting was hard enough and it provided many opportunities to make mistakes and broadcast inaccuracies. After years of experience in news, I came to realize that the local reporter’s job on television is in many ways more difficult than that of network or a typical day for a newspaper reporter, who generally just turn in their copy and are done. In local television, you’re not just covering news, you are involved deeply in the process of turning news into an organized presentation. Adding all of these additional chores is a major overload. Having said all of that, I kind of like working alone myself. I think there is probably room for a mixture.

One of the very first places to go to one person shooting/reporting was NY1, the local news channel in NYC. I remember when they started (was it the early ‘90s?) and thinking that they would likely get someone killed on the streets of NY, either by robbers, muggers or just in a car crash into the reporter trying to shoot his own stand-up. If it ever happened, I never heard of it and NY1 continues to this day.

The real challenge in television going forward is not cutting back and saving money. It is, first, how to make the product more valuable overall, both to advertisers and viewers. Second, it is teaching investors and the stock market how to be happy with large profits instead of mega profits. Television station groups, like Gannett, need to find new ways to increase revenue, even outside of television and realize that the days of 30 to 50% profit margins, the days when a local station in a major market was considered a  “license to print money”, are over. Punishing the people who helped stations make all that money through the years is not the answer.

end

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