I had a chance to look over the memo from ITN’s Dave Man­nion on the return of News At Ten. Without repeat­ing it in full, it offers import­ant insights into the think­ing of one of Britain’s best tele­vi­sion journ­al­ists.

We have been given a prime time slot. Our job is not simply to split the audi­ence, but to win that slot, deliv­er­ing volume, high share and draw­ing in more of the up mar­ket achiev­ers so valu­able to advert­isers. That will not be easy. The BBC 10 is now well estab­lished and draws a con­sist­ently solid audi­ence, both in volume and share. In spite of their cur­rent cut backs, the BBC remains hugely well resourced both at home and overseas.

On the other hand … we now have more cov­er­age money than we have had for years…

Our aim is to provide intel­li­gent yet vivid pro­gram­ming for an audi­ence which is becom­ing more soph­ist­ic­ated by the day. This applies to ALL our pro­grammes, but the new News At Ten in par­tic­u­lar must be a nightly show­case for the very best of our journ­al­ism and pro­duc­tion. We must con­tinue to main­tain the levels of ori­ginal journ­al­ism which have become one of our hall­marks in recent years. There is noth­ing like a genu­ine scoop to get us talked about.

We must con­tinue to use our pot of ‘spe­cial pro­jects’ money to spec­tac­u­lar effect with pro­jects like ‘The Big Melt’ and Zim­b­abwe week. But above all else we must ‘nail the day’…

These days most people ‘absorb’ news and inform­a­tion via a myriad of gad­gets and devices as they go through their work­ing day. So by the time they get to 10 o’clock and are pre­pared to com­mit them­selves to watch­ing a half hour news show, what do they want from it?

Well for sure they will want more than just a re-hashed updated ver­sion of what they already know (or at least think they know).

The absorp­tion of what has become known as ‘ambi­ent news’ will mean most view­ers of tele­vi­sion news will, by late even­ing, have some degree of aware­ness as to WHAT has happened that day, but they will almost cer­tainly have little know­ledge of WHY it happened and what the con­sequences of events might be.

Some will go to the Net to find out more. Oth­ers (and there remain many mil­lions of them) will choose broad­cast news and one of the reas­ons they will choose TV news is that — at the end of a long day — they don’t want to do the work them­selves. They want us to do the work for them.

They want us and trust us to make sense of the day for them. And if they emerge at the end of News At Ten without feel­ing that have got what they tuned in for, we will have failed them. We must ‘Nail the Day’ for them or wave them goodbye.

Our job must be to leave our view­ers sat­is­fied that they have been well informed, but that DOES NOT mean turn­ing News At Ten into the Open Uni­ver­sity. We must deliver our inform­a­tion and explan­a­tion in a sharp, non-patronising, well con­struc­ted man­ner. And we must ruth­lessly root out bad habits that dam­age our mission.

Con­trast Dave’s views with those of John Hock­en­berry, an NBC vet­eran, writ­ing here about his exper­i­ence of net­work news:

[T]elevision news had lost its most basic journ­al­istic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the “emo­tional centre” of the Amer­ican people. Gone was the mis­sion of using tech­no­logy to veer out onto the edge of Amer­ican under­stand­ing in order to intro­duce some­thing fun­da­ment­ally new into the national debate. The inform­a­tional edge was per­il­ous, it was unpre­dict­able, and it required the news audi­ence to be will­ing to learn some­thing it did not already know.

Stor­ies from the edge were not typ­ic­ally reas­sur­ing about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpre­dict­able flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emo­tional centre was reli­able, it was pre­dict­able, and its story lines could be duplic­ated over and over. It reas­sured the audi­ence by telling it what it already knew rather than chal­len­ging it to learn.

This explains why TV news voices all use sim­ilar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why report­ers in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no mat­ter whether the story is about the dev­ast­at­ing after­math of an earth­quake or someone’s lost kitty.

It also explains why TV news seems so archaic next to the advert­ising and enter­tain­ment con­tent on the same networks.

Among the greatest frus­tra­tions of work­ing in TV news over the past dec­ade was to see that while advert­isers and enter­tain­ment pro­du­cers were per­mit­ted to do wildly risky things in pur­suit of audi­ences, news pro­du­cers rarely ven­tured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns.

Advert­isers were aggress­ive in their use of new tech­no­lo­gies long before net­work news divi­sions went any­where near them. This is exactly the oppos­ite of the trend in the 1960s and ’70s, when the news divi­sions were first adop­ters of break­throughs in live satel­lite and video technology…

Pearl Jam, Nir­vana, and N.W.A. were already major cul­tural icons; grunge and hip-hop were the soundtrack for com­mer­cials at the moment net­works were passing on stor­ies about Kurt Cobain’s sui­cide and Tupac Shakur’s murder…

Humour in com­mer­cials was hip — subtle, even, in its use of obscure pop-cultural ref­er­ences — but if there were any jokes at all in news stor­ies, they were tele­graphed, blunt visual gags, usu­ally involving weathermen.

Enter­tain­ment pro­grammes often took on issues that would never fly on Dateline. On a Thursday night, ER could do a story line on the med­ic­ally unin­sured, but a night later, such a “downer policy story” was a much harder sell. In the time I was at NBC, you were more likely to hear fed­eral agri­cul­ture policy dis­cussed on The West Wing, or even on Jon Stew­art, than you were to see it repor­ted in any depth on Dateline.

Inter­est­ing to see if the new News At Ten meets some of Hockenberry’s challenges.