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Why I will never be a Conservative
16
Tag Archives: ITN
ITV News: now edited by everyone
I understand that today is the day ITV News moves to a system where reporters edit their own TV packages.
How can you tell someone new to video editing? Well, it’s always the sound that gives it away. That, and the going to black and flash frames.
Having pioneered multi-skilling in TV newsrooms what would my thoughts be? Well, for one video editing has become a lot simpler. We’re not quite at the point where it’s no more complicated than word processing, but it’s getting there.
For a well-resourced news programmes — on one level — it makes sense. But working to deadline, the ability of a number of people performing synchronously to outperform one individual is pretty much given. And, if you have a news channel, the economies of scale are pretty simple. Peter Horrocks is unlikely to view this move as giving ITV a competitive advantage in news.
Still it is going ahead, and the real measure of any multi-skilling effort is the number of hold-outs. Which high profile correspondents miss training days or feign incompetence? You have to judge multi-skilling success by the number of refuseniks. The more, the unmerrier.
In my experience, good TV reporters tend to make good editors. The problem is that the good ones are those that tend to get the extra resources. Not that ITV News is flush with resources. After all, there’s lean, and there’s size zero…
But when ITV boss Michael Grade’s bonus comes in at one fifteenth of ITN’s budget for ITV News — dedicated video editors are a luxury Grade’s vacation plans can’t afford.
When can you use off the record quotes?
My two penn’orth on Samantha Power from the Guardian:
For me as a broadcast journalist, the camera and the microphone are the record. You can’t unsay things to a recording device or speaking live, only apologise or cringe. But in conversation, different standards apply.I was at ITN in the early 1990s when John Major referred to his colleagues as “bastards” in a TV interview with ITN’s political editor. The Beeb’s Nick Jones overheard the remarks. BBC bosses shared ITN’s view that these post-match mutterings were off the record so Jones leaked his notes to the Observer, which broke the story.
I think the technology has changed all the rules. ITN/BBC were operating within their conventions, the Observer within theirs, but now politicians would be cagier — broadcasters can blog those off-mike moments.
In Power’s case, uttering “off the record” immediately after you’ve said something better left unsaid is no protection.
Breaks off News At Ten
News At Ten returned. With no commercial break. Deliberate? Permanent? Odd feeling in what was otherwise a very familiar programme package (well, I did work on it years ago). But down to business. You want an old-fashioned critique of an old-fashioned show? Start with the Bongs (the headlines).
Edmonds after Diana felt like too much crime at the top, and going through the show you have a lot of crime in the faux part one. 1. Hasnat Khan speaks — Neil Connery VT 4. Wrap: Ipswich murder/Peter Hain/Weddell reax 5. Edmonds murder — Penny Marshall VT Still to come: Capello/Lifeboat rescue
2. Diana inquest — James Mates VT
3. Northern Rock — Tom Bradby VT + live
[Place where the break should have been…]
6. Special Assignment — Bill Neely VT + live
Promo: Neely vlog
7. Capello — Geraint Vincent VT
Recap
8. Lifeboat Rescue — Tim Rogers VT
So seven packages, two lives and a wrap — two of the packages themed, “Special Assignment” plus “And finally.”
The style was spare and unintrusive. Khan was a good get, but needed some context to shake the dust off his rather dull pronouncements. Diana going to live in Pakistan! Tell me more…
The story balance made it feel a little too crime-time for prime time. The Neely vlog promo (which looked interesting) was given a lacklustre promo. But a very simple, clean, deliverable programme.
The Lifeboat Rescue felt awkward as an “And finally.” Not exactly life-affirming — more an RTA on an international sea lane.
The only thing it lacked was a little of wit. Doubtless that will come with time. The big audience test will come on day two. For ITN’s sake, I hope it works.
There’s not much not to like here — which isn’t to damn with faint praise, but simply to point out that with news viewers the less you can do to drive them away, the more will stay. But like battery chickens, the odd surprise is good for them.
You can watch the Beeb alternative here. The set piece is John Simpson in Zimbabwe. Big old name plus big international story leading equals statement of intent, and a conservative reply to a conservative challenge.
P.S. Re-read John Hockenberry’s cry of pain — You Don’t Understand Our Audience — in case you think any of this really will shore up the crumbling edifice.
The return of News At Ten
The old wisdom would have been that the coming News At Ten battle is between two types of television news. One side, the Beeb, driven by the need to inform. At its best patrician and provocative. At its worst dull. The other side, ITN, driven by the need to tell stories, at its best emotionally engaging, at its worst crass. And so let battle commence.
Except that time has mixed it all up. On the BBC side is former ITN golden boy Craig Oliver, who knows News At Ten so well he reinvented it for BBC1. On ITV’s, Alex Chandler, who has worked his way up through the ITV News ranks, and who has spent more time at ITN when News At Ten was off air than when it was on.
The real battle to create two news programmes is not between the editors but between two completely different methods of producing the news on television.
Take the BBC. Its 10pm news has a relatively modest budget, but it draws on the resources of the entire corporation – the world’s biggest broadcast newsgathering outfit – to fill half an hour.
The editor can order from long menus of home or foreign news filtered and prepared by experienced teams. It’s the editorial equivalent of dining at a hotel buffet, where success is measured not by how beautifully the food is presented on the plate, but by the quantity which has been stacked upon it.
So the job of the editor is not fill a running order from those lists, but to act upon them and to shape the stories in conversations with reporters. The tension is between the incremental changes in a story and the need for a programme to tell it coherently. Without that tension, an algorithm could construct a running order.
And this is where the sheer size of the BBC complicates the job. The very range of stories it can cover — the scale of its reporting operation — means that the 10pm is just one of a number of outlets.
The uniform “BBC-ness” of the material coming into a programme can overwhelm any individual character the bulletin might aspire to. Craig Oliver has sharpened up the 10 no end but at the BBC, his is one editorial voice among many important voices.
The BBC has strength in depth. You can rely on the players to perform. But where you can’t, changing them is difficult. Reporters report on different lines to different managers.
The contrast at ITN couldn’t be greater. News At Ten was the operational focus of a bespoke newsgathering machine. Its reporters were a family.
There were so few of them that they had to get on air regularly. An editor would know their individual strengths and weaknesses so well that assignments could almost be tailored to them.
The smallness meant that many of the conversations were unnecessary. The machine worked slickly and quickly. Reporters knew what was expected of them. When they failed to meet expectations, retribution was swift.
And unlike the BBC where parallel teams might collide, ITN reporters knew that if they didn’t get the story, no one else would.
So how will the new News At Ten line up? On a good night the programme will be able to line up the likes of Bill Neely, Penny Marshall, Tom Bradby, Julian Manyon, Jon Irvine, Keir Simmons and half a dozen more besides.
The names are impressive, but they are a thin blue line. Reporters have to make air. Fewer stories can afford to fall down. If a big story fails to make the grade at the Beeb there are many others waiting in line to take its place.
The money that ITN gets to make the national and international news is just £30 million, and that cash has to fund other bulletins too.
Whilst cash can still be found for presenter salaries, the budget for newsgathering stretches ever tighter. To balance the books the tap will have to be turned off some weeks. Viewers don’t get told. No graphic appears to say that this week the news is running on empty.
Foreign news suffers most. Every pound spent has to be seen on air. No bad thing, ITV bosses might say, and few would argue that ITN is not adept at parsimony. Fewer still would argue that parsimony has given way simply to poverty.
So, for Patrick O’Brian fans, the contest shapes up as an undermanned sloop against an unwieldy ship of the line.
But to look at the battle purely in journalistic terms is to miss the point. This is not an encounter the audience is crying out for. It watched News At Ten come and go with barely a murmur. Its modern incarnation is a far cry from the programme that sat in the top ten and commanded a regular audience of 12 million five nights a week in the late 1960s.
So will this be television news’ melancholy, long, withdrawing roar? Let’s hope that amid the cuts, there’s still some thrust.
[My column from Press Gazette]
Two views on TV news
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.