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).

  • Hasnat Khan exclusive/Diana
  • Geor­gina Edmonds murder
  • Ant­arc­tic spe­cial report
  • Fabio Capello

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
2. Diana inquest — James Mates VT
3. North­ern Rock — Tom Bradby VT + live

4. Wrap: Ipswich murder/Peter Hain/Weddell reax

5. Edmonds murder — Penny Mar­shall VT

Still to come: Capello/Lifeboat rescue

[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.