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.