大象传媒

"turn the demise of the final salary pension-scheme into a compelling TV news report."

This is why I don't watch the TV to get news and instead rely on around 10 RSS feeds from the main newspapers and news aggregators.

I don't want you to dress up a story so that it is somehow eye catching, I simply want the facts.

All fair points, but there is a bigger problem. The ubiqity of new technology has made editors too eager to just play with toys, forgetting the content in the process. The literalism of most TV news now is shocking and depressing. In fact, the whole problem was nicely covered this spring on Charlie Brooker's excellent Newswipe, of which Lord Reith would have been proud, managing to entertain and yet sneak in a whole load of 'inform' under cover.

During the 1990's many of us watched The Day Today and Brasseye and laughed at the thought that we could go own the US Network news route. We're not laughing now. It seems that many in TV News have taken them as a template, rather than the rather savage critique they were meant to be.

Othe rnew media provision is rathe rless certain. Some is good, soe not so good. There is a tendency to 'bite-size' infomration. And for some stories (like the banking crisis or the current expenses fiasco, that's not realy possible). I think there is a danger of the technology tail wagging the content dog. Journalists have to take a great deal of care in this reagrd.

Thank you for this 'back-story' piece. Whatever one feels about the issues, it is very helpful to hear media creators (if you will forgive the term) talking about why and how they are produce what they produce.
There will always be a tendency to 'play with new toys', but that is usually a necessary stage on the road to sophisticated and careful tool usage.
Since so many people still do get their news and current affairs from television (perhaps even more true in America), it is vital that television journalists and news producers do make every effort, as here, to make exciting television pieces out of complex and possibly not very visually interesting material. One may argue that radio has an advantage here, but television remains, at least for now, a vital medium of news distribution.
How the internet and particularly web-distributed video and social media will affect news presentation is, I believe, becoming one of the more vital 'back-story' questions.

I'm reminded of "Lord Privy Seal."

It's happening far more often these days, too.

The question that comes to my mind is how many other news items are turned into full reports ready for broadcast, but get dumped because of the more worthy news on heavy days? Why do we not have access to them all on the news website? 大象传媒 has gone to some expense covering this story surely the little bit extra to cover server space would not cost much more.

With the time allowed with 24 hour news broadcasting, one would think that a good explaination of events could be made. Unfortunately the majority of our journalists today can only deal in sound bites, wasting the time available to them and do the viewing public a total diservice, especially at the 大象传媒 where they are paid out of taxpayers money. Hopefully the day will come ala MPs where out poor journalistic practice will inccur the full wrath of the people.

If by "Lord Privy Seal"* you a referring to the shots through the Google screen of the sun, people in India and a train journey, then consider how you'd do it otherwise and remain interesting. It's an attempt to make what would otherwise be boring typed queries on a screen come alive. It's very difficult to be anything other than literalist in a situation like that: How would you have done it?

I actually think the 大象传媒 does pretty well making dry news topics interesting and I don't think there is any need to apologise for doing so. There ARE some areas where I think we need to be careful, though, particularly in longer-form presentations such as documentaries, where there is a tendency (not so much at the 大象传媒, thank goodness) towards "Paris, France Syndrome", where the most banal facts are clarified in case you might get them wrong (yes, Paris is in France and you don't need to tell us); and the tedious repetition found in commercial television factual shows where one point is made per segment, and that and every previous point is recapped after each break, reducing the actual content of an hour-long programme to about four topics.

*"Lord Privy Seal", for those who haven't encountered the phrase, refers to the tendency, particularly among new film-makers, to be too literal with images to accompany a voiceover. So for example you might (hopefully not) illustrate the mention of the Lord Privy Seal by showing images of a Member of the Upper House, a water closet and an aquatic animal in quick succession.

Hold on Rory, you are one of these people who is doing today's reporting and as such you are obviously going to defend today's poor reporting. It doesn't matter if there are red flashing lights and lovely wooden florring in the studio... we want the news, not B&Q's latest room makeover.

The students who agree with you are taught for todays type of reporting and again they are obvisouly going to say todays reporting is better.

But take it from the customer, we want the old news back. We don't like how the 大象传媒 is no longer unbiased and prefers sensationalist headlines instead of national news. I mean come on, how can only call the news from 10 years ago lame when we found about topics including good news while today David Beckhams latest haircut takes a more prominent stage on the News at Ten than somebody who saved several people?

Is todays reporting really any better than 20 years ago? No. Simple answer. Todays news has sold itself to money and it is not even trsusted anymore, that is why people no longer watch the news.

@8 Well, quoting News At Ten is hardly fair because you really are getting into the TV equuivalent of The Sun or the Daily Star. However, ITV know their demography. and boy, are they hitting them. The over-emotive sensationlism of News At Ten means that I can herdly bear to watch it now, it's so bad.

The 大象传媒, however, is supposedly the broadcaster of national record. Yes, some of the older footage seems a bit stilted now but:
a) it is factual sound and
b) I'm not sure why it needs to be made more visually appealing.

For instance, I saw a couple of Rory's quotes later in his entry. The first was this,
"What's more, the advance in broadcasting technology - from computer graphics, to digital editing, to new means of reaching people via the internet - have made it possible to approach complex subjects and visualise them in new way."

What concerns me here is the implicit assumption is that "new" way of visualisation = "better" visualisation. And it's not always true. As I said in my previous post (@2), the explanatory graphics used are becoming increasingly more literal and simplistic. Election nights in particular are becoming a bit of a joke, with the graphics and the toys distracting from what's actually going on.

The second quote of Rory's was "He then set about making two rather dull websites somehow look interesting" about the Wolfram Alpha story. Perhaps it's just me, but if the story was so difficult work into a televisual format, why do it? It was clearly more suited to an online audience, who would be the ones most likely to read it anyway (the fact the WA is hardly the paradigm shift the PR puff tried to push and the 大象传媒 kind of initially fell for is another issue). Online services do actually do this extended content thing better, as examples like local election content on 大象传媒 News show.

Unfortuntely, the TV approach seems to be to the journalistic equivalent of Alistair Campbell 'sexing up' content to make it palatable to the drooling hordes. Once a gain I fall back on the analysis of Charlie Brooker and, in particular, the fantastic segment contributed by Adam Curtis during the Newswipe run that talked about the TV need for some kind of 'narrative'. We've seen it with the whole expenses issue, and with the economics. Let's be honest, Robert Peston's new status is built on the apocalyptic doomsying of last summer. It's a problem with all TV news.

The other classic problem of current news is having the 'reporter on the spot'. Example: today (May 19) just as Michael Martin was standing up to deliver his somewhat anti-climactic resignation to the House, a reporter called James Cook on the 大象传媒 News channel was standing outside Martin's house near Glasgow. WHY? What thing of any use would he able to tell us?

It's a bit like the endless shots of Nick Robinson standing in Downing Street, just to show us that he's there. There's no value added and the studio-based presenter has to sit there and engage in a stilted and agonsing dance of asking questions that will elicit little or no useful product. Even worse, the presenter in the studio is more likely to know more than the person in the OB, resulting in the embarrassing spectacle of the n on the scene having to be told what's going on there. Crazy. This is definitely one practice that is not an improvement over that of even 10 years ago, let alone 20.

There seems to be a belief that the audience need "stories" to explain the world. Sometimes the interplay of events is so complex that you just can't build a simple narrative like that. sometimes things just really are random, like school shootings and earthquakes. There seems to be the added belief that the news needs to be slick and whizzy. But the bells and whistles actually act like noise; they drown out the actual news.

A note here: you may be forgiven for thinking I'm something of an old fart in this regard. But I'm not. In terms of the idea of transliteracy, I fall squarely into the wired, social-networking technology focused demographic. And I suspect that I'm not alone in this little segment in feeling rather ill-served by quite a lot of TV news.

@fusen2 you may "just want the facts" but many switch over the 6'o clock news after the first couple of stories because it doesn't catch their interest. Surly producers and reporters have a job to make a report stimulate the visual senses, rather than just stand there with a bit of paper?

I don't believe it's reasonable to fail to cover a potentially important tech news story because it doesn't naturally look pretty. If it's important it should go in, and if you want people to watch it, you might want to do your best to ensure that it holds their attention. Something that does seem to have changed over time is peoples' attention spans.

There's something else we should remember too. In this article we are seeing behind the process of making a tech news story. The fact is, Rory did not actually manage to sell the report to the majority of 大象传媒 news editors (I won't comment here on how strange I find the concept of having to sell a news story or what actually "selling" a news story today in the 大象传媒 actually means). We're seeing it here on the Web while domestic TV-only viewers didn't see it. Rory admits that it's "by no means a masterpiece" and perhaps those who are critical of the approach can be reassured by the fact that the majority of editors turned it down.

But I think the attempt is valid and, fundamentally I do not believe that news coverage has to be boring. You are telling a story whatever you do in the medium, and any good storyteller tries to match the audience's expectations: today, for better or worse, that includes holding the attention of people who have plenty of other things going on. If we look at the viewing figures we can see that the 大象传媒 is pretty good in this respect.

When we look at historical television something I did quite a lot during my tenure as editor of a major online publication on the topic it's easy to use what we see from the past as a reference for "what should be done" today. We need to bear in mind that a great deal of the time, what you see is all that could be done with the technology and constraints of the time. True artists are always seeking to transcend the boundaries of current approaches and techniques, and not all of the results will be "good" in the abstract, let alone appreciated by commentators at the time.

All this being said, I am not a huge fan of literalism and I certainly dislike the "Lord Privy Seal" approach to imagery, as discussed earlier. However a professional practitioner will weigh up a significant number of considerations, often with very limited time and resources to hand, and come to a decision on how to tackle a story. Sometimes the results will not be to everyone's taste. Such is life.

@7 regen: "where the most banal facts are clarified in case you might get them wrong"

I can agree with you here. The problem I find is that so much of what is presented to us these days automatically assumes we're stupid and don't already know something about the subject.

I've just watched a clip about English Channel wrecks. It was very interesting. However, I already know what ROV stands for, yet every time the term is used it's also given in full. Why? I already know, and if someone doesn't already know by now then they can use any search engine to find out for themselves. John Humprys felt the need to interject with an expansion on a set of initials earlier this week (I can't recall the exact circumstances, now) but it upset the flow of the discussion remarkably well. I already knew what those initials stood for, and didn't need it explained again.

I just want to be treated as an adult while I consume news. Please don't keep pandering to the lowest common denominator all the time. We're not all morons.