How to Fix the News Business
Watch any network news show and see who is advertising — Cialis and Depends.
Everyone agrees that the TV news business is in trouble.
The demographics are terrible. Watch any network news show and see who is advertising — Cialis and Depends.
There’s a reason for that. Most people under the age of 40 and certainly under 30 don’t watch The Evening News or much of any TV news.
The suggested solutions are many, and most of them are around things like using smartphones or trying to ‘hip up’ the broadcast with ‘younger anchors’ or young reporters doing the same old same old. Or maybe smartphones?
This is not going to work.
The problem is not in the reporters or the tech. The problem is in the way the news is presented. For the most part, the overall architecture, that is, the way the news is packaged has not changed much since the 1950s, but of course, the taste of the viewership has.
Five years ago, we started a very interesting project with Spectrum News 1 in Los Angeles. Instead of producing conventional news ‘packages’ — and they all look pretty much the same — reporter stand up, man on the street, b-roll, we decided to try something entirely new.
When we run our boot camps, we tell the reporters to look at a story not through the eyes of a journalist but rather through the eyes of a viewer — that, after all, is whom you are making the story. It creates an entirely different approach.
In the 1950s, most people visited the movies a few times a year. They lived in the real world in terms of their expectations and what they saw on the screen. That, for them, was a pleasant diversion and a fantasy. Today, with Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and so on, we are all binge-watchers. That is, we are all ‘at the movies’ for hours on end every day and night. (Add in video and movies on your phone, and you can see why the Nielsen Company recently reported that the average American now spends an astonishing 8 hours a day watching TV or movies. The movies have become, in a sense, our view of how the world works.
So, if we are constantly watching Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, how in the world do we expect viewers to resonate with TV news that looks like it did in 1962?
The trick here is to marry classic Hollywood (and Netflix) storytelling techniques to journalism. In other words, find characters, story arcs, and compelling drama, and fold them together to report the news.
This may seem odd, but trust me, it works. And it works incredibly well. That is because a whole generation of viewers has already been pre-conditioned to resonate with that kind of reporting and storytelling. And what is more ‘reality TV’ than the absolute reality of news?
Now, marry those classic storytelling techniques with outstanding reporting and journalism, and you have a revolution in TV news. An entirely new kind of TV news. One that is driven by the character (as opposed to the reporter) and by the drama of the story.
This may seem revolutionary for TV news, and it is, but it is what the world of print journalism discovered in the 1960’s. Then, it was called The New Journalism, promoted by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Hunter Thompson, among others. Today, character-driven print journalism is considered standard. So if you want to save TV news, it is not about doing the same old thing with new gear — it is about creating an entirely different way of approaching and telling a story.
And trust me, it works.