Deborah Potter
More TV news means more jobs
The “more with less” mantra has become so ingrained in TV newsrooms that the latest data may come as a surprise. Yes, once again, local stations set a new record for the amount of news they aired but they also staffed up to do it. On average, stations aired 5 hours and 30 minutes of local news on weekdays in 2011, 12 minutes more than the year before, according to the annual RTDNA survey. In just four years, stations have added almost a full hour of news each day. And that increase isn’t all due to big market stations pushing up the average, says Hofstra’s Bob Papper, who conducts the survey. The typical station (median) is running five hours of news a day. Almost a third of news directors surveyed said they expect to add more news this year. Not a single one expects to cut news time. Where is all that news finding a home on the schedule? Mostly in the mornings. The fastest growing time period for local news was 5-9 a.m., with 28% of stations that added news putting it in that time slot. Another 20% added news at 4:30 a.m. And no wonder. Almost three-quarters of news directors […]
Read More →You’ve got a great big responsibility
Who says journalism ethics is all seriousness and no light? Not the folks at Columbia University’s SPJ chapter, who somehow managed to turn the Society of Professional Journalists ethics code into a song. The title: “You’ve got a great big responsibility.” My favorite lyric: Sometimes you won’t be popular Some folks will get annoyed But […]
Read More →Writing advice from a legend
Imagine sending a letter to a writer you admire and getting a personal reply packed with advice. Joan Lancaster didn’t have to imagine. In 1956, she became one of thousands of children who sent fan mail to C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and actually heard back. Lewis’s charming letter encourages […]
The improving state of local TV news
This won’t come as a huge surprise to anyone working in local TV news, but there’s more of it than ever and more people are watching.”To quote Mark Twain, ‘Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,’” says Hearst Television’s vice president for news, Brian Bracco, in the 2012 State of the News Media report, issued […]
When writing, remember the verbs
Some things rarely change. TV news writing is one of them, unfortunately. More than a decade ago, I noticed something about both network and local newscasts that drove me nuts and wrote a column about it. This morning, I got a message from Rick Tillery, an anchor in Medford, Oregon. “It appears this needs to […]
Tips for taking better notes
“Leave the notebook at home.” That’s what one journalism site recommended when reviewing Evernote, a digital service that stores notes, pictures and Web clips online so users can access them anywhere from any device. It’s a cool tool but it hasn’t replaced my reporter’s notebook and I don’t think it ever will. A pad and […]
Better blogging made easy
If blogging is just writing, why is it so hard to do well? Maybe because it’s not just writing, or at least it shouldn’t be. Journalism students who ought to know the basics seem to struggle with blogging as much as anyone else. They aren’t sure what to write about or how to make it […]