The video went viral, of course. Reporter Abbey Niezgoda of WLNE in Providence, R.I., was reporting reaction to a shooting when she was attacked by the victim’s mother. The video shows the woman throwing a rock at the TV crew, threatening them with a baseball bat, and finally sending her two pit bulls after the [...]
Picture this. You’re on day two of a TV news shoot out-of-town, working with a freelance crew. Location: a high school auditorium. Day one was a morning session and the house lights were on. The photographer got plenty of shots of the action on stage and the audience reaction. Now it’s the evening of day [...]
What’s the connection between photography and terrorism? Apparently, it depends on where you sit and when you ask the question. Just after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, investigators urged anyone who’d been near the finish line to share photos or video they’d taken around the time of the explosions. But the very same day, [...]
Some issues just won’t go away. More than a decade ago, I wrote a column for American Journalism Review in which I posited that some of the best and brightest J-school grads probably weren’t going to work at local TV stations because the salaries were so low. Last week, I got a call from a [...]
by Steve Safran I want to tell you a little bit about working in local news. It’s messy and complicated. It’s filled with drudgery. It’s overnights for years without recognition. It’s reporters who start in small markets with pay so low they take a second job, usually as a waiter or waitress. Pilots describe their [...]
Local television news can be so easy to mock. Happy-talk anchors, meaningless live shots and enough on-screen grammar goofs to send an English teacher into orbit. The good news is that it’s not all terrible. But a lot of it is and, sadly, there’s not much hope for improvement. Take the fact that so many [...]
What exactly is the value of a journalism degree? Are J-schools really preparing students for the media jobs of the future? The questions aren’t new, but they’ve come up again in connection with the selection of a new dean for Columbia’s prestigious graduate school of journalism. If you haven’t read it, Michael Wolff’s take in [...]
If you just look at the bottom line, local TV stations appear to be thriving. Revenue was up substantially last year, thanks largely to a flood of political advertising. But viewership was down in every key time slot in every sweeps period in 2012, according to an analysis of Nielsen data by the Pew Research [...]
Are some of the people you interview sounding a little rehearsed these days? More and more officials, professionals and business executives are being coached on how to deal with the media. And while that can be a good thing, it isn’t always. Many doctors and lawyers have been advised to avoid acronyms and technical language so [...]
We’re starting the New Year here at NewsLab by looking back at the year before–just as we did at this time a year ago. In 2012, our readers not only wanted practical tips, they also gravitated toward posts about the state of the news business. Here are our top ten most viewed posts, in case [...]
The TV business runs on numbers. So it’s really no surprise that networks from ABC to Fox are ramping up their efforts to offer news aimed at Hispanic viewers. The real wonder is that it took so long. For years, Latinos were mostly ignored by the biggest names in broadcast TV, viewed as a niche [...]
A front row seat to history. The privilege of sharing life’s most amazing moments. And the God-given right to eat behind the wheel. Nobody ever said working in TV news was all glamour, right? If you’ve ever been on a six-hour stake-out with no bathroom in sight, you’ve “enjoyed” one of the unique aspects of a TV [...]
Here we go again. Two more journalists have learned lessons the hard way. If they thought their personal lives were somehow separate from their professional lives, they’ve had to think again. And while the two cases were vastly different, the outcome was the same. Both journalists lost their jobs. Lesson 1: What you post on [...]
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 [...]
It was a sorry spectacle. For more than a week, NBC let Ann Curry twist slowly in the wind after word leaked that she was on her way out as co-host of the “Today” show barely a year after getting what she described as her “dream job.” As one critic put it, watching her soldier [...]
CNN is taking a lot of grief today, and deservedly so. The network’s well-respected Twitter feed for breaking news, @CNNbrk, posted the first tweet on the Supreme Court’s decision on President Obama’s health care law at 10:08 a.m. Unfortunately, it was absolutely wrong. The post followed an on air report by CNN’s Kate Bolduan, who [...]
Ask an entire generation of journalists what inspired them to go into or stay in the news business and the answer often comes down to one word: Watergate. Forty years ago this month, two young reporters at the Washington Post filed their first stories about what a White House spokesman described as ”a third rate burglary.” [...]
It’s no secret that television newsrooms are expecting more production from everyone on staff. And there’s nothing really new about reporters being expected to file multiple times a day for multiple outlets. Heck, I did that 30 years ago at CBS, filing for radio and TV. But a recent story on TVNewsCheck about this new reality [...]
I know this is a touchy subject. Maybe I’d be smarter to leave it alone. But a piece in the new issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism and a recent exchange I had with a freelance photojournalist have me thinking again about this apparently age-old question: is staging ever acceptable in TV news? First, [...]
Quick: What do Wynton Marsalis, Elizabeth Smart and Chelsea Clinton have in common? They have well-known names, certainly, but that’s not all they share. All three are now employed by network news divisions, which speaks volumes about both the power of celebrity and the current state of television journalism. CBS News recently gave Marsalis the [...]