Now it’s the evening of day two. The stage lighting is theatrical–lots of colored gels and spotlights–and the house lights are mostly off.  As the crowd applauds one of the acts, you ask the photographer to get reaction shots.

“Just use some from yesterday,” he says. “The lighting was better.”

Well, yes, it was. But seriously? At first I thought the photographer was joking, but he didn’t just suggest this shortcut once. The second time I asked for more cutaways he repeated that he’d shot reactions the day before, and besides, he added, “Who would notice?”

Where to begin the list of all the ways in which this is just plain wrong?

Who would notice? I would, for one. But the audiences for the two events were different. And if just one other person noticed someone else in a cutaway where he or she was sitting at the evening session, all bets would be off on our credibility. If we were willing to cut corners for something so trivial, who’s to say we hadn’t cheated in other ways, or simply made something up?

Besides, even if I was the only one who knew the shots weren’t made at the same event, doing what the photographer suggested would deliberately mislead the audience about what actually happened. The NPPA Code of Ethics could not be more clear: “Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.”

In case you’re wondering, the photographer in question has years of experience and has worked for network news programs. He has a great eye and shoots terrific stuff. I guess this just goes to show you that even a gifted photojournalist can have a blind spot.

Got ethics image via Shutterstock

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, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security put out a warning that “discreet use of cameras or video recorders” could signal the planning of a terrorist act.

Here we go again. When officials need help identifying or finding suspects, anyone with a camera can be their friend. But otherwise, just about anyone can be seen as a suspect themselves.

There have been too many incidents already of photojournalists being arrested for doing their jobs, not to mention the cases of citizens who have been detained and had their cameras confiscated after videotaping police action. But fighting back can pay off. 

Gemma Atkinson was handcuffed and threatened with arrest in 2009 for taking cellphone video of police in London when they stopped and frisked her boyfriend. She sued and won. Now, she’s used the money from the settlement to produce this animated video:

A useful reminder that it’s important to know your rights.

Photographer image via Shutterstock

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 journalism prof asking me if I thought things had changed. Sure, I said, some things have, but not the bottom line.

My case in point in the original column was a new college graduate named Jennifer. She had earned her degree in broadcast journalism from a large state university in the Midwest. She was bright, personable and her résumé boasted an impressive series of internships and summer jobs in newsrooms.

So where was she working? In public relations. Not because she couldn’t get a job in news, she said, but because she couldn’t afford to. Her PR position paid almost twice as much as she was offered by one newsroom.

Back then, a lot of news directors told me their job applicants left a lot to be desired. Their writing skills were weak, they had little or no knowledge of government or history. They appeared to think they were entitled to work the day shift, and by the way, they wanted their weekends off.

That was before the recession hit, of course. With jobs scarce in every field, my guess is that highly qualified graduates were more than willing to “settle” for local TV jobs, if they could get them. And after several years of slashing payroll, stations did start hiring again as the recovery took hold, particularly for entry level jobs.

But if employment was up sharply, salaries were not.

The median starting pay in television news was about $25,500 in 2011. According to the annual survey of journalism and mass communication graduates by the University of Georgia, that’s the lowest full-time salary paid in any journalism field. And it’s been that way for a very long time.

The bottom line is that new hires in TV newsrooms today make considerably less in terms of purchasing power than I did when I started in this business 40 years ago. My first television job paid $6,000 a year. Plug the numbers into a cost-of-living calculator and that turns out to be the equivalent of $33,412 in 2013 dollars, almost 24 percent more than today’s starting average. That’s grim.

Broadcast news has never been the business you’d choose if you’re trying to get rich. But as the economy improves and entry-level salaries in TV news stays flat, I suspect we’ll see many of the most qualified graduates once again taking jobs in some related, better-paying field.

Bob Papper, who conducts a separate salary survey for RTDNA, once said that broadcast news is rapidly becoming “one of the lowest-paying jobs a college graduate can find.” With student loan debt hitting $1 trillion, only those whose parents can subsidize them may be able to afford to work in news. And that’s just sad.

Paying peanuts image via Shutterstock

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 job as “Hours of boredom with moments of terror.” There’s not a lot of terror in news.

Until Monday.

My friends in local news work their ass off to tell stories that affect people’s lives. They are lumped in with “the media,” so often used these days as an insult. But “the media” is people. Normal people (mostly). People at work the same way you work. Working in news is just like working in any company.

Except when you get something wrong.

I do not for a moment defend the inaccurate reporting that went on Wednesday. That was terrible journalism. That was rumor mongering. That was the absence of the rule to have at least two sources. The oft-quoted saying in journalism is “If your mother says she loves you, get a second source.” News let us down Wednesday.

But, for the most part, that was the national news. What inaccuracies were reported locally were sourced, as in “According to the AP…” That’s not an excuse. That’s how it works. And how it doesn’t. My friend Cory Bergman at BreakingNews.com had a perfect tweet midday Wednesday as the networks were pulling back from the report that a bomber was arrested. Cory’s site was not reporting any such arrest. And Cory tweeted “And that’s why Breaking News is still waiting.”

Props, Cor.

Local journalism can be silly. We’ve all seen those “WILL THIS THING KILL YOUR CHILDREN? TUNE IN AT 11!” teases.

But it can also rise to the occasion. On 9/11, NECN was on the air for 60 hours straight. Tom Melville, the assistant news director, anchored overnight. Everyone pitched in. NECN News Director (and now GM at WBUR – an example of excellence in reporting) Charlie Kravetz gave cool-headed direction and insisted upon accuracy. We held off until we knew.

On Monday, as the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, I am quite certain the instinct would have been to run like hell. But the journalists stayed. People like Steve Silva of Boston.com, who was there simply shooting what he hoped were inspiring stories. As soon as the explosion hit, Steve ran to get more footage. That’s not sensationalism. That’s journalism. And, though he’ll shrug it off, that’s bravery.

My friends in local news tried to make sense of the chaos. Mike Nikitas at NECN anchored calmly and accurately. Kathy Curran of WCVB, there to report on the race, put on her local news hat and stood within yards of the explosion, reporting. Producers and assignment editors in every newsroom – unheralded though they are – scrambled to keep things organized and on the air. The national anchors dropped in later. But the local newsies were there from the first second.

I worked in local news from 1992 – 2006, and continued to work with stations as a consultant right up to last month. Twenty years of experience. I can tell you what I know for sure: the people who bring you the local news are, well, wicked awesome.

Take the fact that so many local newscasts look and sound alike. Not just a lot alike. Exactly alike. TBS late-show host Conan O’Brien has been having a field day lately making fun of TV stations for the sameness of their news programs by stringing video clips together. There’s nothing inherently funny about an anchor introducing a story about a new software program by asking, “Could this be the end of e-mail overload?” But it’s hilarious to watch 28 straight-faced anchors in row deliver the identical line.

How does this happen? Let’s start with the syndicated stories TV networks pump out to their affiliates, a service they’ve provided for decades. One of my first jobs in television many years ago was to log the video offerings from ABC on the cutely named DEF or “daily electronic feed.” What’s different now is that so many more stations both receive and use the stories from such feeds.

The big four broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, have around 200 affiliates each, but they’re pikers compared to CNN’s Newsource, which goes out to more than 800 stations across the country. That wide distribution practically guarantees a story will get decent play. The Newsource story about e-mail aired on at least 225 stations, according to Matthew Koll, chairman of the software company that was featured.

Like the networks, CNN makes it easy for local stations to run these stories by providing scripted introductions for local anchors to read. And read them they do, even when they don’t make much sense.

“The final days of a campaign can get a little salty,” parroted one anchor after another in November, whatever that was supposed to mean. The line provided by Newsource set up a story about election-themed drinks and food, and it earned a dozen local anchors a starring role in another Conan montage.

The widespread availability of these stories only partly explains why they’re so often used. Back in the day, fluffy features from the networks usually made air only when a local story ran late or fell through. Today, syndicated fodder is a necessity rather than a fallback, given the huge amount of news time stations now have to fill.

The average TV station produces about five-and-a-half hours of news each weekday, according to the most recent Hofstra/RTDNA survey of news directors. That’s an increase of almost an hour since 2008. Even as the economy tanked that year and stations cut their payrolls, they added more news time. While staffing has recovered, salaries have not. Average pay at local TV stations increased just 2 percent in 2011, failing to even keep up with inflation. “That’s likely the result of stations adding people who are mostly entry level–or at least paid at a noticeably lower rate than existing staff,” says Hofstra University’s Bob Papper.

Small wonder, then, that many stations literally rip and read the scripts that accompany the network feeds. Who has the time or experience to rewrite anchor introductions, much less produce original stories to fill all those newscasts?

Apparently, no one has time to proofread in some TV newsrooms either, so the graphics that make air can be real howlers. “Fire destroyed by home,” reported a Las Vegas station in a breaking news banner. An anchor in South Bend, Indiana, described the results of a national education survey next to a graphic that read, “School two easy for kids.” And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one station warned viewers in a full-screen graphic in December to be careful driving on “snot and ice.”

Admittedly, it’s easy to poke fun at these sorts of flubs. And if you look in the right places, you can still find local stations producing great journalism. WVUE in New Orleans (Dirty Deeds and Hiding Behind the Badge), KLAS in Las Vegas (Desert Underwater, below) and WXYZ in Detroit (Wayne County Confidential) won prestigious duPont-Columbia awards this year for reports on significant issues ranging from government corruption to the housing crisis. KTRK in Houston earned the highest honor awarded by Investigative Reporters and Editors for exposing wrongdoing by local law enforcement officials (Constable Corruption).

But most television newsrooms aren’t doing in-depth reports or serious investigations on anything close to a regular basis. They can’t, as long as managers keep adding news time and expect the existing staff to fill it, while also feeding the Web and social media.

“Everyone is trying to do more with less,” says Micah Johnson, president of the talent agency MediaStars that represents TV news employees in contract negotiations. “I think it’s having a detrimental effect on the product.”

If the people who run some television stations were cooks, they could rightly be charged with watering the soup. And as long as stations keep following that recipe, local TV news will be an easy target for cheap fun.

Originally published by American Journalism Review

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 USA Today is about as blunt as it gets. He chastises the school for hiring Steve Coll as dean, calling him “another New Yorker writer, one who…has never tweeted in his life.” As Wolff sees it, Columbia is utterly out of touch with today’s news business and its needs.

The disgrace is not just that the school takes students’ or their parents’ money to train them for a livelihood that it reasonably can predict will not exist. But it is also an intellectual failure: The information marketplace is going through a historic transformation, involving form, distribution, business basis and cognitive effect, and yet Columbia has just hired a practitioner to lead it with little or no career experience in any of these epochal changes.

Not entirely true, writes David Carr in the New York Times, who gives Columbia credit for “aggressive moves into new forms of journalistic expression.”  But he too slams journalism education in general as a con game. “Having seen many journalism programs up close, I can say that most are escalators to nowhere,” Carr says.

Harsh, right? But not the whole story. Just ask the recruiters who show up every year at Columbia’s J-school and others looking for new hires. According to Crain’s NY Business digital skills gained from reputable schools may be the edge that journalists need to compete in a shrinking job market.”

So maybe the J-schools are doing something right. If so, why would Columbia’s new dean say he’s thinking about adding a year to the school’s one-year master’s program? The school currently has a second year program focused on specific topics, but it’s optional. The core MS program at Columbia costs close to $85,000, as it is, including tuition, fees and living expenses. Even if you accept that the one-year program is worth that kind of money, I have to wonder what would make a two-year masters worth twice as much. Weigh in, please.

Keyboard image via Shutterstock

Local television news on the air suffered a reversal of fortune in 2012, losing audience in every key time slot, including those that gained viewers the year before. In most nontraditional time slots, viewership stagnated. And the total audience for all local news programs combined was smaller than the year before. The strategy of gaining viewers by adding more and more time for news appears to have stopped paying off.

Stations say their online, mobile and social media audience is growing rapidly, but much of the data on that is proprietary so it’s hard to get a handle on where things actually stand. And all the available evidence suggests that digital revenue is growing far more slowly.

Two related reports offer additional insights into the state of the news media in general and local TV in particular. According to a national survey, Americans appear to have noticed the effects of budget and staff cuts by local news organizations.

Nearly one-third—31%—of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.

What are local TV stations providing? A study of newscasts on eight stations in four markets finds less substance than ever. The vast majority of stories (80%) run less than a minute. About half run just 30 seconds.

When 2012 is compared with 2005, the amount of time devoted to edited story packages has decreased and average story lengths have shortened, signs that there is less in-depth journalism being produced. Traffic, weather and sports—the kind of information now available on demand in a variety of digital platforms—is making up an ever-larger component (40%) of the local news menu. Meanwhile, coverage of politics and government is down by more than 50%.

The good news on content? Crime and courts coverage is down significantly, from almost 30% of the news hole in 2005 to 17% last year, and coverage of the economy more than doubled, to about 8%.

Admittedly, it’s dangerous to draw conclusions from such a limited study, which looked only at morning and late newscasts, not the early evening programs most stations still consider their newscasts of record. And the earlier data was collected during sweeps periods, which may have tilted the results in terms of story length. But parts of the new study do have the ring of truth: everyone’s doing more live shots and getting less time to really tell a story.

What does all of this mean for the future? Stations are braced for the traditional non-election-year “hangover” in terms of lower revenue in 2013, so it’s unlikely they’ll be investing much more in news. They’ll be producing at least as much of it as ever, though. What will that mean for overall quality? You tell me.

TV static image via Shutterstock

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 they can be understood more easily by the general public. Nothing wrong with that. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, is a master at making complex science information understandable, as he did in a recent interview with the NewsHour about the meteor that exploded over Russia.

But much of what’s called media training doesn’t actually focus on helping professionals make the complicated clear. Take the email I received last week, for no known reason, from a DC-based media training and coaching firm entitled 3 steps to a successful media interview. Step one: Research the reporter and media outlet “to discover what the ultimate purpose [of the interview] is.” Steps two and three: Prepare three strategic messages and practice delivering them out loud at least three times.

The simplest way to prepare is to create a list of potential questions and answer each question out loud. The more you practice, the more you will be prepared to respond during an actual media interview. Practice your key messages and hone them down to their most powerful bits of information.

No wonder it’s so hard to get a sound bite that doesn’t sound canned or planned from some people. They’ve been rehearsing their responses, over and over. And you can bet they’ve been taught how to “bridge to message,” a technique for getting their point across no matter what they’re asked. You know you’ve been bridged when the interviewee says something like, “That’s an interesting question but the key issue is…”

If you expect to have any hope of knocking these folks off script, invest some time in developing a question or two they never dreamed you’d ask. And don’t be afraid to ask the same basic question more than once in a slightly different way.  You just might get lucky.

What annoys you most about media-trained interviewees? If you’ve succeeded in getting something spontaneous out of one, please let us all know how you did it. They’re sharing techniques with each other. Why shouldn’t we journalists share ours?

Viewfinder image via Shutterstock

Where are the dominant local TV news stations?  As one-time powerhouse stations struggled in the ratings, we asked a question that touched off the most active conversation on the site to date.

For journalists, almost nothing is just personal. Ethical issues can arise when journalists think their “private” lives really are private.

How to create an interactive timeline. A tutorial on how to use Dipity and Vuvox.

How to make a TV story memorable. Tips on reporting and writing from award-winning KARE reporter Boyd Huppert.

The best local TV stations to work for. Results of a survey of TV news directors judging their peers on the quality of their news.

TV news needs verbs. A heartfelt plea to revive the use of action words in television newscasts.

Why some longtime anchors get the boot. A reflection on the departure of some veteran news anchors.

The glamorous life of TV news. A humorous look at what it’s really like to work in TV news, complete with video.

Quick thinking gives iPhone telephoto lens. Your smartphone can do even more than you might imagine.

Tips on taking good notes. How to use your own shorthand and learn to leave out what’s not important.

One additional observation about what drew readers in 2012: Several older posts beat out new ones in our most-read list, including digital note-taking tools and  how to interview children. Our resource guides to journalism fellowships and grants and recommended journalism textbooks remain popular, as well.

We’ll try to provide more of what you’re looking for in 2013, and we’d be happy to have your support in the form of a donation. Remember, NewsLab has no outside funding whatsoever, so we have to depend on you to keep the site up and running. Thanks, and Happy New Year.

For years, Latinos were mostly ignored by the biggest names in broadcast TV, viewed as a niche audience that wasn’t worth the effort. That changed when the 2010 census count of Americans of Hispanic descent topped 50 million, one-sixth of the U.S. population. Their median age is a demographically desirable 27, compared with 42 for non-Hispanic whites. And they spend plenty — $1 trillion a year, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Fox gets in the game

Leading the charge to attract them is MundoFox, featuring entertainment shows and news in Spanish, which launched in August with affiliates in 50 markets, including all of the top 10. The network is aimed at younger, bilingual Hispanics, a group Fox believes is not being served by existing Spanish-language programming. So far, only two of the new MundoFox stations offer local news, but that will change quickly, says Jorge Mettey, senior vice president of news. And when it does, Fox will be up against a behemoth and a well-established runner-up.

The big dog is Univision, whose pedigree dates back 50 years to when the first full-time Spanish-language station in the United States signed on in San Antonio. Today, it’s one of the most popular networks in any language. In prime time, Univision often beats one or more of the big four English-language networks among viewers under 49. The No. 2 Spanish-language broadcast network, Telemundo, started about 30 years ago and has an audience about a third as large.

Univision’s dominance is most evident in local news. The network’s owned-and-operated stations in Los Angeles and New York have the most-watched early and late local newscasts in the country regardless of language in the coveted 18-34 demographic. Univision stations in Houston, Dallas, Phoenix and Sacramento also rank first in late news in their markets.

The key to their success isn’t just broadcasting in Spanish. It’s “culturally relevant news,” according to Univision TV Group President Kevin Cuddihy. That means showcasing stories of particular interest to a Hispanic audience, including immigration, voting rights and news from Latin America.

ABC joins forces with Univision

While MundoFox hopes to poach Spanish-speaking viewers from Univision and Telemundo, ABC News is going after a different audience and partnering with Univision to do it. This fall, the two debuted a joint online news site and plan to launch an English-language cable news channel next year. They’ve set their sights squarely on U.S.-born Hispanics, half of whom who say English is their dominant language.

“They call themselves Hispanic,” Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, told NPR, “but they aren’t necessarily getting the same sort of news coverage directed specifically to them about being Latino, or about what it means to be Latino.”

NBC is finally paying attention to the Hispanic audience, too. The network has owned Telemundo for a decade but did little to capitalize on the relationship until Comcast acquired the company last year. Now, Telemundo is included in the daily editorial meeting and partners with NBC on political polls and coverage. “Many times we have told them about a story we’re working on that they pick up,” Telemundo anchor José Diaz-Balart says.

Local TV stations reach out

The growth and potential of the Spanish-speaking audience haven’t been lost on local TV stations, either. KUSA, the Gannett station in Denver, partnered with Telemundo affiliate KDEN a year ago to produce two daily newscasts in Spanish. The Tribune Co. station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, broadcasts a Spanish-language version of its evening news program on one of its digital channels.

In Indianapolis, Dispatch Broadcast Group’s WTHR added a daily Webcast in Spanish this summer in an effort to reach a local Hispanic population that has more than doubled in the past decade. The content is mainly repurposed from the station’s main newscast, but the goal is to eventually add coverage of issues that matter to the Hispanic community. “You have to be in the game,” General Manager John Cardenas says. “You have to connect to grow a loyalty base.”

And growth is what it’s all about. By 2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, one in three Americans will be Hispanic. As viewership of network TV news continues to flatline or decline, it’s a no-brainer to go after one of the country’s fastest growing minority groups. “It would be foolish not to have as your business model to reach out to this community,” Diaz-Balart says. “I applaud any effort by anyone [to do that], but it takes more than a Hispanic-sounding surname to serve and understand the community.”

Can the newcomers beat two long-established Spanish-language networks at their own game? Unlikely, in the short term. But as the Latino audience grows and changes, many may be looking for alternatives in Spanish and English. Whoever gets in line first stands to profit most when the channel surfing begins.

Originally published by American Journalism Review