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RTV 320 Chapter 1

RTV 320 Chapter 1. The Business of News. Recent years. More media outlets and more competition...and…‘Digital Media’ and ‘citizen media’ competition…

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RTV 320 Chapter 1

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  1. RTV 320 Chapter 1

    The Business of News
  2. Recent years More media outlets and more competition...and…‘Digital Media’ and ‘citizen media’ competition… As employment in the newspaper industry plunged, starting in 2007, with a quarter of its newsroom jobs lost over the next three years, plenty of people wrote off broadcast news as well. But the TV news job losses of 2008 and 2009, 5.3 percent combined, were only half a percent higher than the economy overall. Job hiring resumed in 2010, erasing all of the 2009 losses.
  3. Recent years… TV news continues to make money, and stations continue to invest in news. The average TV station is running a record amount of news (5 hours and 18 minutes per weekday at last count), and each of the last three years has set a new record. The TV news business is also not limited to TV—or even news. Over 80 percent of the stations that run local news are doing so not just on the air and their own website, but on other venues as well. A majority of TV stations run news on radio, cable channels, another TV station (both within and outside the market), mobile, another website (in addition to the station’s website), and similar ‘convergence’ environments
  4. Ratings There are two critical terms to define in order to understand ratings: rating and share. Both are percentages. In television, rating is the percentage of homes watching a TV program of all the homes that have a television set (that’s somewhere between 97 and 99 percent of all homes). In radio, it’s the percentage of people listening to a particular station of all the people who have radios.
  5. Ratings… In essence, it’s a competitive measure of how a TV program or radio station is doing against all the choices in life: eating, sleeping, working, watching another station, and so on. SHARE is a share of the current audience watching a TV show, or currently listening to radio. Ratings are used to set advertising rates; shares are used to make programming decisions. TV news: overnights and sweeps.
  6. Ratings For example, in TV, a rating of 15.4 means that 15.4 percent of all the homes that could watch that program had that program on. If we’re looking at a local station, it’s 15.4 percent of the station’s local market (metro, DMA). If we’re talking about a network program, then it’s 15.4 percent of the country. What’s going on with people in the rest of the 84.6 percent of the homes? Some are watching other channels; some are listening to radio instead; some are reading; some are sleeping; some aren’t home and so on.
  7. Why do ratings? Advertisers want to know who they’re reaching CPM and CPP ‘establish a value of the audience reached then determine the appropriate cost to reach them’ Why is local news valuable? Is national news valuable? Nielsen and Arbitron / Google AdWords & Analytics
  8. The Scope of Media Use Part of the difficulty of peering into the future of news is that there’s a lot we don’t really know. Let’s start with what we do know. Media use is the number one life activity for the average American adult. Even more than sleeping. Way more than work. After all, we don’t work seven days a week, but we do consume media every day. We spend more than two-thirds of the waking day (69 percent) using one or more media.
  9. The Scope of Media Use Over 40 percent of the time that we spend with media, we’re doing nothing else. Not working. Not eating. Not traveling somewhere. Just consuming media. Television remains the 800-pound media gorilla. The use of TV towers over any other medium. And it’s growing. That’s not just what we found in our extensive Middletown Media Studies’ observational research; it’s what Nielsen continues to find in its studies of TV and online usage.
  10. But … media use is more complex than it used to be A few short decades ago,: There were morning and afternoon papers, four television stations, a bunch of radio stations and magazines, and that was about it. Today, we have fewer newspapers but more of everything else. And more choices beyond that, most notably the Internet. Same number of hours in the day, but a staggering fragmentation of options, most shouting, “watch me,” “listen to me,” “read me.”
  11. Media use is more complex than it used to be And we do. And since we still only have 24 hours in a day, we seem to cope by piling on. The assumption had generally been that as new media came along, it displaced older media. Not today. Perhaps led by the computer, which taught us how to multitask, we are more and more using two or more media at the same time. Not just young people, but almost everyone. Recent study, over 30% of media use involved two or more media at the same time.
  12. So, it’s hard to measure media use… Two or more media at the same time is part of the problem. You can observe the complexity, but it’s nearly impossible to ask someone about it. Part of the problem relates to the staggering number of media choices. It’s hard enough to keep all the choices straight, much less remember which ones you used and for how long.
  13. Hard to measure… A lot of phone surveys have people saying they watch less and less TV, even while Nielsen’s far better set-top boxes are recording the most TV viewing ever. The situation is further complicated by a lack of standards for judging Internet use. Internet use was initially measured by “hits” until advertisers understood that the numbers were largely meaningless and easy to manipulate.
  14. The big picture: total time spent online In the most recent annual figures, comScore Media Metrix, put average adult time online at 1.07 hours per day. JupiterResearch, in an undated 2011 report, put the number at 2 hours per day. The Nielsen Three Screen Report for 2010 estimates average adult time online at 40.8 minutes per day. The Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey (2009) put time online at under a half hour for leisure per day.
  15. W H AT W E TH I N K WE K N O WA B OU T M E DI A U S E Media use is a lot like real estate—it’s all about location. TV is the dominant medium at home; radio is the dominant medium in the car; the computer is the dominant medium at work. Anywhere else, and it’s about mobile.
  16. W H AT W E TH I N K WE K N O WA B OU T M E DI A U S E Media use is a lot like real estate—it’s all about location. TV is the dominant medium at home; radio is the dominant medium in the car; the computer is the dominant medium at work. Anywhere else, and it’s about mobile.
  17. W H AT W E DO N ’T K N O WA B OU T M E DI A U S E We know that newspaper circulation is down, and it has plummeted as a percentage of the total U.S. population, but the picture in TV is less clear. We know that the typical local television station has seen its audience drop over the last few years—especially at night. Is that audience slipping in the midst of a general decline in TV news viewing? Or is it a decline because the audience has more and more choices for TV news, and so a stagnant audience is spreading out? Or is the audience for TV news growing, but the choices for viewing are growing even faster? We don’t know for sure because it’s so hard to look at it that way.
  18. W H AT W E DO N ’T K N O WA B OU T M E DI A U S E While fewer and fewer newspapers are being published, and they’ve gotten smaller and smaller, TV has been going in the other direction. Near an all-time high in the number of local TV stations running local news. And those stations run more news than they have ever run before. And in the last few years, we’ve seen a new phenomenon: More and more stations are now running news on more and more other stations—most of which never ran local news before. As this is written, 224 local TV stations in this country receive their news from one of the near record number of stations originating local news.
  19. S O W H E RE A R E W E G O I N G ? The debate is—or should be—about what media will supply that news and what form that news consumption will take. The text notes the primary employer of new journalists, nationwide, is probably AOL for its hyperlocal news efforts known as Patch.com. But it’s still unclear if that business model will work. Clearly, AOL is making a huge investment in Patch, but that’s a bet on the future of news, not an investment that’s currently turning a profit. What is hyperlocal news? Is that going to be the new ‘norm?’
  20. What does this all mean? That’s how Chapter One ends… Internet vs. TV? Increasing number of niche markets developing in news and information—like small screen. Loyalty to established, traditional media will likely translate into the present established brands dominating the news and information fields in the future
  21. What does this all mean? Newspapers problems, and increasing number of ‘paywalls’ – while TV stations are not building paywalls. (Good for TV) Move to digital broadcast signals is slowly leading to dozens, maybe eventually hundreds, of all-news local TV channels as well as more all-weather and mixed specialty channels. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean people will care.

  22. RTV 320 Chapter 2

    News
  23. What is news? Importance or significance Prominence Conflict Human interest Timeliness Proximity
  24. But, beyond this chapter… What You Need To Know About Your Audience and Yourself. There’s a great old story about a traveler who sees a man and a donkey by the side of the road. The man is whacking the donkey over the head with a two-by-four. WHAM! SLAM!! BAM!!! Visibly disturbed, the traveler asks, “Friend, why are you hitting that poor animal?” The reply, “Because I want him to walk.” “So, why don’t you just ask him to walk?” asks the traveler. “Because first,” says the whacker, “you have to get his attention!”Guess what? That’s the newswriting business.
  25. The news business Every day, we go out there, looking for ways to take a bunch of facts and make them so compelling, folks can’t help but watch. It’s not enough to just tell the story. We have to whack people over the head and get their attention. Call it Two-By-Four Journalism. We use words instead of wood, but the principleis the same. No point in talking when the listener is distracted, bored, or indifferent. Our job is to craft stories with language and style powerful enough to make folks stop, focus, absorb, retain, and (we hope) say “Hey! how about that!” That’s the kind of writing that keeps folks watching, and makes us successful.
  26. The news business No matter where your writing skills happen to be right now, you can dramatically improve them, just by remembering two simple rules. Both deal with attitude, possibly the most important element in the writing process. Burn these rules into your brain BEFORE YOU WRITE A SINGLE WORD, and watch what happens.
  27. Rule One: News is a conversation. If you think you’re “broadcasting the news to the viewers”, you’ve got it wrong. You’re telling stories to one person. Disc jockeys have known this for decades. They don’t speak to an “audience”. They talk to one human being at a time. Same with TV news. Sure, thousands, maybe millions are watching, but they’re not herded together in some stadium watching in unison. They’re home, on the sofa, barely paying attention, watching BY THEMSELVES, ONE BY ONE . What’s more, that one person isn’t just anybody. Think about it. That person knows you. He hears from you every day. Your face and voice are familiar to him. He trusts you to provide valuable information.Does that description remind you of anyone? Of course it does. That’s your FRIEND out there. Talk to him that way. Make sure every word you write passes the “best friend” test: If it doesn’t sound like a buddy talking to a buddy, something’s wrong.
  28. Rule Two: A story has to matter to you, before you can make it matter to someone else. Simply put, you’ve got to get juiced about the stuff you’re cranking out, no matter how routine the facts may seem on their face. You’ve got to get so excited, so moved, so motivated by that half-point interest rate hike, the warehouse fire downtown, or the budget bill in Congress, that you absolutely can’t wait to get at your word processor, and type out the story with so much energy that smoke comes out of your fingers (OK, skip the smoke, but you get the idea). Enthusiasm is infectious. It will spill over into your copy and viewers will feel it. They’ll sense a special power in your stories, and they’ll pay attention.
  29. TYPES OF STORIES Breaking News Planned Event Reporting Enterprise Reporting Investigative Reporting Special Segment Reporting (‘franchise’) Features
  30. WHERE STORY IDEAS COME FROM Wire services like the Associated Press News releases from government, businesses and organizations Agendas from governmental or quasi-governmental organizations Scheduled news conferences Follow-up notes from previous stories
  31. WHERE STORY IDEAS COME FROM • Other media, including newspapers, books, magazines, radio, cable, blogs, tweets, other television stations and so on Story idea services and consultants (and stringers) Reporters and other news people who have seen something, talked to someone or just had an idea People who call the station with information, tips or stories
  32. THE ASSIGNMENT DESK The nerve center of the newsroom Commonly overseen by the Assignment Manager or Managing Editor the assignment desk monitors police, fire and emergency frequencies on the scanners; regularly checks the wire services; makes regular calls to police, fire and hospitals (among others) to find out what’s going on; maintains the future file or daybook to keep track of scheduled events for the day, the week, the month and the year; handles the logistics of pairing photographer and reporter (assuming they’re separate); and makes sure events are covered, people are where they should be, even whether crews are getting off for meals. The assignment desk works with producers, managers and others to make sure that everyone is on top of events of the day and how the newsroom is going to deal with them.
  33. THE MORNING AND AFTERNOON MEETINGS Most stations have a morning meeting, usually starting around 8:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m., running no more than a half hour or so. The morning meeting sets the agenda for what the station plans to cover that day and determines, in large measure, what will air on the early evening newscasts, assuming that breaking news doesn’t alter the landscape. Who runs the morning meeting varies from station to station. Commonly, it’s the news director or assistant news director, managing editor or executive producer. In other words, one of the top managers in the newsroom. Who’s at the meeting? Reporters, shooters, producers, anchors—everyone involved in planning the news for the day.
  34. Afternoon… Commonly, stations have a second assignment meeting in the afternoon, usually around 2:30 p.m. or 3 p.m. This smaller meeting involves the “nightside” crew—afternoon/evening assignment editor, 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. producer, nightside reporters and, perhaps, others. The concept is the same as the morning meeting, but the target is the late evening newscast.
  35. Final idea… The basic tenets of broadcast journalism—or any kind of journalism—involve a newsperson being accurate, fair, clear and interesting. What we call news isn’t simply random facts, it’s material that contains one or more of four basic news values. How important is the news function to our society?
  36. Chapter 3 - Readability
  37. Some basic rules Conversational style Words as people speak Contractions Sentence fragments in some cases Simple sentences Chapter Four deals more with words, contractions and similar style issues
  38. Rules The slug The printed word All caps? Use paragraphs, indenting the first word of each. Radio copy normally goes across a full page and runs three and a half to four seconds a line, depending on type style and margins. TV copy goes on the right side of a split page and runs one to two seconds a line, depending on type size Us – see sample scripts; 12 point Times New Roman
  39. Rules Hyphenation Don’t hyphenate or split words from one line to the next. Abbreviation – almost never Symbols – almost never Initials and Acronyms Names – first and last, later reference in story
  40. Numbers Minimize the use of numbers in broadcast copy Write out all numbers one through nine; some say through eleven – we will do through eleven Use numerals for numbers 10 through 999.
  41. Numbers Names for thousand, million and so on. Common: one-thousand, 22-thousand, three million Write out a hundred or one hundred to prevent an announcer pausing or stumbling over the decision of which way to pronounce it. Ordinals may be written as numerals or words (2nd or second). Write out fractions in words (one-half, two-thirds). Numbers below 1.0 such as .4 be written as four-tenths of a percent. Write point or dot: one-point-four
  42. Emphasis Underline Dash Ellipsis Not capitalized
  43. Prounouncers and spelling Phonetic spelling for announcer Spelling does matter TV name keys Correct pronunciation really matters Common errors? Local pronunciations People’s names
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