A Live Shot and Two Vo-Sots? Drive to the Second Window, Please

Posted on February 17, 2010 Written by 9 Comments
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The difference between fast food and cheap news.

To understand why your newsroom is the way it is, you have to understand why the burger place down the street is the way it is.

(I am posting this here so the next time someone asks, I can just give them the link instead of explaining it all over again.)

I don’t think a week goes by that someone somewhere doesn’t ask, “Why isn’t there any creativity in my newsroom? Why is everything so cut-and-dried and formulaic?”

Take a look at your favorite fast food restaurant. The process of producing and delivering the product is so carefully controlled, a machine could probably do it.

There is one way, and one way only, to make the giant-size burger. Employees have been taught (and may even have a chart to remind them) how many pickle, tomato and onion slices go on it, and even how they should be placed.

If you’ve ever peeked past the counter, you’ve probably seen little placards instructing employees exactly — “Welcome to BurgerBarn. Would you like to try our Big Barnyard Deluxe for only $2.99?” — how to greet customers, and what they should try to sell them.

As a result, you can drive through a BurgerBarn in Olympia, Washington, or a BurgerBarn in Ft. Myers, Florida, and the experience — not to mention the food — will be exactly the same.

There is more to this, I think, than consistency of product. By eliminating creativity and originality from the food preparation process, fast food establishments have turned cooking into unskilled, low-wage labor.

How is that different from TV news?

Well, I don’t think it’s any different at all.

Without knowing where you live, I can say with some confidence that last night, your local news began with a shot of both anchors sitting side-by-side on a set with a pictures of the city skyline and some monitors behind them.

One of them said something like, “Shocking new details about ______,” then turned to look at the other anchor, who picked up the story from there. The studio camera may have done a vertigo-inducing zoom to the second anchor as he or she finished the sentence, then tossed to a reporter who was Live! at the scene with an update.

It was the same almost everywhere last night, and it will be the same again tonight.

There’s no particular marketing advantage, as there is with fast food, to having two newscasts at opposite ends of the country almost exactly alike. But it implies a fairly significant economic advantage.

Just as it doesn’t take an experienced, highly-paid chef to follow the template at a BurgerBarn, it doesn’t take an experienced, highly-paid journalist to follow the template the consultant has written for the newsroom.

By making every newscast alike, and setting up guidelines that mandate story structure to almost word-for-word precision, stations and consultants have created a news product that anybody can assemble — with only a little more intellectual effort than is required to place pickles and tomatoes on a sesame seed bun.

If you aren’t in the business, you might be surprised how much of what you see is template-driven.

Those ‘spontaneous’ q&a sessions following stories are pretty obvious. “So… tell me… Jeff. How… dangerous… is… that… leaking gas line?” You’ve probably seen better acting at a high school play.

But did you notice in 1990 or thereabouts that the anchors on your local news began exclaiming, “Just take a look at this!” when introducing a particularly dramatic piece of footage?

That wasn’t spontaneous. It’s in the template handed down from the news designers, who realized that more and more viewers were mentally ‘tuning out’ their newscasts, even if they weren’t doing it physically.

(What that exclamation implies, of course, is, “Just take a look at this! It’s better than the other crap in this newscast, which we know you’ve been ignoring.”)

The median starting pay in TV news, according to a recent survey, is less than $20,000. According to a restaurant industry web site, entry-level fast food employees make more than that.

What does this mean if you’re in the business? I think it means that in the future, you’ll be working with fewer and fewer people with high-paying skills.

And if you’re a news consumer, it means you should probably start getting reacquainted with your morning paper.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

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Breaking Kayfabe

Posted on February 16, 2010 Written by 3 Comments

(This is the first of the mcarp essays, written more than 10 years ago by Michael Carpenter, a broadcast journalism refugee who found the light… republished with permission.)

Breaking Kayfabe

I learned an interesting word on the Internet a couple of years ago: kayfabe.

It’s a carney term, transplanted in later years to professional wrestling. It means to always keep up the illusion, and never allow a moment’s candor to reveal it’s all an act.

Pro wrestlers who’ve been out of the business for years will still swear it was all real: the grudges, the death cage matches, the ‘loser leaves town’ matches. Until WWF owner Vince McMahon decided to blow kayfabe all to hell, rare was the pro wrestler who would admit anything about the business was less than completely genuine.

(An aside: what the hell was John Stossel thinking when he confronted pro wrestler ‘Dr. D’ Schulz and asked him to admit he was a fake? What did Stossel think the guy would do — scuff his toe on the floor and say, “Aw, gawrsh, Mister Stossel. Ya got me red-handed”? Or maybe he would blame his producer.

Of course the guy beat the crap out of him. I would’ve probably done the same thing.)

McMahon may be willing to blow his own cover, but television news still sticks to its illusions. Sometimes, it’s forgotten they are illusions. I’ve known news directors who genuinely believed their anchors were covering a half-dozen stories a week, just because they saw promos saying they did — even though they hadn’t seen the anchors themselves set foot out of the newsroom in six or seven years.

As a friend of mine, still in the business, once said: “They lie to the viewers, they lie to us, they lie to each other, they lie to themselves. And they’ve been lying for so long, they’ve forgotten what the truth was to start with.”

These essays and anecdotes are a form of ‘breaking kayfabe.’ Those of you currently, or formerly, in the business will see little or nothing that surprises you. As for the rest of you, if it’s too tough to bear, maybe there’s a Seinfeld rerun on somewhere.

Mike Carpenter
Oklahoma City, November 2000

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Others are Ranting

Posted on February 15, 2010 Written by 2 Comments
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The web has always been a place for sharing rants, and now we can do it with instantaneous results.

No, I’m not going to add (much) to the cacophony about Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines, other than to say that his fame certainly juiced the attention to the cause. His rant is one of an outsider, who rails against conspiracies and things he does not understand. Most of our ranting, whether it be about sports or politics or economics, is the ravings of an outsider.

When you get an insider’s view of events, then you’re in for a treat.

I’ve written quite a bit about my former career in television news, and if you click around on the Television and Broadcasting tags here you’ll find a number of entries where I’ve taken the news-folk to task for being lazy or just plain dumb. I can do that, because I’ve walked in their shoes, and know what they could be doing instead of what they put on the air.

There are others ranting, though. Like this network insider who knows the Snowpocalypse coverage is overblown, and the inherent hypocrisy in the way it is delivered. The Social Web gives us instant publishing capabilities, allowing us to share these insider perspectives in safe and anonymous ways.

This isn’t anything new, however. Sure, it’s cheap when others are hosting. And a site like “The Daily Rundown” can get a larger audience today, with more people online and more people aware that such inside dirt is being dished. But the online rants go back more than a decade.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing (with permission) the rants of Michael Carpenter. I first got to know him in an online forum where broadcast journalists would meet to talk about storytelling, the craft, how to get a job, and how to survive in the industry. By the time I got to know “mcarp,” he was already done and gone. But he had his very own website, which in 1998 was cool! And he wrote openly and honestly about the world of broadcast news, which was even more cool! And he pulled no punches, which was the coolest part of all.

Sadly, his site has been through several revisions and the “mcarp Institute for Situational Journalism Ethics” is no more. But I saved his essays, which are still as valid and relevant today.

Michael Carpenter, you taught me that it was okay to be Howard Beale. How our nation would have been better served if we had remembered Howard Beale and what he stood for.

Stay tuned. The mcarp essays are coming.

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Cutting Corners

Posted on December 6, 2009 Written by 2 Comments

We’ve got that B-Roll!

“b-roll” is the term used for the video that is brought in after-the-fact to supplement a news story or a commercial.

When I was in television news, it was considered almost sinful to rely too much on file video. We prided ourselves on writing to the video we had, and not pulling generic stuff from the archives.

It was a sign of laziness if one were to write the copy first, then hunt for specific video to make it fit. More often than not, you get a better story by writing to what you experienced and perceived than some generic and stale ideal.

I knew many in the business, though, who were masters at using stale stock video. Some kept their own libraries of traffic, weather, schools and “people walking around.”

The “B” in b-roll doesn’t stand for “bland,” but that’s not a bad guess. It had to do with the early film editing process, where there were two channels being mixed together live on the air. Typically, you’d have the reporter’s narration and the sound bites on the A-channel, and the cover video (with natural sound) on the B-channel.

Modern editing has rendered these notions moot, because non-linear video setups allow for multiple tracks, overdubs, and slowing of video in an instant. Need to trim a little bit of video? No problem. The fancy dissolves and wipes are a cinch, too. Now you don’t have to pay attention to an A-roll and a B-roll, because each little bit is a snippet in its own right, and is sequenced automatically by a processor.

TV’s Future is in the Past

Yet, even with the video innovation, there are two lessons:

1) Jargon never goes away. We will still have “B-Roll” long after the generation who actually edited on film. Ask anyone in a TV newsroom, and they can tell you what B-Roll is, even if they’ve never touched film or can’t explain the origin of the term.

2) B-Roll will never go away. The declining population in newsrooms isn’t going to magically rebound when the economy improves, meaning stations (that survive) will do so by doing more with less. Shooting fresh video can be costly, and if you make a practice of discouraging the travel and time required to acquire video you can shoehorn a little extra “product” out of the crews you have.

And that’s what it is, “product.”

Which makes this fake ad as raucously funny as it is sadly prophetic.

(hat tip to my friend John McQuiston for finding this clip.)

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