LocalNewser dispatches from the frontlines of local news

All Set to Serve Up a Lousy Lunch Without So Much as a Smile

I remember the day my Dad brought my brother and me for lunch at New York’s classic Horn and Hardart Automat. We picked out simple sandwiches from the vending machines and had a kid-like fascination with the way the place worked.

One thing, though, it wasn’t really about the food.

To make an Automat work, food has to be easy to make, long-lasting, and able to fit inside the mechanics of the vending machines. So bacon-wrapped scallops are out, and ham and cheese sandwiches are in. Sandwiches, salads, pieces of pie and coffee.

I got to thinking about the Automat as I’ve been reading up on the Tribune Company’s audacious plans to do away with anchors and reporters at the company’s station, KIAH, in Houston.

The new format, dubbed “NewsFix” by Tribune’s “Chief Innovation Officer” Lee Abrams (you can learn a lot by checking out Abrams' Tribune bio, which describes a guy who's done a lot of radio re-mixing, but no journalism. He seems genetically closer to Howard Stern than Edward R. Murrow), deep-sixes the decades-old anchor and reporter concept and replaces it with a graphics-heavy mix of natural sound stories and MOS interviews.

TVNewsCheck’s Wayne Lorentz talked to insiders who’ve seen a pilot of “NewsFix” produced not in Houston, but at WPIX in New York, and, well, it’s not Frontline:

“In one story, the narrator refers to terrorists as ‘bozos.’ In another, a clip of fictional boxer Ivan Drago from Rocky IV is mixed into a story about the West getting tough with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. There are even clips from cartoon shows like Ren and Stimpy and animations from the JibJab website.”

This, Tribune insists, is how you break the mold and reinvent local news.

Or, it’s how you take a made-for-the-50s model like the Automat and apply it to the fast-moving digital world of 2010. (Only without the retro cool)

See, the thing about replacing reporters and anchors with folks on the street and Ren and Stimpy is this: you’re trading bacon-wrapped scallops for a chilled ham and cheese on white bread delivered soullessly from a vending machine. Day after day after day.  (Can you imagine how bad those cartoon-infused stories will be in the fifth week of the experiment, when the editors are getting bored and the format is being forced?)

Would you watch that?

The only way to make a talent-less newscast work would be to produce phenomenal content that truly reinvents the way we tell stories in this medium. There are backpackers out there who can tell a story without appearing on camera and make it feel like journalism at its finest. They find real people and let them talk, without standing outside a Burger King quickly grabbing anyone who'll go on camera.  That format...well, I’d be jazzed—but not convinced of its viability.  (And you'd have to assemble an amazing stable of visual journalists and give them the time to produce those stories--and we all know that's not in the cards with existing old media companies)

In Houston, it looks like we’ll be getting the Automat. The way KIAH will fill its newscasts without talent is with easy-to-churn-out luncheon meat. Grab a ton of MOS interviews on stories. They’re easy and they’re fast. And, yeah, sometimes they’re amusing.

Now think about a restaurant you’d eat at every day for a week. It’s probably not the Automat.

My grandfather used to eat at the same spot on the same day of the week every week. He liked the Italian food, but he also liked the service. The same server took care of him, asked after his daughter and the grandkids, and knew his drink.

It was the full experience. In a way, anchors and reporters have done that. They’re the familiar servers in our favorite restaurant. Sometimes we get the same thing we had last time, other times we try something new.

If you’re going to kill that, you’d better damn well have the food to make it all worthwhile. And in Houston, it sounds a lot like processed vending machine food without even the enjoyment of a friendly face to serve it to you.

Harrison Ford, Your Morning Show Anchor

Could Harrison Ford be the best fictional news anchor since Jack Nicholson in Broadcast News?  Check out J. J. Abrams' new flick, Morning Glory:

Wendy Corona Loses Court Battle Against KPRC/Houston

Ex-KPRC Anchor Wendy Corona

A year ago we told you about Wendy Corona's departure as an anchor at Houston's KPRC, one of a wave of high profile departures as stations offloaded talent from coast to coast. Corona claimed breach of contract and damage to her reputation. A year later, KPRC has won in court.

"Corona sought $3.2 million in damages plus court costs from Channel 2, which is owned by Post-Newsweek Stations, and individual defendants after her dismissal from the station in January 2009," reported the Houston Chronicle. According to David Barron's piece in the Chron, a judge granted motions for summary judgment dismissing the breach of contract, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, misrepresentation and fraud claims made by Corona.

The case called two KPRC news directors to court to testify--Nancy Shafran and Skip Valet. Neither Post-Newseek nor Corona commented on the ruling. And according to the Chron, a counterclaim--accusing Corona of filing an "abuse pleading"--remains pending.

Getting Good on Camera, Part 3: It’s Not About the Camera

At some point in television, it always becomes about the camera: what are you shooting on? How is it in low light? What editing system are you using? And on...

In the new world, where the reporter in front of the camera is as often the operator of the camera--and the resulting video is as likely being posted to a blog or website as it is being aired on the 11 o'clock news, trust me: it's not about the camera. I've been sharing some of the suggestions I have given aspiring journalists over the years for handling the camera (from the lens side), but when people are doing it all themselves, there always seems to be a point when they stop making forward progress and start obsessing about gear.

Should I go to B&H and get a good camera? I mean, if I'm serious about this, I should have a serious camera, right? What camera would be the right camera? If I get the wrong camera are my videos going to stand out for the wrong reasons? And on...

Forget all that. Trust me, I've done enough obsessing over video gear for you and me both. And while I love the gear I've got, I realize when it comes right down to it, if you want to show off your talents on the lens side of a camera, the camera is unimportant. If you want to show off your talents on the eyepiece side of the camera, that's different.

But for a print journalist who wants video skills, or a blogger who wants to get video on the blog, or anyone who wants to know how to stand in front of a camera--any camera--and punch right through to whomever's watching, all that matters is you:

3 Ways to Look Comfortable, Not Awkward, on Camera (Video Series Part 2)

Continuing our series on getting better on camera--and avoiding the little things that can derail any on camera effort, here are three top tips for bringing out your best any time you stand in front of a lens:

CoachReporter: Video Coaching Part 2 from Mark Joyella on Vimeo.

For more, check out the first part of this series here.

NBC Set to Get Its #Journchat On

If you're not already hip to the weekly Monday night #journchat, (and part of getting hip to #journchat is accepting that you must use a hashtag, since it's a Twitter deal and that's just how the kids do it) here's a great opportunity to see what it's all about. On August 9, from 8-10 p.m. ET, journalists, public relations pros and social media gurus will get together for a live chat hosted at NBC News; of course you can get in on it from the nearest available laptop--just connect the tubes to Twitter (preferably through a chat client like TweetChat).

#journchat's a tweetnomenon created by Sarah Evans (@prsarahevans), a PR who's led the way in using social media to bring down the walls of misunderstanding between TV types and the wonderful folks who send all those news releases. (Why does a news release contain all the wrong information? Why does a news conference suck? Usually, because PR folk don't truly understand how we work and what we're looking for. #journchat's aimed at fixing that.)

Getting NBC News in on the act, Evans says, can only take it to the next level. "It is my hope to offer a similar format where attendees can hear (and see) from various roles at NBC, including: anchor, web editor, tech reporter, producer, blogger and the social media director," she says. "We're giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the newsroom to help journalists learn and public relations professionals to better pitch and interact with the network."

The NBC #journchat came about after Evans arranged a live CNN #journchat at SxSW. She pitched the concept to NBC's Ryan Osborn, the network's first social media director (how do I get a job like that, you ask? I'll fight you for it) and he jumped at it. "I'm really excited that NBC has embraced the #journchat community and I look forward to strengthening our partnership."

"Social Media Freak" Sarah Evans

So will there be celebrity twitterers? Be there and find out. In the meantime, #journchat's a great way to expand your social network and pick up some valuable contacts on both sides of the fence. It's also damn funny, filled with people who know how to make Twitter as fast-paced and entertaining as a gathering of friends around a bar table.

Local News Without Our Beloved Cliches? The “Revolution” Is On (Again)

Dramatic developments this morning out of Chicago--er, sorry--out of the Windy City:

Tribune's named two ultra senior executive VPs (or something) with the titles "regional vice presidents of innovation and imagination."  I kid you not.

If ever a job title sounded like a glossy way of describing a no-work gig arranged by your friends in the mob, this would be it.  But of course, I'm sure this is going to be really difficult work for these veeps.  Carrie King and John Zeigler, according to Phil Rosenthal in the Sun Times, have been given the assignment of rooting out the cliches in the local newscasts at Tribune stations (okay, that won't be hard) and then, um, I guess, innovate and imaginate their butts off.

If there's anything more amusing than the ridiculous cliches local newsers cling to (we've driven BREAKING NEWS into the ground, for instance, along with TEAM COVERAGE, and on and on and on and...), it's the amusing military-style WARS ON BAD NEWSCASTS that station groups declare from time to time. Just listen to Tribune's rousing message to the troops:

"It will help bring us into the 21st century in terms of what (viewers) see and hear," Lee Abrams, Tribune Co.'s chief innovation officer, said in an interview Tuesday. "It's elevating us and escaping the grip of the 1970s television playbook that seems to be what every station in America is addicted to."

We're out to bust the TV cliches," Abrams said. "If you ever watch Onion TV, they mock it and they're right. Some of this stuff is hilariously out of date and we've got to attack. Some of theses cliches are beyond belief."

"We're going to do the greatest level of experimenting where we have the least to lose," Abrams said. "You'll see tweaks to WGN and CLTV with this new structure.

"But we have a lot of cities where we're not doing well in morning and evening news, and we're not going to tweak our way out of it," he said. "We have to do something dramatic. What happens sometimes is a station will mimic the big guy and end up with the poor man's version of traditional news. To really bust out, we have to do something noticeable and different."

“The TV revolution is underway," Tribune Co. said in its Tuesday announcement, calling the restructuring and new positions for Zeigler and King “the first phase” of its effort to “ ‘blow up’ the traditional TV playbook” and reinvent local TV.

Oh, man, that's classic stuff.  I can't think of a way to even try to make that more amusing than it is all by itself.  So, best of luck with the revolution.  I've witnessed a few revolutions in local news over the years, and God bless, they usually end badly.  Those chief innovation officers often end up strung up or with their heads on pikes as the revamped news set burns in the background.

But maybe this time...maybe this time it'll be different.

Why Reporters Love Getting No for an Answer

Media Management 101: How Not to Look Like a Crime Suspect

Ask any journalist, and the honest ones will admit there's a lot to that concept of "the pack." We do a lot of our work in groups, even if we're not technically working as a team.  But in certain situations, there's strength in numbers, and we know it.

I bring this up after reading two separate stories this morning about political candidates who've taken the "I'd rather run than talk to a reporter" approach to media strategy.  Perhaps they know this only encourages us to chase, much in the same way a dog will run after almost anything that it sees darting away, often without truly knowing what it is, or if there's any real value in catching it.  We sense that somebody's dodging us, and damn straight that's all we need to get the blood flowing.

And yet this fundamental truth of journalism seems lost on so many who ought to know better, like politicians and PR folk.  In crisis mode, instead of stepping up to the cameras and adopting a pleasant expression and kindly answering every tough question with a flowery but empty answer (which quickly leaves us tired and anxious for something else to do) story subjects put their hands over our camera lenses, or say "no comment" (seriously?  who teaches this?) and demand that we get off their property.

In Nevada, Tea Party darling and U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle has guaranteed herself a grilling when and if she ever gets caught by a reporter by literally running from one:  "In a segment fit for TMZ, one intrepid reporter chased her on foot outside a restaurant this month, repeatedly asking why she had once said that 'if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.' She ignored the questioner and tried to outpace him, in a video clip replayed across the state," wrote The New York Times.

Now how on Earth could a clip like that help a campaign?  Especially when reporters are--in so many cases--so easy to deflect?  Walk up to a camera and smile, shake the reporter's hand and remain calm, and then simply spout your talking points no matter what the question.  In person, it is annoying for both of us.  But the end result is an interview that's boring as all hell.  And reporters would take a fascinating clip of a candidate running and saying nothing over one who stands and says flowery gibberish any day.  Stay on point, and it's like Kryptonite.

But off they go, running.  And the pack feels a lizard brain impulse to follow at all costs.  You have only convinced us to try harder.  And we will.  Oh, how we will.  I go and tell my bosses that you ran and that translates in newsroom speak as "Mark has a helluva story and he gets all day to work on it."  I call in and say the candidate did an interview but I couldn't pin him/her down on anything, that translates as "Mark has nothing."  You do the math to see which story gets resources and time, and which reporter gets reassigned.

In Chicago, candidate Mark Kirk has plenty of questions reporters want answered.  He could sit down with a reporter of his choosing and--with a Charlie Crist smile--answer them all (though without really saying a damn thing, and carefully avoiding anything that might be a soundbite for 6:00) and he'd be able to move forward.  Instead, as Greg Hinz writes in Crain's Chicago Business today, Kirk, too, took off running after a speech like the operator of a used car lot running from the I-Team:  "As soon as that was done — with a swarm of TV cameras and reporters moving toward the front of the ballroom — Mr. Kirk bolted for a back door.  With media in hot pursuit, he raced through a Hyatt kitchen and into the back seat of a black SUV — I believe it was a Cadillac Escalade — which instantly peeled out."

For crap's sake, what media adviser thinks a reporter looking like a murder suspect is good TV?  Why not throw a sweatshirt over his head while they're at it?

This is not to say that you can avoid tough questions, or that reporters will swallow gruel without complaint.  But the mechanics of the business--and the pack--have rules.  And cooperating deflates, while running intensifies.  Simple. Who let the dogs out? Hell, YOU did.

Editor’s Note

Hey folks, just wanted to let you know that I've recently been snowed with a blizzard of (usually Russian language) spam that has overwhelmed comments.  I've finally gotten the spam-sweeper in and found a handful of really great comments that I never responded to;  thanks for participating in the site, and I hope you don't think your comments were ignored.

On with the show...

Top Tweeters Tagged in Trades

TV's Top Tweeters: Why Some Local Newsers Still Fail

So it turns out some folks in local news have Twitter accounts. Who knew?

If you're like me, and @TVAmy and @AnnNyberg are among the folks you follow, this will come as no surprise. I'm convinced Amy and Ann are cyborgs of some sort who remain plugged into the grid around the clock, constantly scanning the web for news and instantly re-tweeting the good stuff. They clearly don't sleep.

Today both made Broadcasting and Cable's list of "Local TV's Top Tweeters" in a story by Michael Malone that wisely lists not just the number of followers a local newser has, but how many tweets they've sent. I've seen lots of newsers on Twitter who break a fundamental rule of television--and media in general: if you've got a big audience, don't turn your transmitter off. And yet people who make a living boosting a brand (whether it's the station or themselves) develop a huge following on Twitter, and then fail to deliver.

Who's using Twitter in a smart way in your market? Is it talent--or a station account? For my money, some of the most interesting local newser tweets come from assignment editors and news directors, not anchors or reporters. And for python's sake, reporters, those "I'm going live on ACTION NEWS @6 See ya then!" tweets are just deadly. At least throw us a TwitPic of you lamely composing that tweet in the livetruck or something.

Broadcasting and Cable