EmailWhen we started the whole VJ revolution, way back in 1988, it was then considered a radical idea for a single journalist to report, shoot, edit and produce their own work, then using a small camera.
Today, that idea is hardly radical.
No one argues about it any longer.
The advent of smart phones has now pretty much made cameras an anachronism
But as we have moved into the era of accepted MMJs or VJs or MoJo, a great opportunity has been lost.
We have found that many stations and networks are simply dumping the crews and big cameras for MMJs or VJs or MoJo, but they are still making the same kind of stuff that they were making with crews:
Stand up
A few sound bites
cut aways
Exteriors or estalishing shots
Yellow Police tape, if you can find any.
What this makes for is boring TV news.
The same people who are watching HBO and Netflix are also watching your local newscast - so why not make a local newscast that looks and feels like HBO and Netflix and featurs films while we are at it.
So that is what we have been doing with Spectrum1
And it is working
It is working LA, Columbua, Milwaukee...
And in two weeks, Louisville, KY.
It's all about great storytelling - character + arc of story.
And what is more Reality TV than news?
Nothing.
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No News Today — or tomorrow for that matter.
March 26, 2024
For most of human history, people lived in a world without news. The concept simply did not exist. The idea of news is really a 19th-century phenomenon, driven first by newspapers, and then by electronic media which brought us radio, then TV and now the web. Now, it seems, we are headed back to a world without news. Not because the technology is not there, but rather because, increasingly, people are no longer interested in news, at least in the way it is packaged now.
What TV News Could Be
February 26, 2024
When television was invented in the 1930s, no one knew what TV news was supposed to look like. The medium had never existed before, and so, like Gutenberg half a millennium, prior, the first creators of TV news had to fall back on a medium with which they were familiar, and that was radio.
What Is News? What Should it Be?
February 20, 2024
Maybe scary stories drive ratings… or maybe they don’t.