EmailHere's a news flash
The same people who are watching your videos are also watching Netflix and Amazon and maybe even AppleTV, despite the rather appalling Morning News (at $15m per episode!)
There is an inherent, if unspoken expectation on their part that your non-fiction, whether it is news or documentary of even a short video is going to be as interesting, as compelling and as well done as Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad.
This may seem unfair, but that's the way it is.
You may have important information to deliver, but unless you can package it in a way that is 'easy to digest' - that is, that holds people's attention and does not let go - they are gone.
And once they are gone, whether it is from your newscast or your website, they are not coming back.
There are too many other options
When we run the bootcamps, I would say that now we spend about 15% of our time focusing on the tech side - phones, apps, etc,,; and about 85% of our time focusing on great storytelling.
We have spent hundreds of hours taking apart the best Hollywood movies and cable TV series to understand what makes these things so popular. Think ot fhis a old style AI, without the computers. And we have created our own formula for making every story compelling.
Last week, we ran a bootcamp for Spectrum1 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was based on our formula for great storytelling in the world of news and information.
Megan Carptenter, an MMJ at Spectrum1 reported, shot, edited, scripted and produced this story on her iPhoneX, and all in one day.
It works.
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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.