The Case for Writing the News
I find reading the news to be a vastly superior way of consuming it. Partly due to personal preference, of course, but market forces have caused news in general to decrease in quality, and the impact is the worst with television.
The problem isn’t that TV, or video in general, is incapable of good journalism as a medium. However, the competitive market that TV news exists in hasn’t spurred a contest of quality, but instead, a race to the lowest cost. What little high-quality news the television market offers is buried in a swamp of low-quality content that, more often than not, is pandering to humanity’s worst impulses of fear, anger, and envy.
Unfortunately, we fall for it all too often. As a result, cable news networks have become an absolute dumpster fire. By and large, they offer far more opinion-based content than actual news, let alone journalism.
As a guideline, if your screen is full of nothing more than “talking heads,” you probably aren’t watching news. That is called news commentary, and it’s opinion-based or sponsored content far more regularly than actual news. News networks make this kind of content because it’s cheap, or profitable in the case of sponsored content. Worse, when people are upset or scared by it, they tend to stay tuned. So the networks find hosts who are good at keeping people angry and frightened.
Local news stations share a lot of commentary, too, but they also do a better job of delivering news. They’ll typically have a reporter actually go to a local event live or to record video. They’re presenting more than their opinion, and they’re using the visual medium to greater advantage.
Their coverage, however, falls short because of its brevity and scarcity. Due to budget cuts, local news reporters are stretched thin, regularly with one reporter covering an entire county or more. And when it comes to presenting their work to the public, local news has the opposite problem from cable news, in that they have a lot of content that needs to be crammed into a half-hour program. So their stories are frequently cut to the bare-minimum, leaving out important context and interesting detail.
To compound this issue, local news stations are being bought up by investment firms to form their own large-scale broadcast networks that mimic cable news in many ways, offering less fact-based news and more opinion.
Everything else being equal, you’ll get better journalism from a reporter who is writing over one who is creating video stories for television.
While newspaper and online journalists are also stretched thin, and dealing with many of the same challenges as TV reporters, written news has the advantage of being simpler to produce. The reporter doesn’t need to bring a video camera and carefully set up shots for interviews, or collect b-roll for editing. Rather than spending time on that before deadline, they can make more calls and get more interviews.
While newspapers still physically printing can be pressed for space on the page, it’s much less constrictive than the time limits on television reporting. Copper Beacon’s articles, for instance, are rarely under 800 words, but those same 800 words can take more than five minutes to speak aloud. Five minutes is an eternity in the average local news program, which often has to make time for local weather and sports. You simply get more information in writing.
Written news is easier to edit, too. Most people are now taught to manage a text editor—a tool on every computer—in school or at work. On the other hand, editing video is a more complicated process that requires special software and training, particularly when trying to meet the branding standards of a television station. And last-minute additions and edits are much simpler to include in writing than video. Changing even the smallest thing in a video requires a rendering process that can take quite a while, depending on the power of the computer being used.
Watching television news can be an easy way to keep up on day-to-day events, but it’s important to be aware that they’re usually only skimming the surface of any story they talk about. For more depth, look for a written report.
