What are the Advantages of Television News Over the Print News?

Advantages of the T.V. as a Media:

Television has some limitations which the press does but television has a natural attribute that is recognized though not completely understood-the peculiarly personal and graphic impact on its viewers which the printed word cannot match.

This close relationship with the audience is not by any means confined to entertainment television, but occurs just as strongly if not more so in journalistic television. Television comes closest to putting the audience physically at the scene of the event. It’s at its best as a transmitter of experience. There are elements of emotion and of involvement in television’s chemistry.

The involvement does not ensure that the viewer will be informed and enlightened by what he sees and hears. But it does provide the broadcasting journalist with a potent catalyst for drawing and holding his audience, toward the end of informing and enlightening it. The rapport between reporter and viewer is almost total.

Very early in the game, television and the politician realized they were made for each other and by now national politics eats up goodly chunks of television time, the most dramatic part of which is broad­cast live.

While a live television event commands as much airtime as the length and import of the story dictate, almost the opposite is true of the regularly scheduled news programme. The day-to-day routine of the television newsman is circumscribed by the basic restrictions of time and the necessity for condensation of material.

As a listener and viewer, the same individual loses his freedom to choose, and he must accept the newscaster’s selection. These differ­ences between printed and broadcast news are basic to an under­standing of the nature of the regularly scheduled news programme. The newsman-dependent on limited time instead of stretchable space-has to think about the limits of his audience’s attention span. He must select the news items that will interest the most people, knowing that he has not the time to be all things to all men. He must
judiciously make use of feature items-not front page news-that will help hold his audience with a change of pace.

When he is through he will still not have satisfied everyone, and he will not have supplied as much news as other media-newspapers, news magazines, opinion magazines and the like. For radio and television cannot provide in their daily news programmes all that is required to keep the public well informed.

With the special requirements placed on it as a headline service, and by virtue of its need to be clear and accurate under the handicap of brevity, broadcasting has felt the need for the widest spread of sources for its news-.

It draws its voice-only reports, its film, live, and tape audio-visual reports, on-the-spot, remote, and communica­tions satellite pickups, not only from its own reporters and corres­pondents but from such diversified sources as police radio bands.

The broadcast newsroom makes use of local, regional, national and inter­national wire services, of its own regular staffers, of its special beat reporters and its bureaus in major cities.

On the scene Reporting:

In recent years, greater insistence on leaving nothing to chance has brought increased use of the broadcast newsman with his own, first-hand, on-the-spot reporting of a story, where possible directly from the scene of the news. Rapid improvement of equipment and techniques particularly in advanced countries, has made such coverage faster and easier than ever before.

The highly organised team fielded today by network news establishments is geared to the day-by-day demands of the regular network news offerings, just as it is to the prolonged coverage of the live event. Judgments and critical selections that shape the daily news broadcast begin at the very top of the news organisation, with news executives of the network. Reporting to them are the editors or producers of programmes.

The latter command a corps of reporters, writers, cameramen, tape and film editors, technicians, and airmen. Several hours before a programme is to be broadcast, the editor makes his plans and assigns his forces on the basis of the news then available. He anticipates later develop­ments and he reserves sufficient flexibility to cope with the new/news that will undoubtedly occur in the interval before airtime.

T V. News:

Once the news ingredients-the budget-are determined, the news-gathering manpower and tools are deployed to their tasks. Stories within coaxial cable or microwave relay reach of the network headquarters are prepared by network correspondents in the area or by reporters at local affiliated stations, and mounted for transmission and recording ahead of programme time or for live transmission on the air. Stories from farther away already filmed must be dispatched by air transportation to points within reach for feeding into the show.

After the news has been gathered and late-breaking additions made, it must be processed, edited, boiled down to fit in the package that will eventually be on the air. To the written stories that will be read by newscasters are added the silent and sound film, video and audio tapes, still photographs, maps, and art work. The final script incorporates all the ingredients and becomes the master from which all program personnel works.

At this point the team of directors and the studio and projection crews move in to back up the on-air communicators-the anchor men and on-air reporters. Their mission is to bring all too final fruition and present as crisp, effective, and professional a news programme as possible.

Hard News:

The hard news concentrates on stories of national and inter­national significance. Politics, government, foreign affairs, are the categories of news treated daily. In a good many cities, network viewers are exposed to more hard news from outside world capitals than they can get from their newspapers. Another kind of hard news-the tabloid story of highway crash, violent crime, and gore-is nearly non-existent unless the story is on a scale which cannot be ignored.

The background, non-deadline piece, sometimes running to three or four minutes, provides viewers with background on a poli­tical or social issue, a scientific discovery, an educational or cultural subject.

This story form, running two or three times the length of the average deadline story, could never find room on the five, or rarely on the fifteen-minute versions of television news. As the volume of hard news on a particular day permits, the short feature or even shorter humorous story gets an airing as a change of pace and mood from the usually heavy nature of the news of the day.

One of the big community contributions of television is covering the news of civic affairs-city, country and state. These visually static stories are getting air-time, and are being dealt with by more knowledgeable television newsmen than was the case only a few years ago. The television news programme is no better than its direct link with the viewer; this link constitutes a direct on-the-air communi­cation.

Whether or not it is good for the air person to become a star, for a show-business aspect to be injected into electronic news, for a personality to become a part of the news that is delivered-these are nevertheless the realities. As the big network news names are famous across the land, their counterparts on local stations are celebrated in their communities.

This star system, created by the public, is not likely to change either at the national or the local level. What is changing and will continue to change is the caliber and capability of the star. Up to now, too many electronic communicators with a knack for holding an audience have been “readers”-personalities with no news credentials.