I hope you’re all recovering from the long weekend’s excesses. Well, I hope you were able to enjoy a few of those excesses!
Anyway, back to work.
News veteran and columnist Bob Jones shared this observation:
One of the major issues that needs to be addressed in Honolulu is who decides what’s news on TV. In newspapers, that’s pretty obvious. An editor or editors with a lot of experience in all news situations. You get to be an editor through an experience ritual.
TV is different here. Aside from the main editor, the news director, decisions about what goes in what position in a newscast, and how much time it will have, goes to a newscast producer. That’s a very young person on a very small salary who doesn’t yet have enough experience to be a reporter. Really! Ask your favorite TV station how much in-the-field journalism experience its newscast producers have.
Local TV is that rare journalism experience where the editors (the newscast producers who decide what stories go in what order and how long in minutes) are the very least experienced and the very least paid people in the newsroom.
I’m not exaggerating. A person without the experience to get hired as a $60,000 reporter can get hired at a local TV station as a $35,000 producer deciding what the $60,000 reporter gets on the air.
That’s TV news.
Anyone else in the biz want to chime in? Anonymous comments can be emailed to me and I’ll post them minus identification.
I’d like to give a nod to Andrew Gomes for his story today on the dispute between the Canterbury Place condominium and its original developer. These disputes are always juicy and too often go unreported. My criticism of the story is that it’s presented largely in the “he said-she said” without much benefit of the reams of documents which must be available in this and the string of related legal disputes. It always seems to me that drawing on source documents adds a level of specificity that gives weight to this kind of story. I don’t think this is an exception.
A reader called my attention to an article in The Nation, “The Trials of Ehren Watada“, who refused to deploy to Iraq because of his belief that the U.S. involvement in the war is illegal. Watada is the son of former state Campaign Spending Director Bob Watada, who is widely credited with initiating aggressive enforcement and shutting down the “pay to play” system of campaign contributions.
Then there was this story about a Windward pet photographer. You mean you can make money at this pet photo stuff?
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I’m not in the biz, but an astute friend has remarked that the local TV news here (as it is in many local markets) is nothing more than outsourced rubbernecking. “I don’t have to slow down at car accidents anymore because channel 4 does that for me.”
I agree with Bob Jones… One thing that I find funny from My Maui vantage point is showing the traffic cameras on television. If you can see this video while driving in your car something is very weird. And if you see it on TV and then jump in your car and drive, conditions will be completely different.
What these local TV stations create is not really news of course, its infotainment. and as in all businesses, labor is the biggest flexible cost. Get the cheapest bang for the buck age wise and demographics wise. The pressure for these kids must be extreme.
the cat photog show anyone can do it.
Her pics have high contrast. I would rather see detail in the eyes. and the darkest area of the black cat fur. But no. Instamatic art. I will have none of it.
also web site is slower than molasses. wrongo, boyo.
What? A broadcast news reporter in Honolulu gets $60,000?
Maybe in the KGMB newsroom that Bob used to work for but not anymore. I’m pretty sure the $35,000 the producer makes is the same amount the reporter makes from what I’ve heard. $60,000 is weekend anchor pay in Honolulu or morning anchor pay.
Otherwise I think Bob is mostly right. You get what you pay for. And when these producers and reporters get smart enough to actually make good decisions the first one they make is to leave the business.
Maybe the TV stations are also sharing production staff to save money. If you flip from channel to channel during the newscast, you’ll see the same story in almost the same order.