The “art-less” news edit…?

[Michael Cerdeiros]

Haha, Good Stuff.

Michael Cerdeiros
Cerious Productions
https://www.CeriousProductions.com

[Mark Suszko]

Yeah, he’s got more of that kind of stuff, really spot-on. We’ve had that clip here before, buit it’s nice to get a replay occasionally.

This style of reportage’ evolved over time to fit the demands of the ENG process, but what Charlie’s skit points out is, the format has degenerated and lost focus and meaning, become irrelevant, becoming a kind of over-stylized kabuki theatre that suggests it’s telling you the news when really it isn’t. There is a saying: “the map is not the territory”. Meaning that representations of the factual situation are by necessity a streamlined version of what is true, and the quality of that streamlining process is quite variable, often poor.

Where I find this exceptionally true is in my local TV news. A typical half hour newscast here, after you take out commercials, sports, and weather, will barely be ten to twelve minutes, divided into three or so stories, one of those will be a “special” that’s minute longer than the rest and represents the station’s biggest play of the day, which they will re-run at the 10 PM slot as well as next morning and possibly the next day’s 6 o’clock as a follow-up.

And they are miserable: Intro from the news desk with a headline description that is totally redundant to the story. First VO bite of the story by the reporter over b-roll says the exact same thing you just heard, slightly expanded but not really telling you anything more. Sound bite actuality from some interviewed person then lasts about 30 seconds and may or may not add anything you don’t already know, because it wasn’t picked so much for content as it was to fill time and fit the story the reporter pre-wrote on the way to the event. The wrap-up is another redundant couple of seconds of b-roll and VO. They seem more intent on filling their alloted segment times than really getting into the meat of a story.

And they throw it ALL away when there’s the hint of bad weather, beacause weather stories are the very cheapest thing to report and fill time flexibly. Do I really need the live shot of a guy standing in the storm on a highway overpass, to tell me it’s raining or snowing? Do I need three minutes of recap of the day’s weather I’ve already experienced, at 10 PM? It’s not like I have a time machine that I can use to go backwards in time and DO anything about it.

More to the point, do we NEED live shots at 10 PM of reporters standing in front of buildings that are closed, hours after the event happened, recapping that something happened there six hours earlier, and throwing it to a tape playback in the studio, made three or four hours earlier…then coming back to the live shot to say basically, “yep, that happened today. Right here. Hours ago. Nothing else has changed here since”. Do I need to see them live at the scene for that to be relevant?

/end Seinfeld mode

[Richard Herd]

“When style is exaggerated and obvious, the work becomes nothing but pure nostalgia.” — Albert Camus

[Stephen Smith]

Ha Ha, my favorite part is the Matrix comment. A matter of fact I just watched a news piece that did that this weekend and laughed. Especially when the person that walked in front of the reporter realized that he was on camera.

Stephen Smith
Utah Video Productions

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[Mike Cohen]

Funny.

This clip is typical of a national network news story (NBC Nightly News for example – if introduced by Brian Williams with his plastic spray on hair it is even more believable!).

But local news in my market only dreams of being this good. They love interviewing 2 people on the street and calling it news – they usually don’t even super the people so they could be station interns for all we know.

Mike Cohen