Philosophy

I got lucky. I picked a profession, TV news, when I was in college and it’s worked out pretty well. It wasn’t always easy, of course. As one news director once told me years ago, “You’re blond, bland, and boring.” How then, have I managed to hold some pretty good jobs in the business?
  Well, I think Johnny Cash has the answer, or at least his character in the movie Walk The Line. I use an excerpt from the movie in a broadcast journalism class that I teach at the University of Houston.
  The lesson is: in TV news, like in show businesses, you gotta believe in what you’re doing because if you don’t, your audience will see right through you. And you’d better tell them a story that’s relevant to their lives and tell it to that at a time when their receptive to hearing it.
  Here’s the excerpt from the film: a young Johnny Cash gets to audition in front of record producer Sam Phillips. Johnny sings a gospel song but Sam stops him.

SP: I don't record material that doesn't sell, Mr. Cash, and gospel like that doesn't sell.
JC: Was it the gospel or the way I sing it?
SP: Both.
JC: What's wrong with the way I sing it?
SP:I don't believe you.

Johnny’s offended, thinks he’s being called an atheist, but then Phillips says:
 
SP: We've already heard that song a hundred times, just like that, just like how you sang it...(SP continues) If you was hit by a truck and you were lying out in that gutter dying and you had time to sing, one song, huh, one song people would remember before you're dirt, one song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up, you telling me that's the song you'd sing?

Phillips suggests Johnny dig deeper.

SP: Or would you sing something different? Something real, something you felt? Because I'm telling you,right now,that's the kind of song people want to hear. That's the kind of song that truly saves people. It ain't got nothing to do with believing in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believing in yourself.
JC: Well, I've got a couple songs I wrote in the Air Force. You got anything against the Air Force?
SP: Nope.
JC: I do.

Pow! There you have it: Johnny began his leap to stardom because Sam Phillips showed him the key: you can sing pretty songs, or deliver pretty TV news stories, but if they lack originality, if they have no punch because the writer has no emotional or intellectual investment in them, the end result may be a perfectly fine example of a good song or nice story, but it won’t stand out. And worse yet, if, as with Johnny Cash’s supposed audition, you deliver a message that doesn’t truly make an emotional connection to the audience, what you say will likely be soon forgotten.

  In TV news, being “blond, bland and boring” and therefore not having much that’s intrinsically interesting to the audience, I think pushed me to try harder to find a unique angle or if I was lucky, an entire story no one else had. I always felt viewers never owed me a second of their time; I had to keep earning it as I told them the story.
  It’s how a TV newscast can be effective even without “stars” or “characters” to deliver the news. If the content is original, compelling, and hits a nerve (powerless people treated unfairly, hard-earned tax dollars wasted, the powerful exposed as empty suits), then the station will succeed in gaining audience share.

  It’s not easy. Because CREATING VALUE never is. Especially as TV newsrooms continue to reduce spending on staff and resources. There’s probably not a reporter out there who hasn’t heard some variation of: “Gee, that exclusive investigative piece you worked on for a week was great. Now, we want you to do TWO just like...every week!”

  The story or newscast must also have one other component to stand out and this gets back to our Walk the Line excerpt: it must RING TRUE. You see it all the time: the reporter interviews someone complaining about something or making a wild allegation and you want to scream at the set, “Seriously? You expect me to believe that?” You want the reporter/anchor to say it for you. If they do, great. If not, they’ve just lost the viewer. Like Sam Phillips (supposedly) said, its gotta be “something real,
something you felt”.

  Things that distance the viewer include teases that lead to stories that don’t deliver, “exclusives” that every station had, “shocking” news that isn’t. Slogans alone don’t “create value” and they often don’t “ring true”.

  While the TV news business faces new challenges as the Internet redefines how journalists do their jobs and how their work is distributed, local TV news has actually increased as a source of news for many people (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news).
For those of us in the business, maybe this is an opportunity to keep the trend going in our favor.