This past week, many friends have sent me links to a Youtube video mocking the news industry: Charlie Brooker’s “How to Report the News.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4)
The video mocks the generic nature of a traditional news report – the “lackluster establishing shots,” “the obligatory shot of overweight people with their faces subtly framed out,” and “lazy and pointless” sound bites. While the video was definitely funny, it made me realize that audiences are fed up with the traditional delivery of news. They can see right through these generic packages and pay no attention to stories done in the same format night after night. The jig is up.
Not only have audiences grown tired of the generic news story, they’re also sick of the generic news anchor.
Ernie Anastos, a longtime New York news anchor was profiled in the New York Times this week. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/nyregion/31ernie.html?pagewanted=1&ref=media). Yet, the story seemed less like a profile and more like an obituary for the dying breed of the traditional local news anchor.
“In an industry that has morphed from ‘And that’s the way it is’ to something more like ‘Oh no he didn’t!,’ Mr. Anastos retains a gray formality behind the ever-sleeker anchor desks, a tone of gravity laced with warmth and aw-shucks one-liners.”
The pithy one-liners are no longer funny, that quick switch of emotion from the crime story to the light-hearted kicker is no longer believable, and even the voice is no longer trusted, but mocked.
“There are other anchormen who read the news in their “I’m reading the news” voice. That is Mr. Anastos’s voice,” wrote the reporter.
If they watch television news at all, young people are watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report – whose formats are based on mocking the traditional newscast. The only time young people are likely to catch a local news segment is after it makes its way to Youtube, which is how Anastos found himself being profiled by the New York Times.
“While bantering with the weatherman during the 10 o’clock news, Mr. Anastos said, “Keep plucking that chicken,” except the verb sounded an awful lot like an obscenity.”
The on-air flub became a viral hit.
As a journalism grad student, I am learning how to perfect the traditional format of a minute and 30 second news story. But when I graduate and enter the industry, news stations will be looking for something different, something new. If we continue to pump out the same type of story night after night, our audiences will tune out. If every anchor on television has the same voice and mannerisms, audiences will tune out. We need to tell stories in a manner and medium that audiences haven’t seen before. We need to act like ourselves, not like how we think reporters should act. And if we offer something new and not generic, then maybe we will no longer be the butt of the joke.