Read here about how ABC News is “transforming” itself through cuts and reorganization. At least they didn’t call it “right-sizing.”

(And bear in mind that ABC News had a larger staff than NBC News and MSNBC combined…)

But how do you do the job with fewer people? You outsource.

Check out Good Morning America’s coverage of tornadoes and storms in Arkansas.

I apologize if the image isn’t clear, it’s not always easy to shoot an old-style curved television surface.

But just about everything you need to know about the future of network news is in this piece.

Particularly in the little white letters across the top.

The ones indicating the source of this interview.

Five years ago, this would have been inconceivable, that a television network would run video shot by a local newspaper.

But the key elements for this piece came from many sources outside of the ABC editorial umbrella.

So, what are your predictions for what is to come for network news?

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

(made with the Despair.com Do-It-Yourself De-Motivator)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“You mean it’s not in Wisconsin?”

The phone rang, and an intern picked it up. She listened for a moment, then put her hand over the receiver and looked at me.

“Where is Mount Everest?” she asked.

What am I, the World Book? “Tell ‘em it’s in Wisconsin,” I replied.

“Nuh-uhhh,” a coworker interrupted. “Mount Everest is in Colorado.”

“Mount Everest isn’t in Colorado,” a third responded. “Pike’s Peak is in Colorado. Mount Everest is in Alaska.”

The intern turned back to me. “Where is it, really?”

Then I realized I didn’t know for sure which country it was in. So, I weaseled. “It’s in the Himalayas.”

“No, it’s not,” replied the coworker who had placed it in Alaska. “The Himalayas are in New York, and I know Mount Everest isn’t in New York.”

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Look – I’ve written a lot of things online over the years. Enough to fill a book, if anyone were so interested. And I share it freely.

But maybe I shouldn’t anymore.

I have no problem with this, because Mark Burhop didn’t Imitate. He Attributed.

Let’s instead look at what I found today, on LifeHacker:

I only return messages left for me at 10 am, 2pm, and 4 pm. My phone’s ringer is turned off, and my cell phone sits in my purse. I call it my “Dr Pepper Rule,” because of the old 10-2-4 logo on the Dr. Pepper bottles.

That was an excerpt from another blog post – and you’ll note LifeHacker does an excellent job of attributing the origin of information and directing readers to the original.

My quibble is with how we define “original.”

Look at this post, from February 2010:

If you will, stop and compare it to this:

I wrote the above and published it on my site in August 2007. Many people read it and linked to it, and that is flattering. It drove a little traffic to my site, and that was nice.

Please note, that in more than three years of writing Occam’s RazR, I have not run a single ad. My ideas, as they are, are completely non-monetized.

So, bear with me if I have a little problem with people taking my ideas and repackaging them as their own. For all I know, the author I linked to above was inspired by a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of what I wrote. That could be the case with this one, as well.

That’s why Attribution is the new currency of Flattery. They are called Links for a reason. They bind ideas, and help trace the epidemiology of inspiration. The other plus to Attribution is when you are open in cataloging how and where you got an idea, then you have immediate immunity to claims of original authorship.

Yes, it feels good to see your ideas flourish.

No, it does not feel good to see your ideas generating money and reputation for other people.

Your suggestions are welcome.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“This is a cleansing moment of clarity.”

— Howard Beale, “Network!” (1976)

Network!, in case you’ve never seen it, is the movie that gave us the expression, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

The gist of the plot is that low-rated network anchorman Howard Beale suddenly comes unhinged before his TV audience, and as his apparent mental deterioration advances, his bosses and coworkers try to exploit it for ratings gain.

And for me, seeing Network! it was kind of like getting saved.

I had been a television reporter for less than a year, but I was already sensing something was not quite right about the way things were. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it — and no one seemed to notice it but me.

So, naturally, I thought it was me. And so, for that matter, did everyone else. My ‘attitude problem’ was starting to get me into trouble.

And then, out of the clear blue, along comes Howard Beale with the explanation:

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.

“You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs.

“In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So, turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!”

When the lights came up at the end of the movie, there seemed to be about three of us in the theater who ‘got it.’

The others were looking at each other with quizzical stares: ‘What the hell was that about?’

But no matter. At least I knew at last I wasn’t alone.

Up the Rabbit Hole

Beale’s rants made perfect sense to me. He was the first person in the business, real or unreal (as if in television news, there were a difference), who did make sense to me — the first person who saw it the way I saw it.

There was a hitch, though: Howard Beale was going crazy.

“I am imbued, Max. I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing as if suddenly I had been plugged into some great electro-magnetic field.

“I feel connected to all living things, to flowers, birds, to all the animals of the world and even to some great unseen living force, what I think the Hindus call prana.

“It is not a breakdown. I have never felt more orderly in my life! It is a shattering and beautiful sensation! It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth. And you will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

Yeah, that’s crazy, all right. Or is it?

I don’t know what author Paddy Chayefsky wanted us to think when he put those words in Beale’s mouth.

But personally, I don’t think Howard Beale was going crazy; I think he was going sane.

He said it himself: “I just ran out of bullshit.”

Psychiatrist David Viscott, in his self-help bestseller Emotional Resilience, wrote about real-life cases not unlike Beale’s:

“Eventually, there comes a day of awakening and reckoning. Your epiphany is both inevitable and totally unexpected.

“In the moment of your illumination, you finally see yourself as you are and are forced to surrender to the truth lest your false illusions forever obscure your best self.

“Until you reach such a day, you often live a self-deceptive way of life. You try to convince yourself that what you have chosen is what you really want.”

I do know exactly how that feels. I’ve been there myself.

Inside the Looking Glass

Ever see one of those promos where the news anchor dashes to the News ActionCopter — off, presumably, to cover The Big Story?

But as soon as he gets in the copter, they turn off the camera. He climbs back out and returns to his office. The pilot shuts down the engine, and the rotors coast to a stop. There is no ‘Big Story.’ It’s just a promo — an ad that pretends the anchor is taking off to chase down the news. (One of my favorites is one in which the anchor jumps into the copter, looks at the pilot and dramatically points at the sky. Like, where the hell else are they going to go?)

The purpose of these ads is to persuade viewers that anchors are out there every day, in dramatic hot pursuit of the news. Even if they aren’t.

Or the promo where the anchor and some anonymous behind-the-scenes staffer look at a script together? The anchor points to some word on the script, gesturing as broadly as a vaudeville performer so you’ll be sure to notice. Then they look at each other, nod, and dart off in opposite directions.

At one station in New York, they hired actors to play the newsroom staff, because the real producers and editors weren’t as glamorous as the station wanted viewers to think they were.

That scene in Broadcast News — in which news producer Holly Hunter feeds interview questions through a headset to affable but dimwitted anchorman William Hurt — is a lot closer to reality.

But I’m not telling you anything you haven’t figured out for yourself: TV news is, for the most part, just an ongoing advertisement for itself. An entertainment program, loosely based on the day’s events.

That ‘News ActionCenter’ is no more real than the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. That’s why they call it a newsset.

Row upon row of monitors cover the walls, but many are just transparencies in cardboard cutouts. Fake.

A sweeping vista of the city skyline ties it all together, supported by pillars of impossibly blue plastic marble or stapled-on brushed aluminum. Fake.

If you could go in the studio, and walk behind the backdrops, you’d see that it’s all just laminated plywood and painted two-by-fours, with extension cords and power strips scattered everywhere. Fake.

The spontaneous question and answer session between anchor and reporter at the end of a live shot? Scripted. Fake.

A reporter walks down the road, talking to the camera and sometimes pausing reflectively, as if looking for a word. Where is he walking to? Nowhere. It’s fake. What’s the word he’s looking for? The one he memorized, along with the pause. That’s fake, too.

You would assume, I suppose, that there is some ‘jumping off point’ at which TV news leaves behind the fakery and melodrama for reality. I think there was, at one time. But eventually, I got to where I couldn’t find it.

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.”

The Awakening

And I told myself for years that the phoniness and fakery and false sincerity and exaggerated drama were just part of the cost of doing business. The other guys were doing it, too, and doing it more flagrantly than we were. We had to stay competitive. But somewhere in the back of my mind, it kept nagging at me.

I knew it was crap to say ‘reports are coming in at this hour,’ when the ‘reports’ had come in the form of a single anonymous, unverified telephone tip, or a snatch of a conversation picked up off a police scanner.

I knew it was misleading to hyperbolize every trivial complaint or allegation with adjectives like ’shocking,’ ‘outraged,’ and ‘dramatic.’ (It also meant that when really serious stories came along, we had no words left to adequately describe them. We’d used them all up overstating fender bender car wrecks, broken tree branches, kids getting into fistfights at school, shoplifted cigarettes, and the like.)

I knew it was ridiculous to dress up in heavy parka, scarf, earmuffs and wool hat in 55-degree weather and stand on the side of a central Oklahoma highway and talk about the ’scary road conditions’ that were ‘paralyzing traffic’ — in Amarillo, Texas.

There was a newscaster in my home town who, according to local reports, briefly became a house painter after his career publicly and spectacularly flamed out.

And when I first heard that, I thought, ‘Wow. What a way end up.’

In retrospect, it seems like not such a bad thing at all.

The paint, after all, is real. The brush is real. The house is real. If you paint houses, you actually paint houses. You don’t apply a few strokes for a camera, then leave while an assistant finishes up, and a promotion team crafts an advertisement describing what a caring and conscientious painter you are.

In fact, I considered becoming a maintenance man at an apartment complex for much the same reason. I had opportunities to do other things (and as it turned out, I took one), but the idea of doing simple, honest work that really was what it appeared to be was appealing after 25 years of often pretending to be doing something I wasn’t, and creating carefully-worded portrayals of a world that really didn’t exist.

And I would like to think that, even though he was a fictional character, Howard Beale eventually had to confront the same reality — that he had been living in a dramatic, exciting, but basically unreal world, and had been trying to fool people into believing that his false world, and not their own, was real.

“In God’s name, you people are the real thing.

“We are the illusion.

“So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now.

“Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now.

“Turn them off!”

I turned off my television in February of 1999, and it hasn’t been on since.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Mind you, I am talking single-day loser here. It took Ken Jennings 76 appearances to top the $3-million mark, so his Jeopardy victims don’t count.

Pete was on the Wheel of Fortune episode where a woman won the first million-dollar jackpot. Pete finished third, which by all accounts makes him the Biggest Loser in game show history.

Odds are, you won’t be able to find anything about Pete online, because losers are seldom remembered. And the ones that do get remembered had to do a whole lot of winning to get there. The Buffalo Bills lost four straight Super Bowls. Dewey didn’t defeat Truman, but he had to beat out other losers (that you can’t name without Google) just to be nominated. Unless you’re really engaged, you don’t remember the losers.

But they were in the game. Pete – despite hitting Bankrupt on two of the four chances he had to spin the wheel – walked away with more money that day than I did for not playing. He’s also got a great consolation prize, the awesome-sounding title of “Biggest Loser in Game Show History.”

All I am is a phone-a-friend, and that didn’t get me squat.

Even the losers have better stories than those who never played.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Why don’t you make something arrogant and superficial of yourself?

I came back from a story one day to find the fortune from a Chinese cookie stuck to my computer terminal screen.

“It is not talent you lack,” the slip of paper said, “but ambition.”

Some free character analysis, courtesy of one of my coworkers. Who knows what the purpose was?

I left it taped to my screen for months, though. Because frankly, I thought it was true.

Obviously, something was wrong with me. Why had I willingly stayed in the same medium-market job for 15 years, instead of carpet-bombing top-10 stations with resume tapes? Why was I driving an old Cutlass, instead of a BMW or leather-upholstered Suburban? Why was I still wearing glasses, instead of having laser eye surgery?

Why did I not care whether I had the lead story, or whether I was officially designated a ‘high-profile’ reporter? Why was I not lobbying for longer standups, and more live shot ‘face time’?

Why was I not living in a so-called ’select neighborhood’? Or playing golf with chamber of commerce officials or Republican party leaders?

It seemed reasonable to me at the time that if I’d had any ambition, I would have been doing at least some of those things, like everyone else I knew.

That Carp. Smart guy, but what a slacker.

It took me a long time to understand that I did not lack my own ambition — I lacked other people’s ambition. And it frustrated them that I was chasing my own goals, instead of theirs. And I became frustrated whenever I fell into the trap of letting others decide for me what I should want.

Maybe I set my own bar fairly low. It was never important to me to be seen as a celebrity. I didn’t enjoy signing autographs, or making personal appearances. Why should someone want my autograph? The service I provided — reading aloud news stories they could have gotten just as easily from the paper — was no more valuable than, say, changing the oil in their cars. But they didn’t ask the FastLube guy for his autograph.

I liked my home town. It felt familiar and comfortable. We had moved frequently during my childhood, and it was important to me to have a sense of belonging somewhere. I saw no reason to live anywhere else. I travelled a lot as a reporter, and saw only one or two places I liked better than where I was.

I could not bring myself to genuinely care about most of the trappings of my (other) brilliant career. I tried. For a few years, I had myself sold on it — and I was as close to the perfect, Volvo-driving, Italian suit-wearing, Cole Haan-shod Stepford anchor as I could make myself.

But I couldn’t make it last, and more importantly, I couldn’t make it convincing. I was like one of those people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” trying to pass for a ‘pod person’ without actually being one.

Whoever put that cookie fortune on my computer probably thinks I’m a complete failure now. I live alone, in a quiet place, and spend a lot of my time thinking and writing. I’m still driving the beat-up Cutlass. The Cole-Haans and Italian suits are still in the closet, but I wear running shoes and jeans every day. I haven’t worn a tie since December of 1998.

I don’t get everything I want from life. No one does, I suppose. But I decide for myself what I want, and I don’t let others make the decision for me.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Am I venting too hard on journalism lately? Maybe it needs a kick in the pants. I teased the other day to some people that I would share the story of my last day as a television reporter. It certainly doesn’t have the gravity of the “Day They Forced Me To Reschedule My Colonoscopy” story, but it was just as inwardly revealing.

My final day in television news was Friday, January 16, 2004. Earlier in my career, those leaving usually had other matters to attend to which precluded actually appearing on camera, but I was accustomed to the reality that I was not going to get away without turning something. I was proud of earning my keep.

However, Human Resources had other plans for me. I was compelled to go down for an exit interview, which is now fairly standard. In an ideal world, it’s the corporation’s way of getting naked and unfiltered feedback. It’s the way employees who are leaving can help those who are still beholden to the paycheck. In reality, it’s an exercise in ensuring there are no outstanding gripes or complaints on my part that might mysteriously surface later in a lawsuit. I made no mention of the manager who ordered me to change my appointment, he had suffered enough.

Naked Pockets

My exit interview was accompanied by the other formalities of separation, including turning in my phone, my card key, and any other identification and passwords. I think the producers took this into account when they made my assignment for that day.

I was to go to Birmingham’s Five Points South, and cover a PeTA protest at 11 o’clock. A woman – wearing nothing but a paint job meant to make her look like a leopard – was to demonstrate by sitting inside of a steel cage on the sidewalk. The circus was coming to town, and PeTA’s grand scheme appeared to be providing the people of Birmingham with additional reminders that the circus was coming to town. But it was an assignment, and I rolled with it.

There she was, right there on the concrete. And you didn’t have to look at her to tell it was cold. But more than a few people tried.

Naked Expectations

I did what I had done all during my reporting career. I stood back and watched.

I didn’t run right up to the PeTA handlers and grab soundbites. For me, the curiosity came in seeing how people would react to this display. I eventually did perform the obligatory interview, but given no direct marching orders about this story, I sat back and waited for the narrative to come to me. It didn’t take long.

People walking by thought this was one of the dumbest, most idiotic things they had ever seen. I’m not sure anyone’s opinions budged, except for the people who told me they were more inclined to go to the circus now.

Jud Hulon was partner that day, a very talented videographer that I didn’t get the chance to work with as often as I would have liked. His style was compatible with the technique we used that day. We set up the mic in various places around the cage, then moved far away to eavesdrop on the people as they walked past. People tend to be much more honest and open when the camera is sixty feet away than they are when the distance is just six feet.

The Truth, Unpeeled

In one of those moments that is too real for fiction, we were somewhat accosted by the mascot from Planet Smoothie, across the street. He obviously saw this as his chance to break into standup comedy, because he was begging to be interviewed.

He was also very, very stoned. You could see the dilation in his eyes, even behind the sunglasses he wore. And unless I am mistaken, Planet Smoothie did not offer a THC/Patchouli shake, and the aroma was quite strong.

After a brief negotiation, I decided to interview the Stoned Banana. And there it came, the moment of naked truth.

Stoner: “This woman looks completely ridiculous”

Me: “This, from the guy dressed as a seven-foot banana?

Stoner: (pregnant pause) “You have a point.”

Such exchanges are worth their weight in journalism gold. Because deep down, even Stoner Bananaman knew that he had very little leeway to make fun of another’s appearance, yet he did anyway.

The Aftermath

This story is worth telling because it is a microcosm about what’s wrong with broadcast journalism today.

Sometime just after four o’clock, the producer chewed us out for ruining his newscast.

You see, he had pulled a piece of wire copy about a survey, where average Americans were asked questions about whether activists and extremists had gone too far with their displays and protests. (You would think the word “extremist” might taint that…) It was supposed to be his lead story, and now he had to reshuffle his entire lineup because I didn’t meet his (unshared) expectations.

No one had given us that wire story. No one supplied us with that as a template. No one mentioned it to us, we were just handed a slip of paper by a grinning assignment editor who said “you guys ought to have fun with this today!” No one that we spoke with that day, including that producer, bothered to tell us how constrained we were supposed to be.

Bare Lessons

We were given a planned event, which in and of itself is rarely news.

However, we were being placed in what I like to call a “target-rich environment,” where the unusual collides with human nature on a mass scale.

We went to the unusual confluence, we took the temperature of the city (still cold,) and we neatly summarized the event in a way that communicated the futility of it all.

And what we did was wrong, because we didn’t attempt to connect a poorly attended circus, the ill-considered media stunt, and an irrelevant survey. Grasping for straws doesn’t begin to describe the contortions made in newsrooms, and I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better.

I did learn three things that day, however.

I learned that I needed no further confirmation that my decision to exit that career was a good one for me.

I learned that Planet Smoothie, as of 2004, did not conduct drug screenings.

And I learned that if you’re ever trapped outdoors in the cold, you can measure the temperature on a leopard’s chest.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

This survey published in September of 2009 shows that 70% of journalists use social networking to assist in reporting.

A Cision study of practicing journalists released in January 2010 indicates:

• 89% use blogs
• 65% use social networking sites
• 52% use microblogging sites

If you’re reading this from a newsroom, please do not lay the charts together and project the trend. I can hear it now:

“With a 19% rise between September and January, experts forecast that by May of this year 108% of journalists will use Social Media!”

Don’t laugh. It will probably happen.

Take the Viewers’ Temperature

There’s nothing new about this. For years, television stations have sent reporters and photographers out on Zeitgeist Patrol – or they would have, if any of the producers knew what zeitgeist was. Maybe if it had a cooler name like Zeitgeist Patrol, we might have been happier about doing it.

Instead, it’s called “Man on the Street,” or MOS for short. That’s where reporters who know very little about an issue get to make themselves feel more educated by asking the opinions of people who likely know even less. Sometimes, you get the added bonus of asking people about things that have yet to be on the news, so you can satisfy your inner gossip and tell them about it in person.

It’s a time-killer, a time-filler, and lacks any enlightenment or originality. It is also demeaning, because it forces you to put people in categories.

Knowing that you must show a cross-section of your viewing audience to appear as multi-cultural as possible, you find yourself not asking people who might have a good opinion, because you need the diversity. This leads to the tragic-comedy of watching reporters chase down people of “local minority” so they can fill out their MOS-Bingo Card. (“Local Minority” means finding the people who are rare in the place where you are standing right then.) People are reduced to characteristics, as you can’t have Columns A and B represented, and not C, D and E.

So while you think it’s an imposition to “take the viewers’ temperature” in person with a microphone, the people who really get it inserted are those who have to endure fact-free television filler.

Different ‘verse, Same as the First

I don’t know why we thought it would be any different with Social Media. A little over a year ago, people swooned over the savvy way Rick Sanchez at CNN “reached out” to his audience with his active Twitter presence. This was great for television, because now they wouldn’t be wasting the time of a reporter and/or photographer to go out and get public opinions! But instead of assigning those resources to investigate stories about crime, education, fraud and societal impact, it put them to work studying unemployment, depression and alcoholism. As “permanent embeds.”

The truth is, there is very little original in modern “news,” especially television. That’s why it’s fun sharing the mcarp essays, because 10 years later they are still true.

Want proof?

Someone in Chicago landed on my site from a Google search.The search was for “live shot ideas.”

My condolences to television news viewers in the Windy City, as the quality of your local television product is bad enough that reporters are turning to the internet for ideas. Maybe you can express your disgust via Twitter. Someone in the newsroom is probably reading it.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Place blame now, and avoid the rush.

Sweeps. Or, in newsroom vernacular, “Oh, shit.”

But consistent sweeps series production is easy if you plan, plan, plan.

Herewith, the mcarp guide to planning and executing ratings sweeps series.

Six months before ratings:

Key newsroom managers meet to plan sweeps ’summit.’

This preliminary meeting should include the news director, assistant news director, chief photographer, and the marketing or promotions director.

Key managers coordinate schedules of mid-level managers, including producers, for upcoming ’summit’ in 30 days.

Five months before ratings:

Postpone ’summit’ because most mid-level managers are on vacation. Reschedule for 30 days later.

Four months before ratings:

Hold sweeps series ’summit’. Producers are urged to plan well in advance, so marketing can arrange appropriate print and radio support.

Producers solicit series ideas from newsroom personnel.

A follow-up meeting is scheduled in 30 days.

Three months before ratings:

Mid-level managers meet in follow-up session. Series suggestions submitted by newsroom staff are read aloud and ridiculed.

Managers agree to meet again in 30 days to come up with some real series ideas, about bee-stung lips and other stuff people are talking about.

Two months before ratings:

Employee evaluations are conducted.

Newsroom staff is reprimanded for not coming up with more series ideas.

One month before ratings:

Mid-level managers lay out schedule for shooting series borrowed from Good Morning, America and USA TODAY articles.

Three weeks before ratings:

General manager throws out all series ideas after getting fax from consultant recommending series that appeared in three other markets last sweeps period, and done locally by competition two years ago.

Mid-level managers retool sweeps production schedule. Marketing begins building new promos from scratch.

One week before ratings:

Mid-level managers meet to check progress on shooting and production of sweeps segments.

They learn no pieces have been completed due to an unexpectedly heavy incidence of car wrecks, garage fires, and skateboarding pets during previous weeks.

Managers discuss which series can be salvaged by turning them into one-part ‘minidocs’ or ’special reports’ (formerly known as ’stories’).

Promos for nonexistent series begin airing.

Morning of air:

Crews frantically race to throw together grab-ass footage to create something that resembles the promos which are now airing.

Crews should strive to duplicate subject matter closely enough that a viewer may not notice the difference between the promo and the story if there’s a ringing phone or barking dog in the house while the story airs.

Post-sweeps follow-up:

Managers meet to blame field crews’ ‘bad attitudes’ for causing system-wide breakdown, and pledge that next sweeps, they’ll plan ahead.

Really.

This is not going to happen again.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Tips from the I-Team toolbox.

A producer in my newsroom was working on one of those ‘evergreen’ investigative pieces (i.e., one of those stories whose shocking secrets you can stick in a file folder, ready and waiting to be ‘discovered’ for the next ratings period).

But, there was a problem.

The subject matter was a ’sting’ of disreputable auto mechanics. The premise: find an older, high-mileage car, have it repaired to certifiably perfect running order by a master mechanic, then take it to other mechanics to see if they find anything ‘wrong’ with it.

The producer had followed the game plan, and sure enough, one of the mechanics she’d targeted told her the ‘perfect’ car had a leaking head gasket. But a telltale smear of oil down the side of the engine block proved that in fact, the gasket was leaking; our ‘master mechanic’ had missed it.

“No problem,” the producer reasoned, as her investigative piece started to disintegrate before her eyes. “I’ll have Frank write and voice it. He’ll know what to do.”

“How will that fix it?” I asked.

“You know,” she replied. “He can make it sound more investigative: ‘We discovered…’, ‘Our investigation revealed…’ — that sort of stuff.”

“In other words,” I said, “to make this guy look guilty, even though he’s honest.”

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed in that case, and the story died in its sleep.

Somebody said all reporting is investigative. I disagree. In television, next to no reporting is investigative. Especially the stuff billed as investigative. Generally speaking, investigative reporting on local news is general assignment reporting with a few extra buzzwords and ominous pauses in the delivery.

For example:

“Our investigation revealed that these convenience store snacks are made mostly (ominous investigative pause)… of sugar.”

“We took our hidden camera into this daycare center, and discovered that every afternoon, the staff makes the children take naps (OIP)… on floor mats.“

Which brings us to the subject of hidden cameras. One station for which I worked sent a crew to cover a hockey game. While they were there, they shot pictures of underage teenagers buying beer at the concession stand. It was being done in plain sight, and they got plenty of footage.

But it didn’t look ‘investigative’.

So, the station sent a photographer to a subsequent hockey game with a hidden camera, wedged in his hat, to obtain dramatic, grainy, secret footage of the fluorescent lights overhanging the concession stand, plus the occasional few frames of a teen buying beer.

The camera, not the teens or the beer, had become the focal point of the story.

What was the point? The point was that the grainy, unsteady look of the hidden camera video suggests, rightly or wrongly, something bad is going on, and that something msyterious and James Bond-like is being done to uncover it.

Most investigative coverage can be pretty much summed up in the tease: “Coming up… we get the goods on a local businessman who doesn’t buy TV advertising.”

It somehow became conventional wisdom that investigative reporting must be, by definition, prosecutorial in nature. I think early episodes of 60 Minutes, with Mike Wallace and Dan Rather chasing bad guys across the parking lot, microphone in hand, left us with that belief.

But what if there isn’t a bad guy?

In the real world, issues don’t always have a clear-cut hero and villain. Sometimes — most times — everyone is a little bit right and a little bit wrong.

But you rarely see investigative reporting that doesn’t have comic book-like delineations between good and evil. And because the I-Team goes in with the intent that it is going to portray someone as ‘the bad guy’, stations tend to focus their efforts on people who aren’t likely to fight back. Advertisers and people with good lawyers get a pass.

I think the reason so much investigative reporting focuses on sex offenders (other than the obvious advantage of being able to put the word SEX in huge letters in a promo) is because sex offenders are a safe and easy target. No convicted sex offender is going to complain about being exploited for ratings. (And the fact TV news is notoriously unwilling to investigate, for example, used car salesmen is a pretty good indicator of how far down the scale it’s got to go before it feels safe getting the goods on someone.)

“Sex offenders could be living in your neighborhood!” Really. Given that we don’t do island penal colonies anymore, I’d say that was pretty much a given. There were more homicides and armed robberies in my neighborhood than sex offenses last year, but no reporter is digging up the names of all the convicted robbers and killers living around me.

When was the last time you saw an investigative report exploring better ways to deal with sex offenders, as opposed to a wide-eyed investigative reporter waving the printout of registered sex offenders at the camera?

Easy enough to report that they’re there; we already know that. How about some solutions?

There are obviously laudable exceptions to the rule. The Firestone tire story, broken by a TV station in Houston, proves it. There’s no question more Americans would have died had a local TV news reporter not tied together the string of apparently unconnected fatalities and lawsuits stemming from faulty tires.

And Firestone is a big company, with big lawyers. The auto maker most affected, Ford, is a major television advertiser.

It’s no wonder all those other stations are trying to claim credit for the story by claiming they were on first with weather video of some guy changing a flat tire along the Interstate.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Welcome to the 21st century, where we’ve fired all the editors and now we’re whining about the lack of quality in the content.

To be fair, I blame the owners for giving the editors less and less to work with, and too many incentives to cut corners instead of pushing back toward quality.

But every time I unsubscribed from the paper, or took my news free straight from the internet, I inched closer to firing the editor. And an Editor In Chief is precisely what I need to make sense of the world today.

There are probably thousands of them floating around, eager for the work. But we’re too spoiled to pay them what they’re worth.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Below, you’ll find an example of how to fail.

…unless there is something in tainted Krispy Kreme doughnuts that spurs follicle growth.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

To understand why your newsroom is the way it is, you have to understand why the burger place down the street is the way it is.

(I am posting this here so the next time someone asks, I can just give them the link instead of explaining it all over again.)

I don’t think a week goes by that someone somewhere doesn’t ask, “Why isn’t there any creativity in my newsroom? Why is everything so cut-and-dried and formulaic?”

Take a look at your favorite fast food restaurant. The process of producing and delivering the product is so carefully controlled, a machine could probably do it.

There is one way, and one way only, to make the giant-size burger. Employees have been taught (and may even have a chart to remind them) how many pickle, tomato and onion slices go on it, and even how they should be placed.

If you’ve ever peeked past the counter, you’ve probably seen little placards instructing employees exactly — “Welcome to BurgerBarn. Would you like to try our Big Barnyard Deluxe for only $2.99?” — how to greet customers, and what they should try to sell them.

As a result, you can drive through a BurgerBarn in Olympia, Washington, or a BurgerBarn in Ft. Myers, Florida, and the experience — not to mention the food — will be exactly the same.

There is more to this, I think, than consistency of product. By eliminating creativity and originality from the food preparation process, fast food establishments have turned cooking into unskilled, low-wage labor.

How is that different from TV news?

Well, I don’t think it’s any different at all.

Without knowing where you live, I can say with some confidence that last night, your local news began with a shot of both anchors sitting side-by-side on a set with a pictures of the city skyline and some monitors behind them.

One of them said something like, “Shocking new details about ______,” then turned to look at the other anchor, who picked up the story from there. The studio camera may have done a vertigo-inducing zoom to the second anchor as he or she finished the sentence, then tossed to a reporter who was Live! at the scene with an update.

It was the same almost everywhere last night, and it will be the same again tonight.

There’s no particular marketing advantage, as there is with fast food, to having two newscasts at opposite ends of the country almost exactly alike. But it implies a fairly significant economic advantage.

Just as it doesn’t take an experienced, highly-paid chef to follow the template at a BurgerBarn, it doesn’t take an experienced, highly-paid journalist to follow the template the consultant has written for the newsroom.

By making every newscast alike, and setting up guidelines that mandate story structure to almost word-for-word precision, stations and consultants have created a news product that anybody can assemble — with only a little more intellectual effort than is required to place pickles and tomatoes on a sesame seed bun.

If you aren’t in the business, you might be surprised how much of what you see is template-driven.

Those ’spontaneous’ q&a sessions following stories are pretty obvious. “So… tell me… Jeff. How… dangerous… is… that… leaking gas line?” You’ve probably seen better acting at a high school play.

But did you notice in 1990 or thereabouts that the anchors on your local news began exclaiming, “Just take a look at this!” when introducing a particularly dramatic piece of footage?

That wasn’t spontaneous. It’s in the template handed down from the news designers, who realized that more and more viewers were mentally ‘tuning out’ their newscasts, even if they weren’t doing it physically.

(What that exclamation implies, of course, is, “Just take a look at this! It’s better than the other crap in this newscast, which we know you’ve been ignoring.”)

The median starting pay in TV news, according to a recent survey, is less than $20,000. According to a restaurant industry web site, entry-level fast food employees make more than that.

What does this mean if you’re in the business? I think it means that in the future, you’ll be working with fewer and fewer people with high-paying skills.

And if you’re a news consumer, it means you should probably start getting reacquainted with your morning paper.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Breaking Kayfabe

I learned an interesting word on the Internet a couple of years ago: kayfabe.

It’s a carney term, transplanted in later years to professional wrestling. It means to always keep up the illusion, and never allow a moment’s candor to reveal it’s all an act.

Pro wrestlers who’ve been out of the business for years will still swear it was all real: the grudges, the death cage matches, the ‘loser leaves town’ matches. Until WWF owner Vince McMahon decided to blow kayfabe all to hell, rare was the pro wrestler who would admit anything about the business was less than completely genuine.

(An aside: what the hell was John Stossel thinking when he confronted pro wrestler ‘Dr. D’ Schulz and asked him to admit he was a fake? What did Stossel think the guy would do — scuff his toe on the floor and say, “Aw, gawrsh, Mister Stossel. Ya got me red-handed”? Or maybe he would blame his producer.

Of course the guy beat the crap out of him. I would’ve probably done the same thing.)

McMahon may be willing to blow his own cover, but television news still sticks to its illusions. Sometimes, it’s forgotten they are illusions. I’ve known news directors who genuinely believed their anchors were covering a half-dozen stories a week, just because they saw promos saying they did — even though they hadn’t seen the anchors themselves set foot out of the newsroom in six or seven years.

As a friend of mine, still in the business, once said: “They lie to the viewers, they lie to us, they lie to each other, they lie to themselves. And they’ve been lying for so long, they’ve forgotten what the truth was to start with.”

These essays and anecdotes are a form of ‘breaking kayfabe.’ Those of you currently, or formerly, in the business will see little or nothing that surprises you. As for the rest of you, if it’s too tough to bear, maybe there’s a Seinfeld rerun on somewhere.

Mike Carpenter
Oklahoma City, November 2000

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.