Local TV Love/Hate Relationship

By Len Gutman on January 14th, 2008 In Media

Friday I had a client event in which one of the local TV stations came out. They sent a cameraman, but no “talent.” Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother.

As you might expect, the visuals on the resulting segment were just peachy. But the story was a mess. It was one of those anchor voice over jobs, where the anchor simply reads the copy while the visuals run. This is interspersed with interviews from the event. While the story didn’t have any mistakes in it, it also didn’t have any information in it.

Here’s what was missing: the name of the company that sponsored the event, an interview with the executive director of the nonprofit which was responsible for the event, any context about why this event was meaningful or important, and worst of all, no contact information for people watching the segment in case (God forbid) they were compelled by the story and wanted to help.

The good news is, I expect a piece about the event in The Republic shortly and on AP as well. I expect the print journalists will cover the story more fully and with some semblence of journalism.

Go ahead, call me a print snob. I think “TV news” is an oxymoron. I do think there is value in the morning shows and other “infotainment” like Sonoran Living and such. At least these shows deliver on their promise — entertainment. TV news is only worthwhile when they are covering a live breaking event and even then these stories are mostly car crashes and hostage scenes.

It’s no wonder more and more of us simply tune out.

Local TV Love/Hate Relationship

Comments

Robyn Says:
January 14th, 2008 at 10:06 am

Although intimidating, live TV is where it’s at. It offers the most control to the interviewee — when well media trained. It’s the packaged stuff that does get tricky. Event with fantastic sound bites, we flacks can’t be in the editing room to control what makes the final cut. And darnit if some of the really good stuff doesn’t EVER make it.

To some extent the onus is on us to be sure that every word that comes out of the client’s mouth is something that we’d want to hear on TV. If contact information is critical, that’s something the client should be trained to say repeatedly in interviews.

Because TV happens so fast it can sometimes be our hope that things just don’t go wrong. But in my experience TV is the place where you have to take your strategy a step further and really have your spokesperson nail the message points and win the interview.

Richard@greatimageltd.com Says:
January 15th, 2008 at 8:26 pm

I agree with Robyn. You need to go the extra mile and make sure the stations’ assignment editors know the importance of a story.

I once had 3 stations going for a story that was happening on a Saturday. To my horror, one of the stations scooped the others by running its own story – still mentioning my organization – on the Friday before.

Sometimes you can make an event TOO important.

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