Broadcast Journalism

A Critical Introduction

Jane Chapman, Marie Kinsey, Jane Chapman, Marie Kinsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134108398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

Broadcast Journalism offers a critical analysis of the key skills required to work in the modern studio, on location, or online, with chapters written by industry professionals from the BBC, ITV, CNN and independent production companies in the UK and USA. Areas highlighted include:

• interviewing
• researching
• editing
• writing
• reporting.

The practical tips are balanced with chapters on representation, ethics, law, economics and history, as well as specialist areas such as documentary and the reporting of politics, business, sport and celebrity. Broadcast Journalism concludes with a vital chapter on career planning to act as a springboard for your future work in the broadcast industry.

Contributors: Jim Beaman; Jane Chapman; Fiona Chesterton; Tim Crook; Anne Dawson; Tony Harcup; Jackie Harrison; Ansgard Heinrich; Emma Hemmingway; Patricia Holland; David Holmes; Gary Hudson; Nicholas Jones; Marie Kinsey; Roger Laughton; Leslie Mitchell; Jeremy Orlebar; Claire Simmons; Katie Stewart; Ingrid Volkmer; Mike Ward; Deborah Wilson.

Part I
The shape of broadcast news

Introduction

Jane Chapman

The chapters in Part I offer explanations and analysis of the various contexts in which broadcast journalism operates. This essential information provides much more than a mere background description of the complex media landscape within which TV, radio and online news is located. An understanding of the terrain—past and present—enables readers to position themselves along with the point of time at which they come to this book in a broader historical and geographical trajectory.

At the same time, this section of the book allows readers to acquaint themselves with the debates and academic research about current issues relating to broadcast journalism. All of the chapters that follow in Part I fulfil the promise of our subtitle – ‘A critical introduction’. What this means is that the resultant familiarity with broader contexts also gives added value in the form of food for thought, and an opportunity to reflect on a range of interpretations about the nature, evolution and practices of broadcast journalism.

There is also a further purpose to this opening section: it introduces themes that continue as undercurrents in future, more specific skills-based chapters. The limitations of space here mean that I will allude to some, but not all, of the arguments presented in individual chapters. I have selected points to mention that seem, to me, to fulfil this generic function of underpinning the more detailed information relating to specific aspects of broadcast journalism that comes later.

The first chapter uses a broad brush to tease out certain themes from TV and radio history, thus helping us to understand the nature of the mediums and how the industry has reached its present position. Using the past, we can even speculate on the future, although the latter is a cognitive activity that historians tend to shy away from. It may be more useful for us to ponder on trends and to take a longer-term view on themes such as media ‘revolutions’.

For some time, people have talked about the digital revolution in terms of computers, but I advance the argument in the first chapter that, considered over a longer time span, the moving image has created the real revolution. Obviously, from this, one can conclude that the broadcast journalist needs to understand how to work with pictures and time-based recording; but the underlying message of broadcast history, with its separate development of radio then television, is also more fundamental. Despite, or even because of, convergence, it is imperative that we unpick the various component skills that make up broadcast journalism. If a news story has to be compiled for a variety of transmission platforms with a range of versions, then history can teach us about the essence of the mediums and therefore how to make the best of the various adaptations.

Roger Laughton underlines the importance of history in Chapter 4 when he focuses on the major part played by both politics and geography in the development of local broadcast news during the twentieth century, while Ingrid Volkmer and Ansgard Heinrich (Chapter 5) stress that this is still the case during the current century. In fact, history provides a salutary reminder of the struggles that broadcast journalists have faced when bringing their stories to various audiences. Nothing worthwhile in life comes easy—a truism today when it comes to finding the money to fund good research and reporting.

Thus, in Chapter 2, Deborah Wilson demonstrates that we should all be concerned about funding issues and that we should not consider public service broadcasting (PSB) as being immune from market forces. Every broadcast journalist needs to be aware of the bigger commercial picture—well illustrated by the fact that when it first started, a broadcast of Britain’s favourite horse race, the Grand National, cost the BBC £175. Compare this to the total cost of the Corporation’s news services today—some £112.6 million. In Chapter 4 Laughton also reinforces a point made first by Wilson in Chapter 2 – that cost factors determine levels of service, in this case provision of local news.

Interestingly, Laughton includes newspapers in his analysis of local services in the digital age. This is because of the increasing importance of convergence—a theme that recurs regularly in nearly all the chapters. The landscape that is described by both Laughton on local news and Volkmer and Heinrich on global coverage is a complex one, with both chapters raising the question of how to define ‘local’. The other question that the contributions of Wilson, Laughton and Volkmer and Heinrich all beg is how future broadcast journalists will survive in this scenario. The message seems to be that flexibility is needed in order to move between sector suppliers, be they radio, TV or local newspaper groups requiring video journalists.

The implications of Volkmer and Heinrich’s study is that we need a form of cross-media education to prepare journalists for working in a convergent newsroom—something that scholars have been pointing out for some years (Pavlik, 2000). The broadcast journalist needs to be sufficiently multi-skilled to move around the industry, but Volkmer and Heinrich also urge us to think big. The future may be local but it is also global. This touches on a huge debate within the academy about global versus local, summarized in Chapter 5. An appreciation of international, national and local structures that comprise both ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ networks can underpin our work as practitioners. This is not merely an abstract point: globalized geography, aided by technology (as mentioned in Chapter 1) impacts on traditional journalism by facilitating trends such as ‘citizens’ journalism’ via the Internet.

Therefore, as we negotiate our way through the broadcast journalism maze, we will probably take with us skills, a flexible attitude and an understanding of the past that helps to explain the current picture. There are two other factors that will complete our toolkit of critical understanding: appreciation of audience and of prevailing news values. In Chapter 3 Marie Kinsey discusses the battle for the audience in the context of changing consumer habits and in relation to convergence and the deregularized multi-channel environment. She examines how audiences are identified, selected and targeted, how broadcasters are managing the challenges thrown up by the Web, and how audiences are measured, and asks whether these methods are relevant or even accurate in a multi-platform world.

Whenever a journalist steps into a new organization, s/he is faced with the task of understanding the individual culture and how this impinges on news values. In the final chapter of this section Jackie Harrison enables us to do just this. She also provides clear indicators about the factors that influence decisions on what is covered, what is not and the prominence given to individual stories within the running order. News values are not set in stone; they are subject to much discourse and analysis by scholars. Harrison’s chapter emphasizes that debates relating to news values are subject to constant adaptation, variation and change.

News values are always present but sometimes difficult to analyse—the very reason why they are subject to much discourse. Harrison quite correctly underlines the fact that they cannot be separated from ethical considerations such as accuracy and the search for truth, although we should be constantly aware of the conflict between the ideal and the real, for an analysis of news values is central to an understanding of reporting and writing practice, and as such underpins all of the chapters that follow.

In essence, the aim of Part I is to flag up the way that macro-changes influence the working lives of broadcast journalists at the local level, relating global change to specific environments both inside and outside the traditional newsroom. By introducing us to the nature of discourses on news production at different levels, this section also establishes the importance of the critical study of the profession and how it has a direct bearing on the way that journalists understand and execute their role.

Reference

Pavlik, J. (2000) ‘The Impact of Technology on Journalism’, Journalism Studies, 1(2): 229–37.

1 Broadcast journalism

Yesterday, today and the future

Jane Chapman

• Introduction
• The struggles of radio news
• Public service broadcasting (PSB)
• The television revolution
• The power of television news
• Radio’s reinvention
• Global and local trends
• Conclusion: pictures win
• Notes
• References

Introduction

The past helps us to understand the nature of broadcasting as a medium and the changing nature of the work and contexts within which the journalist operates—but the way that historians view these elements is always coloured by the present. As we progress through the twenty-first century, broadcast journalists are facing a challenge to the discrete identity of broadcasting and its very survival. Broadcasting now involves media that previously were used for non-broadcast purposes—different communications media are merging their functions.

The computer is at the heart of this revolution: it too has become a medium for broadcasting. The digital revolution and convergence have meant that TV and radio can be received using a variety of platforms. Gradually sector-specific definitions—for instance, between audiovisual and e-commerce industries—which historically had guided understanding of mass communication, are becoming eroded by technology and cross-media ownership. Therefore, this chapter aims to provide a counter-current to present trends. I use history as a tool to unpick the overarching characteristics of radio and television as they emerged in the past, to tease out the strengths and weaknesses of words and pictures, and their contextual importance.

The ability to create the convergence of two different media in the same box was first established in 1927 with the radiogram and there have always been certain overlaps—such as sound with its shared mechanical features in radio, TV and film. However, the common binary code of digital technology means that media are now interchangeable so that each can assume the characteristics and functions of the other. Interchangeability can result in a single body of material being packaged for a range of outlets and delivery. Content then becomes paramount, and method of delivery secondary, but portrayal of content will be influenced by the same tools—words and pictures.

Broadcasting is a social application, varying with different cultural contexts, but always of such importance that it may well be feasible to conclude that the real media revolution of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not computers, but moving pictures. The ascendancy of the latter was helped by the inheritance of radio’s institutional frameworks. The basis of this argument is that technology does not determine social use, but that broadcast journalists interact with aspects of society; their role is to reflect, to mediate and interpret political, economic, social or cultural phenomena.

From the 1920s onwards, first the words and sounds of radio, then the words and pictures of TV have always been present in the here and now of the listener and viewer and of the world that surrounds them. They have served to bridge public and private, with the reporter building an interactive relationship between them. As a medium, broadcasting provides ‘the most rapid, broad and cost-efficient participation in anything unfolding moment by moment … broadcasting creates a sense of contact with other members of the dispersed audience’ (Ferrell Lowe and Hujanen, 2003: 16).

The struggles of radio news

Radio’s development over the years has been very much a function of its potential social usage as a medium. The arrival of phonograph, film and the ‘wireless’ all offered the reporter a tool for presentation that challenged existing communication of time and space, but this was not immediately obvious at the time. In fact, their ultimate application differed from their intended purpose. Early pioneers such as Marconi saw radio not as a mass medium but as a means of one-to-one communication! Broadcast journalism emerged only after a systematic struggle for acceptance within the media—not just by inventors and pioneers of equipment, but by reporters and broadcasters. The techniques that are used for reporting today are not automatic or set in stone. They took time to develop.

Often there was opposition to many of the now accepted tasks that broadcast journalists presently undertake on a routine, daily basis. Technical breakthroughs throughout the twentieth century relentlessly increased the potential for immediacy and hence drama through recording and reporting that have always aimed to appear as ‘live’ as possible. However, the arrival of a new means of disseminating information and entertainment tends to destabilize the existing media system, thus radio posed a challenge to the historic relationship between wire services and newspapers. The press in both Britain and the United States lobbied heavily for statutory restrictions on broadcasting, for they wanted to ensure that it was they who carried breaking news first—despite the fact that radio was, in retrospect, a more flexible and instant medium for doing this.¹

Early radio news was a prisoner to the press. When the BBC started its General News bulletins on 23 December 1922, the organization had no in-house journalists. They were dependent on the supply of copy from Reuters, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Part I The shape of broadcast news
• Part II The practices of broadcast news
• Part III Context