The television faces of tomorrow

We are in the campus television studio this week, taping our newscast projects. Three talents per team, two news and one sports or weather. I sit over in the shadows and feel warm and fuzzy, watching the 20-year-old faces in the bright lights trying so hard to do good on TV.

We began the semester way last January learning the tools that journalists use to write stories. They are the same tools used to create all media products: news, entertainment and advertising, which I also call manipulation. Then we learn to write stories for print, as if we were newspaper reporters. But I tell them from the first that print is also a totally online medium now, also. I don’t know of a newspaper that doesn’t operate a Website.

What the students really need to understand, though, is that in the converging print and broadcast journalism world, they must know how to write the in-depth story, 1,000 words or so, and the quick 30-second story for broadcast. Already in television, reporters are required to write both. Right now, on television at the end of the 30-second story, the anchor will say, “For more on this story, log on to our Website, at knsd.com,” or wherever. There, you will find the 1,000-word version, written by the same reporter.

Very soon, however, the television will also be a computer, and the remote will also be a mouse, and if you want to know more about the 30-second story, you won’t have to go to no steenking Website; you’re already at it. You will only have to point your remote at the screen, click, and you will be taken to the in-depth “print” story. You can stay there, read as long as you like, then click Back to return to the newscast, which will be waiting exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a server.

Amazing, what this convergence will do to watching television. If you are a sports nut, a baseball fan, say, it will take forever to watch a baseball game. Anywhere in the game, at any time, if you want a player’s complete statistics, click on the player and they will appear. Such stats are already available online at mlb.com. Then when you have settled the bet, click Back, and it will take you to the game exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a computer, not an analog train at a crossing anymore, passing in front of you an inning at a time.

Back to my students. Writing for print is difficult for them, because they don’t read newspapers. They aren’t familiar with the rhythm of a story written for print. At mid-semester, when we shift into broadcast, you can see lightbulbs going on over their heads; this is the writing rhythm with which they are familiar, and they are much happier when their papers come back for rewrite without so much of my red scribbling on them.

I give them the raw information for the stories. The news stories are like “Parents Against Porn,” “Yacht Drug Bust,” “Fatal Auto Wreck,” etc. In sports and weather, the home team always wins (San Diego State NEVER loses to BYU), and the weather is always interesting (in our newscasts, it’s very stormy in San Diego). Finally, toward the end of the semester, the three-person teams produce the newscast script package, and we go into the studio where production students tape the show as if it were live. Today we started looking at the tapes in class. Most students are seeing themselves on the screen, at the anchor desk, for the first time. I never get tired of it.