The News Gods Have Spoken
The researchers have been to the mountaintop and returned with Big News.
In a Variety interview recently cited in TV NewsCheck, Magid COO Jaime Spencer announced, in a way that read as definitive, “We’ve fully arrived in the ‘context’ era, and we are completely out of the ‘breaking news’ era.” Spencer was speaking to findings of a study commissioned by TV NewsCheck in the leadup to their Programming Everywhere conference at this year’s NAB convention.
According to author Brian Steinberg, Magid believes that this means “local and national TV-news organizations need to start giving viewers more context, depth and emotional reassurance, rather than relying on breaking news and dozens of star anchors and correspondents.”
“The brands that are succeeding and the brands that will succeed are aligning around attributes like ‘insightful,’ ‘thoughtful,’ ‘reassuring,’ ‘timely,’ ‘calming,’ ‘innovative,’” (Spencer) says.
If he’s right (and I believe and hope he is), there’s good and heartening news here.
The qualities that viewers value most will not be those that AI can easily replicate, at least not in the moment and in real time. These are personality traits. They are describing a way of processing and reacting to things. Not simply reporting on them.
But there may be an elephant in the (news)room.
Anchor and reporter performance is simply the last step in the process that supports it. The era of breaking news has spawned newsroom systems and talent and producers and reporters (and consultants and coaches!) all trained and managed to be expert at finding and packaging and delivering breaking news. It’s a way of top-to-bottom thinking in newsrooms and on anchor desks. A way of top-to-bottom being.
If we’re going to achieve context and depth-driven on-air delivery, we’ll have to start by imagining and staffing and managing the context and depth-driven newsrooms it will take to support it.
Imagine an anthropological map of the evolution Spencer’s describing — at least as far as delivery goes — and it might look something like this:
People watch people.
TV NewsCheck reports that, according to Spencer, people-as-brands “outperformed institutional brands across nearly every metric.” Substitute “anchors” for “brands” in Spencer’s statement to Variety and you get something like, “The anchors that will succeed will be seen and experienced as insightful, thoughtful, reassuring and calming human beings.”
These qualities — and the ability to provide “context, depth and emotional reassurance” — are not things you can convincingly fake. They are earned, and the work of earning them is time-consuming. In a breaking news model, anchor workflows are simply not designed to provide that time, and support staff are less qualified than ever to help them compensate for that. Young writers and producers may be extremely intelligent and well-meaning, but they are also generally less experienced — in life and in work — than at almost any time in the history of the industry.
And this is in a time when locally produced newscasts are expanding and anchors are spending more time on air than ever before. In a number of the organizations I serve, it’s not unusual for talent to see whatever has been prepared for them while they are literally between stories and in the middle of delivering a newscast focused on something else.
As the percentage of time talent spend doing the news has expanded, the percentage of time they have to prepare for doing it — to cultivate any capacity for context and depth — has been shrinking.
And this all comes on the heels of decades of asking — in some cases, requiring — anchors to be less involved, at least when it comes to building the thing they front.
We’ve built systems that nurture talent who are expert at performing the news. Not necessarily owning it.
We’ve told them not to ask questions that have not been pre-approved.
This essentially encouraged anchors and reporters to perform inquiry instead of actually engaging in it. As long as they each knew their lines, they did not really have to listen to each other at all.
Not to stray from what’s already been scripted.
As long as anchors could read cleanly and at a pace the protected story count, this reduced the burden to achieve any kind of in-depth understanding of the stories they were reading.
To quickly move on to whatever is next without regard for what’s preceded it.
This kept things moving, but risked sacrificing the coherence that distinguishes talent when they are conscious of how the dots connect from one story to the next.
I was once hired to help an organization do some important future planning. When I pointed out that the internal committee they were convening didn’t include anchor talent, I was told that was by design. “Why would we want to do that?” an executive asked me. The idea that anchors were, in general, unlikely to contribute meaningfully on the front end had become institutionalized.
To be fair, in the era of breaking news that lack of faith in anchor talent has never been entirely unjustified. When providing context and depth are not necessarily skill sets required to do the job, there are bound to be people doing the job who aren’t up to that task. Managers were right not to put that on their plates.
There have always been notable exceptions to all of this, of course — both organizationally and individually. Especially in cases of true breaking news, when something was happening and being covered in real time. But in the era of breaking news, even the concept of breaking news itself became a brand concept driven more by premeditation (production) and performance (delivery) than by reality on the ground. In many cases, that meant anchors and reporters were judged more for the way they performed breaking news than for the ways they truly managed it — because they weren’t truly required to manage it at all.
For their part, reporters have been taught and managed to master brevity — to deliver as much as possible as fast as possible. Q&A has been limited to what can be premeditated, so that any conversation is limited by what we know they know instead of driven by what we think viewers need to know. It’s been an important discipline to the extent that it’s challenged journalists to consider and edit based on what’s essential. Getting to the essentials is a difficult and important discipline. (As Mark Twain said, “I wrote a novel because I didn’t have time to write a short story.”) There is important wisdom in the challenge to be brief. But it’s also a practice that can result in delivery that comes off as canned and robotic. When everything’s premeditated, the performance challenge becomes simply reading or memorizing it. Neither the anchor nor the reporter has to think about it in real time.
Producers have been trained and managed to keep story count high and story length low. This “more is better” imperative can be critically important in a system designed to highlight breaking news. It is not a recipe for success if context and depth are the order of the day.
If anchor and reporter performance needs to change, we’ll have to reimagine the systems that support it.
In a presentation at NAB, Spencer framed this all as a workflow challenge but was not specific about how newsroom support systems may fundamentally have to change to make contextual, depth, and empathy-driven anchoring a reality. That will be the real ball game. And it will not be a matter of returning to the way anything was done in the past. I mean none of this as an argument for that. It will be a matter of being clear about who we are and what we value and then imagining how we use new tools and new workflows to live up to the challenge.
The analogy of anchors as newscast quarterbacks is a great one, but only as long as we’re honest with ourselves about the fact that great quarterbacks are as much disciples and masters of preparation as they are of playing the game itself. And they work in systems that are designed, first and foremost, to get them ready to play. Diet, sleep, film study, playbook review, field simulation, conditioning — all these things calibrated and prioritized to deliver them to kickoff physically and mentally ready to lead.
If we really want newscast quarterbacks, we’ll have to think as deeply and deliberately about what they do off-the-air as we do about what we want from them on-the-air.
Of course, even the best and the best-prepared can’t succeed if others on the field aren’t prepared to do their own jobs at the same level. There’s a reason that great left tackles — the linemen that protect the quarterback’s blind side — are among the best-paid players in the game. They buy their quarterbacks time, and even the best need time to work their magic. If newsroom experience levels mean anchors have to constantly be checking others’ work, the time they’ll need to cultivate any kind of context and depth will be compromised. Ultimately, this may be one of those places that AI in the newsroom makes an important and substantive difference.
Likewise, reporters will need to be more capable than ever of talking intelligently and spontaneously about what they’re covering — losing the relative safety of knowing nothing will ever be asked unless it’s been planned in advance. And, hopefully, learning that having the answer to every question has never been what makes the work they do matter. The real soul of the work is in asking the questions themselves.
From a performance standpoint, the bar has never been higher.
One of the exciting findings in our own research has been that what viewers need from us changes based on what’s going on in the world and how people are feeling about it. The traits Spencer cites are things that become especially important in times of uncertainty and communal anxiety. In those times, especially, people need more than information. They need journalists who clearly understand what that information means to them and can help them navigate what may be ahead.
Being informed is not enough. They need to feel understood. Doing that well and responsibly is a high calling and the greatest of responsibilities.
And as we all grapple with what comes next we’ll have to be mindful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Apparently, the research did not say that breaking news was passe. On the contrary, it said that breaking news was now so baked in and expected that it does not function as a differentiator. Viewers don’t want something else. They want that and more than that.
Here’s hoping we’ll all have the imagination and courage it will take to deliver on all of it.
Next Time: The Newscast Quarterback
Newsrooms are already producing exciting examples of depth and context-driven anchor work. We’ll dive deeper into what that looks like and what it really takes to make it happen.