Before that, I was a general assignment reporter, and one of the first things I covered was the death of an eight-year-old boy, who stepped out between two school buses and was killed when a third bus hit him. This meant asking a lot of tough questions of some very shaken people (curiously enough, two of my daughters attended the same school several years later).
Do I think people wanted to know what happened? Yes, especially the parents of the students at that school, who wanted to know not only what happened, but could it happen to my kids.
Broadcasting live does have its benefits. I believe the entire Amber Alert system benefits greatly from the fact that live broadcasts can get the word out instantly to millions of people and may save lives. I think that coverage of floods, fires, and other disasters are important. Would the Tsunami relief people have generated as much support without the images? No, because it would have remained just another third world disaster, nameless people dying somewhere most people never heard of. Broadcast coverage created sympathy for those people.
You are right, there is a difference between public interest and interesting the public. The decision to determine what is important and what is not takes place each night at story meetings across countless newsrooms. Good, bad or indifferent, editors, writers, reporters, and directors sit down and try to determine what to present and what to skip. The curious thing about this is no matter what network, station or paper, most media outlets will offer the same stories, even Fox. The overall content of the stories usually don't vary that much. And the reporters struggle to make their version unique enough to qualify as still being relevant. But the overall content of any nightly news is virtually the same.
All of this is about competition. Being the first to broadcast a story—or in my case, to be the first to print a story. Some times a station will begin its broadcast a minute or two early to try to be the first.
One of our local stations introduced a "Live at Five" program instead of Oprah, Dr. Phil or Wheel of Fortune. This transitioned into its 6 p.m. broadcast. It also caused another local station to broadcast a "First at Five" program, beginning at 4:58 p.m. each night. It's only five minutes long, but it kept a lot of people from switching channels.
Journalists are caught in a deep rut here, without any hope of getting out. Most of the FReeper would point to Fox news a model of what broadcast journalism should be. If we accept that as a valid argument, then if other networks tried to do the same thing, people would still attack those same news shows, even here. I've noticed that when a politician votes the way most conservatives want, That politician still catches flack from the same people. you read, "It's about time," or "It doesn't make a difference," or even (and my personal favorite), "He's still going to Hell." If NBC, CBS, or ABC tried to model itself after FOX, most of the comments would read discuss how those other stations are simply trying to steal Fox's style, or how the others sold out to the "right-wing wackos." You would be hard pressed to find a single comments stating "NBC did well" or "Good Job CBS." What positive statements you'd find would still be crouched in contingency statements: "Gee, they finally got one right," or "About time." So where is the incentive to do things other than they way they currently do?
That is something I could never do. Just not in me to write as clearly as you do under time pressure. I can write reasonably well, IMHO - but only by dint of careful (time consuming) thought and copious edit/rewrite (which is far more practical on a computer than the old ink-on-paper method, even with the help of photocopying).Before that, I was a general assignment reporter, and one of the first things I covered was the death of an eight-year-old boy, who stepped out between two school buses and was killed when a third bus hit him. This meant asking a lot of tough questions of some very shaken people .At the risk of sounding like I'm denigrating something I can't do, just because I can't do it, I do however raise a question: Did you ever have second thoughts about the perspective you had immediately after the performance? If you had written the review all over after a few days, would it have been the same piece, with no change other than your tendency to forget some detail in the interim? And if you had your druthers, with no constraints, would you have said that all the performances and shows were worth reviews of exactly the same prespecified length?
These questions represent a challenge to the format to which you were being paid to write. I make no doubt that the deadline and the length to which you were writing were important for commercial reasons. I am trying to address the philosophical point that, at any given time, something else might have been more important to the public interest than the story you were assigned to write.
Do I think people wanted to know what happened? Yes, especially the parents of the students at that school, who wanted to know not only what happened, but could it happen to my kids.
Do you think the deadline influenced the way you researched the story and how you wrote it? Did it compromise your ability to do justice to the shaken people involved, and did your story make the reader unnecesarily paranoid?
An Amber Alert system would have been better for those in the path of the tsunami than all the relief which can now be mustered. The problem lay in bureaucracy; the Australian government had warning of the earthquake's likely consequence in time for an Amber Alert to have saved a hundred thousand lives but diplomatic protocol and the sheer bad luck that it hit at a time when nobody was minding the store at the Indonesian emergency system prevented any substantive response.Which raises the question of whether the Australian government was right in sticking to "channels" in such a crisis. It puts me in mind of the story of the G.I.s at Pearl Harbor who struggled to get to the armory and, when they got there and were under attack, were refused ammunition because they didn't have the necessary paperwork. The sergent was asked later if he would ever hand out ammunition without that paperwork. He replied, "Only in an emergency."
All of this is about competition. Being the first to broadcast a story—or in my case, to be the first to print a story. Some times a station will begin its broadcast a minute or two early to try to be the first.
One of our local stations introduced a "Live at Five" program instead of Oprah, Dr. Phil or Wheel of Fortune. This transitioned into its 6 p.m. broadcast. It also caused another local station to broadcast a "First at Five" program, beginning at 4:58 p.m. each night. It's only five minutes long, but it kept a lot of people from switching channels.
. . . which only says that everyone involved - journalist and audience - is behaving in a superficial way. The journalists all have the same story, and their business depends on being the first to tell it. That's serious business to the journalist, but to the public it almost never is - how does it really matter how soon I hear that someone I never met died?