I am in Boston for a conference on the media and global governance but it’s the local news that has caught my eye.
The Boston Fox and ABC affiliates that I watched in my Cambridge Hotel room were leading with weather porn last night as heavy rain storms swept across eastern Massachusetts. I love weather stories.To care about the weather is to be human.
But these programmes were as fast as a hurricane. They didn’t stop for breath as they went live from outside resident’s homes (“There was a big bang when the lightning hit the chimney”), over to the metereologist (“more autumn tomorrow”) and then straight on to a feast of other human-interest tales.
Fox had the family whose home burnt down after a factory fire 18 months ago – (“It was like a warzone” said the mother) – yesterday their replacement trailer-home fell off the back of the delivery truck and was wrecked. ABC went with a fire in a subway (“I guess the office will understand when I am late”).
No-one got hurt in any of these stories but it felt like the news response to a terror attack. The presenters didn’t actually over-inflate the stories, that was left to the mile-high graphics and rapid cutting. It was done with humour and incredible tautness. But in a highly-competitive TV market like Boston’s you have to fight for the viewer’s attention and deliver a daily dose of high-octane, people-sized news. It made the BBC and ITV’s regional TV output look like the Open University channel.
It’s exactly the sort of parochial profit-driven news that I suspect is viewed with disdain or indifference by many of the internationally-minded folk who will gather at the Robert John F Kennedy School [oops – see comments] tomorrow for this conference. As someone who started on local papers and city TV I have a different perspective.
All news is local and telling stories about your area can be as important to a healthy society as international news channels. TV is very limited in its ability to get complex ideas across but it sure as hell delivers basic contact between public and events.
More from Harvard later.
Spot on, Charlie.
Don’t forget the local news helicopters. Those are excellent.
I’ve been trying to explain to people here in the UK just how local and targeted the news can be in the U.S. and nothing demonstrates that more than the weather coverage. Or local sports. Or the local crime beat, which in Atlanta quite involved because… well… because of the amount of crime.
When I first moved to Oxford, some people torched the local police station on St. Aldate’s at 2am. That evening, I eagerly tuned into to BBC Oxford to see a mere scripted report read by the anchor — no video footage, no interviews, nothing. That was hardly ‘news’ — I already knew what happened.
In any U.S. town of Oxford’s size, that would have been a major story with multiple interviews, and an on-site team. Now BBC Oxford will always cover the Lord Mayor’s parade or similar bring-out-the-community event. Or the odd human interest story about the guy who is the best recycler on his street.
Sometimes I feel like BBC Oxford is just more of a cheerleader for the community than really reporting about what happens every day.
Maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement… I’m not sure?
Ofcom say they are pondering this issue of localism in the comparative context.
Take care,
Russ
Mashing up google maps and news events is a potentially killer app for delivering a better understanding of events on both a local and global scale. Ushahid (http://www.ushahidi.com/index.asp) is a very interesting site that was set up during the post election violence in Kenya to act as an incident reporting and tracking monitor for acts of violence.
anyone who witnesses an incident or has information on it can send in a report and the data is added to both the map and a searchable database: the map can show incidents by type (e.g. arson, rape, murder) and or date. This gives an immediate sense of the scale and distribution of the situation in real time.
One of the pioneers of this type of approach is http://chicago.everyblock.com/ (formerly chicagocrime.org, see the story on its development at http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2008/01/31/0102) which mashes information from police, local government, businesses etc with a detailed city map to provide an amazing amount of useful stuff on local neighbourhoods: from crime rates and types to building permits and more. Founded by Adrian Holovaty, one of the pioneers of interactive online journalism, it has grown to cover New York and San Fransisco as well as Chicago.
this is a viable alternative to making local news exciting, the ability to ‘drill down’ inot your local area on a street by street level is tremendously powerful. This kind of mapping of local news trends is a potential answer to the conundrum of how do you package news in an interesting, accessible way without the overblown production values of the local US networks
US local media has clearly softened your brain Charlie, it’s the JOHN F Kennedy School of Government recently re-branded as the Harvard Kennedy School.
More seriously, friends in local TV years ago explained to me that it’s all the fault of one consulting company that has advised stations one after the other how to improve their ratings with louder faster and live live live. So stations poured money into live trucks, which they need to justify so they insist on a live shot even in the 5 am news.