Television Field Production and Reporting [antikvár]

Preface Even among reporters and photojournalists who have called television news their home for the past two or three decades, questions still arise about which reporting methods work best in television. This debate over the nature of television news is to be expected. Print journalism, in its developing forms, has been germinating for the past four centuries, sufficient time to reach a mature if yet imperfect state of grace. Broadcast journalists, by contrast, have had barely four decades to experiment with the potential of television news and to reach at best a limited understanding of how broadcast news content can most effectively be communicated. Some broadcast reporters and photographers have not extended their explorations, but instead have retreated to the familiar journalistic precedents of their time. Most often they have imitated print journalists (they see reporters as people who gather facts and write words at a word processor or typewriter); they have borrowed from radio (let's tell people the news); often they have applied an imperfect understanding of photojournalism (photographers are people who take pictures). Moreover, those who control television have borrowed their titles for television journalists from Hollywood (we'll call our news people picture editors, producers, sound technicians, scriptwriters, talent, and, of course, news "directors"). Yet today television news remains an entity distinct from other, more traditional forms of journalism, sometimes as vaguely understood as on the day it was created. In part, this is because television news is a journalistic anachronism. Today, as always, the profession remains a journalistic hybrid of filmmaking, journalism, theatre, and radio—all rolled into one. It communicates at its best when it involves the emotions. It routinely communicates nonverbally. It uses