Home page for Mike Lee Ideas on TV News

Enhanced TV News Storytelling 

(updated 13 Feb 2014)

-Tell your stories in three acts.  That is how we humans are hard wired to understand life.  (for instance, think about the three acts of your encountering a yellow light about to change to red, your reaction, and the result)

-Make the viewer feel emotionally invested, part of the story and personally tied to the issue.  Give me a city council meeting and I can turn it into a real life drama.

-Create and maintain suspense and anticipation throughout the story

-Practice lateral thinking.   The story is there.

-Stop dumbing–down.  So what if someone out there has to look up one of your words.   They will remember you because they had to do that.

-Develop your own unique style of writing and talking.  Yes, it has to be within in the bounds of sound thought, logic, and the ability to be understood, but if a viewer with her or his head in the fridge can not tell who you are by listening, you will remain part of the great, and routinely forgotten, mass of reporters who have little impact.

Follow-ups  and Serials Two of the most important ways our brains create strong and lasting memories is through emotional impact and repetition.  Any ad executive knows that.  A lot of news directors seem not to have gotten the memo, or they did but use repetition mainly for branding their station.  Ask most viewers for the call letters of their local stations and they will draw a black.  But they will member ‘8 on Your Side,’ or ‘Eyewitness 5.’   But when it comes to actually news content, there is very little repetition of news stories, or of updates on important issues and themes.   Why?  Budgets are a popular excuse.  In truth, news producers and news directors are largely untrained in how to update a story over several days, if not months, and keep it newsy and enthralling.  But it can be done.  Most news serials are aired during sweeps and fail to connect one day to another as a common thread and real life drama, with built in news value.  Here is my version of how to tell a good serial (Real-life soap operas on important issues)

 

Teenage ‘Reporters’   This will be difficult for encrusted minds to accept.  But if you want to develop a younger demographic, and not just wait 20 years and hope that today’s youngsters will abandon social media and settle into armchairs to watch what old style TV, you need to start discussing teenage input.   Here is my proposal.

Regards,

Mike

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