News in TV

I think I'm going to add another topic to discuss on my blog: News. After all I figure I'm going to school to learn and do it, so I have some small expertise in the field. At least enough to yak about it. In my investigative class a guy came in to talk, Tim Lennox...interesting lecture. He made a few points about commercial television that I agree with wholeheartedly. For instance, in commercial TV news station, watch thier reports, the sound bites last about 8 seconds. I always thought "Now how can they really be reporting the news effectively if they are giving the expert or the speaker only 8 seconds to talk?" Tim made an excellent point. He said if we, as reporters, could go back in time to the days of Lincoln and we were reporting on the Gettysburg address, what 8 seconds of that speech would we put in a news report? Fabulous. Because you could not sum up that great speech in 8 seconds...there is no way. He brought up some other great points like how print journalists (newspapers) have a section that is dedicated to the errors/corrections they made in the last newspaper. But do we have that for TV news? Nope. We just "assume" we are perfect. News. Psh. Glad it's not my life's calling.

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