Americans have a disrespectful term for presenters chosen for their looks rather than their journalistic skills: ‘eye candy’. The camera clearly flatters certain kinds of good looks, but the potential love affair is often truncated as soon as the mouth is opened. The faces that last are not necessarily the prettiest, but those whose personality and intelligence best fits the job in hand. Neither Andrew Marr, the BBC’s former Political Editor, nor Evan Davis, the BBC’s former Economics Editor, are quite in the running to be the next James Bond, but their luminous enthusiasm for and verbal mastery of their briefs make them great, natural communicators. As former ITN chief Stewart Purvis says:
You can’t teach it. You can’t define it. You can’t fake it. You’ll know it when you see it . . . An ability to trot out facts isn’t enough. Pick away at the seams of those facts to get at things that really matter, be genuinely interested in ordinary people – if you’re too detached from their hopes and fears you’re an academic, not a journalist. If you’re jaded by the work after thirty days or even thirty years, get out of the job. One golden rule?
Have something to say.39
There is another golden rule, easier stated than observed: keep it simple. A news reporter has on average about 90 seconds to voice a report on a UK television. At an optimum of 3 words a second that is a maximum of 270 words, without pause and allowing no inserted interview or actuality, which would in most cases be unacceptable. On a live link to the studio he or she may have the opportunity of supplementary questions from the news anchor, but either way these are colossal constraints when trying to impart the context and complexity of a story. During the Bosnian war in the early 1990s, the BBC’s East European correspondent was Mischa Glenny, also a respected historian of the Balkans. He found the persistent and growing demands from his editors in London for ever shorter bulletins summarising the former Yugoslavia’s immensely complex ancient, multifaceted tribalisms in two-dimensional bite-sized packages increasingly intolerable.40He eventually resigned rather than travesty his knowledge.
Other reporters will say that there is always a way to say something meaningful, however briefly, without trivialising the subject. Each has their own way of immersing themselves in mounds of detail, and then emerging with a clear line through it. The best reporters have
an inordinate respect for words, their power and dramatic effect. John Simpson, himself an Oxford English graduate, but better known as the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, is an admirer of his fellow wordsmiths, like BBC News special correspondent Jeremy Bowen. In Simpson’s third volume of autobiography, News from No Man’s Land: Reporting the World, he quotes a Bowen 1999 dispatch from Kosovo, in which he ‘rounds out the details the camera can’t’:
The flat stank of urine and decay. Something was very badly wrong. She said her name;
she is seventy years old, and a Serb in a place where Serbs are no longer welcome.
She was weak and confused. Her front door had been kicked in, the neighbours said, by Albanian fighters from the KLA.
Her photo album was open: the family in better times. A young Serb paramilitary, perhaps a grandson with a machine gun, and her husband with the Yugoslav army in the Second World War.
She kept looking back. Then we realised the decomposing body of her husband was in there with her. He’d been dead for six days.
In normal countries, you’d call the police. But in Kosovo there are no police.
NATO smashed their buildings and forced the policemen, all Serbs, to leave. NATO’s armoured columns provide overall security, not social services. Twenty-four hours later, she was still there.
This is reporting of the highest order it seems to me . . . It moves from the life of a single disregarded individual to the level of international politics in a few terse, underwritten sentences. And it is deeply discomforting. As you watch the pictures and listen to the words, you are forced to consider what happened to the old woman and why;
and about our own involvement in this entire campaign. And yet Bowen doesn’t tell you what to think: he just presents you with the painful facts, then leaves it up to you to decide.41
That eye for the telling detail, with the visual pictures augmented by the spoken ones, is a particular skill. It is the opposite of the obvious: the reporter doesn’t need to tell you what you can already see, but the things that you cannot, whether it is the smell or the unseen significance of the scene. Instinctively identifying that significance requires more than judgement, it needs both nerve and knowledge. The number of specialist portfolios in television news has not just grown to fulfil reporters’ career prospects. They are necessary so that more reporters have the time to acquire specialist skills and knowledge with which to counter the increasingly sophisticated massaging of messages from governments, corporations and other lobbying groups. However, when they get too close to the trail, as the environment correspondents did in the 1990s, the hunt itself is in danger of being abolished.
The other danger is that specialists become too close to and cosy with the fields and interests on which they report. As Curran and Seaton observe:
The popular image of journalists (elaborated in many movies) as intrepid hunters after hidden truths is hardly realistic. Specialist reporters in particular are closely involved with, and indeed dependent upon, their sources. Thus crime reporters identify with the police, defence correspondents with the services, and industrial relations experts with the trade unions. But, in addition, journalists who are better seen as bureaucrats than as buccaneers,
begin their work from a stock of plausible, well-defined and largely unconscious assumptions. Part of their job is to translate untidy reality into neat stories with beginnings, middles and denouements.42
Despite the overnight stardom of BBC Business Editor Robert Peston for breaking the Northern Rock collapse in 2008 and Treasury stories about the ensuing economic recession, there are many who believe that it was the failure of economics correspondents to maintain an adequate distance from their sources that left society so poorly forewarned about that recession, and its inevitability in hindsight. Yet Curran and Seaton’s dystopian view need not be the only outcome of such ‘swimming with the sharks’. A generation of reporters educated to interrogate those ‘unconscious assumptions’ and resist the freemasonry of professional association can yet be expected to hold the Machiavellian princes to account.
It is not just a mechanical fact-checking skill that is required. It is the dogged digging of individuals with a particular understanding of their chosen field, the rugged individuality of the reporter who will not easily be misguided or scared off. It is a characteristic that translates as honesty and reliability on screen. As Andrew Marr writes in My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism:
Journalism needs the unexpected. It needs the unpredictability and oddness of real life.
That means it needs real reporters. There is no better protection against the special pleading and salesmanship of the PR machines than decently paid and experienced journalists, trusted inside their organisations to use their judgement.43
Conclusion
Screen reporting is a tough job, requiring reporters to always have their wits about them, even while looking good and always knowing which camera is on them. While some hang up their safari suits and settle to a life recycling all they know in fictional form, others migrate to the safer environs of the television studio and become the key newscasters. Their experience in the field is palpable in the authority they bring to news announcement, even when reading other people’s words, though not all transplant successfully. Their experi-ence can show in interview, particularly when confronting evasive politicians, but not all survive the migration from field to studio desk, where they become more part of a production machine. And some never entirely give up the front-line work. Jon Snow frequently quits the gleam of the Channel 4 newsroom for the glare of the real world at some key summit or disaster. BBC Foreign Correspondent Ben Brown has taken to the studio, presenting on the BBC News Channel and sometimes on prime-time News on BBC1, but he has no inten-tion of permanently escaping the field, the real world of the reporter, where their eye is our window on the world.
That said, the world of reportage is moving on apace with the advances of the internet and online journalism. In 2003, the number of people in the world consuming their news first online overtook broadcast figures; in the United States over 80 per cent get their news online first.44The journalist, photographer and online guru Ben Hammersley – progenitor of the influential Guardian newspaper Comment is free weblog site and originator of the term
‘podcasting’ – claims that more Americans read British newspapers online than watch CNN, Fox News and MSN News combined. He believes that the combined skills of print
and audio-visual journalism is just reaching a tipping point, where the new forms of web storytelling will render both hard copy and broadcast obsolete, or at least secondary. What he calls the traditional ‘dead tree’ newspaper edition will be no more than a daily printout of a 24-hour rolling news operation, but an operation that will supplant what he dismisses as ‘the wallpaper of broadcast news’, such as Sky News and the BBC News Channel:
Web news is massively more popular than broadcast news now. I think that the big winners will be the newspapers and the big losers will be the broadcasters. . . . Bloke in suit behind desk talking to camera with prettier girl sitting next to him is not going to work. People don’t watch it, with its logo and its theme tune for the war. But if we use it to just tell stories: fantastic!45
News executives beg to differ, and the remodelling of Channel Five News in 2008, with the arrival on its red sofa of the comely Natasha Kaplinski at a reported £1 million annual salary, doubled its audience figures, according to head of news Chris Shaw.46This bucks the trend of diminished audiences elsewhere in the broadcast news spectrum, but may explain what one BBC journalist calls ‘eye candy rampant’, with the number of blondes hired recently. Concerned at the constant erosion of their audience, especially among the younger demographic, BBC News – newly restyled as a multimedia operation – is also experimenting with alternative delivery platforms they hope will appeal more, from their well-established website to mobile phones. Reporters and editors are encouraged to reveal a more human profile by regular blogging, but it is unlikely that the Wheelers and Taylors of this world will find a new outlet for their serious reportage on what the techies like to call ‘the 4th screen’. The mobile phone may well have an expanding role as an information tool, but it is an inadequate device for communicating considered analysis or striking pictorial impressions. Furthermore, the undifferentiated mass of information and opinion – good, bad and indifferent – that is the internet is the antithesis of authoritative form. Even some of its gurus admit that its promiscuous torrent underlines the need for expert analysis that recipients can trust. Self-styled web apostate Andrew Keen says ‘the internet is killing our culture:’
Web 3.0 will be where the smart people seize back control and get rid of all this ‘social media’ fetishizing innocence, amateurs, the child in us. I am not against the internet, but I am for curating it by experts . . . The challenge for professional newspeople is: you have to learn to emancipate yourself from all this mass humility.47
While news organisations and industry experts cannot agree on what the digital future holds, it is best for the reporter to concentrate on perfecting the established verities of their craft. Stories that combine the dramatic elements of conflict, jeopardy and a satisfying denouement will always be in demand, as will those who can write and present those stories compellingly. An inquiring mind, that may sometimes find compliance with editorial or management dictate difficult, is also a prerequisite. Originality and freshness score highly, so investigations, particularly those involving the cloak and dagger of undercover work, are at a premium.
Expert briefing – presenting to camera
The presented documentary is usually one that has been largely researched and written in advance. Pieces to camera are normally constructed in the knowledge of where they will probably come in the final film, what information they must therefore include, and so tend to commit the filmmaker to a particular style and narrative arc. This is as true of a live linked news package as it is of meticulously researched, long-form documentary series.
The process is just one aspect of well-planned filmmaking:
1 Serving the story: Good research not only distils a complex subject into a simple narrative, ensuring the essential information is drip-fed to the audience in
comprehensible sequence and form, but also finds the pictures, people and places to support and augment that story. The reporter’s job is to synthesise those elements and lead the audience by the hand down that preordained path. Pieces to camera are not essential, and each should be justified in context. How frequently presenters address the camera directly, if at all, is both an aesthetic and editorial decision, requiring answers to several questions, e.g.:
• Will camera links clarify the story and be the most efficient means of imparting the necessary information?
• Does the audience need a human ‘interpreter’ to negotiate difficult material, or will their presence stand in the way of sympathy with the subject?
• Is the reporter one whose face and voice work well within this film, and have the right tone for and reputation with the target audience?
• Do the locations for the film and the mode of shooting allow for engagingly framed pieces to camera that match and augment the content?
2 Ownership: These questions presume that the film is being made for a known programme slot and assumed audience, as most television commissions are.
Reporters and presenters are generally selected as being appropriate to their audience, but their ego and professional desire to spend as much time as possible in front of the camera must be tempered by producers’ and directors’ consideration of the needs of the film. They also need to adjust their performance for the particular audience and context, such as time of day, in which the film will be viewed. But the best reportage is where all these elements cohere organically around the reporter and he or she has undisputed ‘ownership’ of the film, by virtue of having clearly conceived the film’s message and imprinting their own character on every aspect of it.
3 Setting out your stall: The most widely-used piece to camera is the opening
‘situationer’, in which the reporter sets the scene in the most compelling location, telling the audience what the film is about and where it is headed. This is rarely the opening scene of a film, which commissioners prefer to be some visually or viscerally exciting sequence that will engage the audience to stay with you. But this is the moment your film’s purpose and reporter’s personality reveal themselves, so it needs to be perfectly pitched. Unless the documentary is necessarily shot in chronological order, as in a voyage of discovery, it is advisable to leave the shooting of this sequence to nearer the end, when the film’s feel and everybody’s performance is better bedded in and the scope is better known. Even the best-researched and prepared
documentaries can take you down unexpected paths, often to the film’s benefit.
If, for instance, your reporter set out to film the story of a country’s agrarian revolution,
but ended up recording the outbreak of civil war, your opening link would need to be changed.
4 Wrapping it up: The second most obvious link, though less popular these days except in news – because of its tendency to be glibly conclusive – is the tailpiece.
In a world short on absolute certainties, reporters are discouraged from being too prescriptive, but there are occasions where a summary is useful and enumerating the questions left unanswered can suit the moral relativities of the day. Elsewhere links may act as bridges to new locations or themes within the film, or may describe things the reporter witnessed but could not film or show. Increasingly, this personalised use of the reporter to share the sensations and emotions of ‘being there’ is what such pieces are used for. This often requires the link to be delivered in some telling, active environment – a military firefight or a hospital ER – which contemporary digital technology has made increasingly feasible, but which are normally delivered extempore, i.e. on the hoof and unscripted.
5 Keep it simple: Whenever and wherever written and performed, pieces to camera should be short and pithy, delivered in the present tense and addressed directly to the camera as if in conversation to an equal. They should not preach or patronise, nor presuppose much prior knowledge of the subject: they should avoid technical terms and jargon, facts and figures as much as possible. Where figures are unavoidable, they should usually be rounded up or down to make them easily speakable. £4,859,976 is
‘just under five million pounds’; ‘nearly one in four children live in lone-parent families’
(actually 22.9 per cent or 2,672,000 dependent children). But when it comes to politically contentious statistics, such as the numbers of asylum-seekers and prisoners in jail, or the rate of inflation, it pays to be precise. Of course, all facts must be accurate and checked before committing to film, or the resulting piece to camera will have to be binned. The penalties of reporters ad-libbing vital information, albeit on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, were dramatically proven in the head-rolling fallout of the Hutton Report on Andrew Gilligan’s broadcast about the ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq’s presumed Weapons of Mass Destruction.
6 Know what you are saying: While pieces to camera may well be written in advance, they should never be read on camera. Most seasoned reporters do not work from a verbatim script, but have a very clear idea of what they have to say and how long they have to say it. The most common form they work from are written as bullet points –
6 Know what you are saying: While pieces to camera may well be written in advance, they should never be read on camera. Most seasoned reporters do not work from a verbatim script, but have a very clear idea of what they have to say and how long they have to say it. The most common form they work from are written as bullet points –