The future of the TV News tease, and lessons from outside TV

The guys at 602 Communications are the best I've seen at teaching people to write effective newscast teases. I've seen Graeme Newell and Doug Drew in action, and what they say about tease-writing ("make a promise") makes sense. We use their strategy where I work. Their website has several articles on news teasing that are worth reading, including this one on "one-word coverage promises". Since teasing is still a necessary evil for most of us, why not do it the best way possible?

In TV news, we know most of our viewers don't like our teases. We often hear the complaint "quit jerking us around, just tell us the news". But we know (and they know too) how easy it is for them to change the channel, and we think our teases are the best chance to keep our viewers in place for another segment, another quarter-hour tick. Graeme and Doug will tell you that what viewers really hate are poorly-written teases, and their coaching is designed to help you write the kinds of teases that will get your viewers to stick around without angering them in the process.

Another factor that we can't forget is that TV is a linear medium, and thus our viewers are well served when we can provide a light and a roadmap to the path ahead. Good teasing can be a good service in this regard, but so often we fail to see it that way, and we write just another one of those throwaway lines. Or we wind up looking like Entertainment Tonight, which to me is just one tease after another, with a smattering of news content thrown in.

But after giving some thought to my recent reading of "Mavericks at Work", I recalled a story about DPR Construction, a general contractor of buildings for very specific and technical needs. One of their company's goals, as stated in "Mavericks", is to increase each year the number of jobs they win without having to submit a bid -- in other words, jobs they win because their customers choose them first and only.

I wonder if a similar goal (being a viewer's first and only news source) is still attainable in this era of 200+ channel choices and an easy-to-use remote control. And if a station could attain such lofty status, could they do without teases altogether, and would their newscast ratings suffer without them? Could such a station make hay that they've eliminated their teases, and have that point-of-differentiation pay off for them? If I were a solid number-one in my market, I'd give it a try. Even if I didn't cut out every tease, I could scale back and put extra effort into the ones I left in my show (using good production and writing a good promise).

Another example from the book is craigslist.com, which has become one of the most useful and one of the most valuable sites on the Internet, without doing a single shred of traditional marketing. The site is plain, but because the information inside is of so much value, people use it again and again to meet their needs. Is there still a place in the wide-open TV news market for a top-rated newscast that does what Craigslist does (plain and simple, give me the news), or are our viewers just too accustomed to having all the bells and whistles thrown at them? If we provided better content, would they be loyal to us, and if so, what would that better content be?

"Management by Baseball", and how it's so much like TV news

Book #2 on my holiday reading list is "Management by Baseball", (Amazon link) by Jeff Angus, a corporate veteran and longtime baseball fan and student. Compared to the innovation-focused "Mavericks at Work" below, MBB is more a basic management primer using famous baseball players and managers (mostly the managers) as the filter through which the lessons are delivered. (There is a chapter at the end dedicated to managing through change, I might add.)

For someone like me who has lived and learned a great deal of management lessons over the past decade, not all of the instruction in MBB is new, but I knew that going in to my reading. At the very least, I thought I'd enjoy reading management legacies of several baseball greats I've heard of in all my years of following America's pastime. But there are many good lessons here for experienced, new or aspiring news managers.

Baseball managers and TV news directors have a lot in common.

1. We deal in the people business. Sure there's a product to manage -- a game and a newscast. But our job is to manage the people who play the game or put on the newscast.
   
2. More specifically, we deal in the talent business. Our talent has name-recognition and holds a position of distinction and influence in the community. Even though we're the boss, our top talent are paid much more than we are paid. We deal with very talented people, and some have enormous egos we have to caress and feed, once in a while.
   
3. We have to manage a wide variety of skill sets. Perhaps a football coach is a better comparison between of the physical and skill differences among all the positions on a football team. A TV newsroom has anchors, reporters, video editors, photographers, assignments editors, web producers, newscast producers, and managers. A football team has lineman (offensive, defensive), linebackers, running backs, wide receivers, defensive backs, kickers, punters and assistant coaches. As managers or coaches, we may have worked our way into management by mastering one of these positions, but we have to learn something about all of them to manage all the skilled people who are playing/working for our team.
   
4. We have to make quick decisions in crisis situations. A game is a series of crisis decisions. In news, we have breaking stories that regularly test our ability to improvise and overcome obstacles, which are always changing.
   
5. Our results are measurable (win/loss records vs Nielsen ratings), but they don't always tell the whole story as to a manager's effectiveness or success.
   
6. Update: Oh yeah! I almost forgot the most important one. When things aren't going well for the organization, it's easier to fire the baseball manager or the news director than it is to dump the starting lineup and the anchor team.

Jeff's website is similarly named: managementbybaseball.com. He writes a blog that's worth reading, and there's more of his thinking behind a login page that requires free* registration. (*You'll need to answer a question from the book, however, to register.)

Next up, "Good to Great by Jim Collins. Check back in a few days for another book report written for news managers.

Why our newsrooms need "Mavericks at Work"

I'm on a mission to read 5 books on my 10-day holiday break. The first I picked up was the much-acclaimed new release "Mavericks at Work" (Amazon link, authors' website).

The book is written by William C. Taylor and Polly G. LaBarre, two authors with a Fast Company magazine pedigree. Their mission is to highlight people and companies who are breaking the mold in their respective industries and share the lessons they've learned over the years. It's not new literary ground, but the stories are great and the lessons are many.

I've taken pages of notes in my journal, but here are a couple of good bullet-points I'll lift out as ideas for our newsrooms.

• You don't win by playing by the rules of the game, but by setting the rules of the game. You've probably heard this before, but it's true. And this is a great source of hope for any business (such as a newsroom) that is currently playing from behind. Whether you're winning or losing, the greatest chance for to shake things up lies in your ability to innovate your product. Frankly, it's the greatest chance for survival for all of us, to get right down to it.
  
  
• Don't think about the competition. Think about your customers. How much time do we spend poring over Nielsen overnights, and now LPM/Demos? How many decisions do we make about our news content by trying to decipher a message in last night's numbers? But what we should be doing more is finding ways to get feedback from our viewers directly. When was the last time you had a conversation with your viewers, and how did that go? Do they like what you're doing? What stories do they want to see? What do they like most/least about your product? Do you have a system to process this kind of feedback to make bigger decisions about the way your newsroom does news?
  
  
• If your business were to go away tomorrow, would you customers miss you? It's a bit of a morbid question, but you better be asking it. A more specific question (and hopeful) question is, "What would your customers miss the most?" Do you have unique content that your customers can't get anywhere else? If not, you need it, and now's the time to be thinking of it.
  

I won't crib too much from the book, but here are a few more of the best messages.

• Be the benchmark.
  
• Don't be afraid to reject customers that don't match your core values. This is very much against a broadcaster's way of thinking. We love everyone, right? But at some point, you ought to think about picking your ground and going with the customers who'll meet you there.
  
• The company with the smartest customers wins. How are you making your customers smarter?
  

"Mavericks at Work" is a must-read for anyone (like me) who thinks the status quo is a dead-end road, even in businesses as long-standing as television and news.

Predictions for 2007

The big-thinkers in our world are starting to roll out their predictions for 2007.

• Terry Heaton titles his look-ahead, "2007: The Battle for Local Supremacy". One of his key points is that, even though 2007 will be a difficult revenue year for local TV outlets (lack of political advertising, for one), it's a critical year for broadcasters and other local media outlets to be investing in their online products, particularly video and community-building. He says it much better than I do, so check it out.
  
• Another acquaintance, Steve Safran, has blogged his 2006 hits-and-misses and his first 2007 prediction via this post at LostRemote.com.
  

Searching for the new Beautiful

There's no denying the Internet has the power to make our lives simpler, if we choose to let the technology do it. You can move millions of dollars (or a few bucks) from bank account to bank account, at home in your pajamas at night. You can buy 10 perfect Christmas presents in an hour, surfing the world in that short time to find exactly what you want. Of course for many of us, for better or worse, the Internet has made our lives more complicated - more choices, more opportunities. But by and large, that's our choice. The Internet is indeed the world's most useful tool.

But as a medium to convey information, thoughts, images, or sounds, the Internet is still lacking in one thing -- beauty. Sure we have content everywhere, and some of it is really good content, and some of it has elements of real beauty to it. But what's beautiful on the web?

Newspapers and magazines convey beauty every day, in their photography, design, how they manage text.

Radio has beauty. The sound of an AM baseball broadcast on a hot summer night. A favorite song you hear driving on a long trip.

Television has beauty too. The work of some of my colleague news photographers and reporters still astounds me, even though I've been in this business a quarter century. I remember 20+ years ago, to the early days of my career, when I was a college student working part-time at CBS News' Dallas bureau. Of all the great stories I got to help with, I remember one simple image from an otherwise routine spot news story that one of our correspondents Martha Teichner did, and I thought it was beautiful. There had been a tornado in West Texas. Typical tornado story -- lots of damage, survivor stories. You've seen it dozens of times. But the beauty in this story was a single shot at the end of the story -- a mailman delivering mail to a curbside mailbox that was still standing, in front of a home that wasn't. Life goes on, doesn't it? I don't remember how Martha phrased her last line of copy in that story, but she didn't have to say much. That story had beauty. Television as a medium has the power to convey beauty every day.

So where's the beauty on the Internet? You can post art to share it with others, but the art itself isn't really different from what it was centuries ago. You can post video and audio, and mix it together, and now even people with no training or experience and using cheap technology can do it. We're starting to see new ways to display video that will give us an HD-like experience. But that's just television transported to a new platform, so it's not really beauty that's native to the net. Sure, there's all kinds of interactive elements, but does interactive equate to beauty or is it just another tool?

Certainly we'll find beauty on the web too, in ways that no other medium can produce. It's coming soon, but what will beauty look like, and what will make it different from all the beauty we already have in our lives?

Are You Linked-In? Why Should You Care?

The TV News business is a pretty small business. Word of mouth is a key factor in making deals and moving your career forward. I've been working in this industry since 1982, and I've spent time in more than 100 different newsrooms over those years. I'm thankful to have met a lot of smart/funny/kind people, many of whom are still my friends today.

So when I first heard about LinkedIn, I didn't think it would help me much, but I created my own free page nonetheless. LinkedIn wants to be a MySpace for grown-ups. Much less about playlists and friends-chat, and much more about making professional connections to build your business. All that's well and good, though I'm not sure it will do me any better than what I'm able to do with the connections I already have. But life is about possibilities, right? And since the online world is where everything is moving, why not professional contacts too?

So with that in mind, here's my LinkedIn page. http://www.linkedin.com/in/chipmahaney

And just for fun, here's my MySpace page. http://www.myspace.com/chipmahaney.

As you can see, I'm in desparate need of virtual friends. Sign up and join me online.

By the way, the very smart & busy Amy Gahran has just finished an article about LinkedIn as a means of connecting reporters to local sources. Check it out here on the Poynter.org site.

The best thing to happen to DFW TV since ... me!

Kidding about that "me" part up top.

But I'm not kidding about how great it is to have Ed Bark unleashed on the web. For those of you not from these parts here in North Texas, Ed Bark was the longtime TV columnist for the Dallas Morning News. He was one of a hundred or so News employees who took a buyout this summer. Now that Ed is free to write what he really thinks, he's doing so. And to my great pleasure, he's writing in great quantities on his new website, UncleBarky.com. Check it out. He's writing about local TV almost every day, calling the shots as he sees them on air.

And while you're reading what he's posting every day, check out one of his very first posts, titled "Why I'm Here". Makes you wonder.

99 ways to better e-mail

This ties in well to my post just below. Here's a great site you should read now, and keep bookmarked. It's a list of 99 ways to use e-mail to communicate more effectively. The list goes into manners, security, and overall e-mail effectiveness.

A must read at this link: http://www.itsecurity.com/features/99-email-security-tips-112006/.