There are plenty of shitlickers out there who always sneer at TV journalists and presenters, amazed that they get paid to stand still and talk into a camera. Anybody could do that, they will boorishly explain, usually at great length.
These idiots can fuck right off. TV reporters have nice smiles, great coats and lovely hair, but they're still tough sons of bitches. They face pressures that are unique even in the media world, and are still producing outstanding content every single day.
TV journos are sent out to do a live cross in fucking gales whenever shit weather hits the country (possibly the worst job in all of journalism), they have to stick their cameras in the face of everybody they talk to, and they have to find hours of b-roll to fill their reports. They also have to take shit from gutless wonders who criticise their appearance from the anonymous safety of their sticky keyboards.
And when they do come up with a corker of a report, nobody fucking notices, and are more likely to complain that a reporter's jacket is ugly, or they didn't pronounce a place name properly, or that they are speaking, god forbid, in their own accent. And if they make any kind of mistake during a live broadcast, everybody is going to see it, especially when there are plenty of arseholes willing to record and share their shameful fuck-ups with the rest of the world on YouTube for cheap LOLs.
Or you could do something great, and everybody will be distracted by something else going on in the company, because everybody likes to gossip about the people they see on teevee. Look at the fantastic series on violent crime that Lisa Owen did last year, which came out the same week Mediaworks lost Barry and Weldon. There was tonnes of talk about what Hillary would do next, but nobody talked about the actual journalism that was going on.
And god help you if you're a young, keen reporter with good teeth and blond hair – you'll automatically be labelled a bimbo, no matter how good your stories are. People will constantly tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but it's okay to judge a reporter by their jacket.
There are still definite issues with TV news, such as a propensity for unnecessary live crosses, the inability to really cover much more than the day's biggest stories, and the usual penny-pinching and newsroom-shrinking. They can also annoy the piss out of their colleagues in other media, with their devotion for getting the perfect shot on camera often getting in the fucking way of everybody else.
But even though they have been cut back to bare bones, the teams at TVNZ, TV3, Prime and the local regional stations are putting in some long fucking hours every day to produce a huge amount of new content, and still finding an audience.
The audience is being chipped away slowly, but not as fast as the print readership is falling. Print journos sometimes sneer at their televisual counterparts as superficial and pushy, but they could learn some lessons from behind the forced smiles.
- Katherine Grant
Posts
