Anchor of The Year?

So this happened. For the third straight year, I am a finalist for the Society of Professional Journalists Florida Chapter Anchor of the Year. I don’t know if this is good. I worked as at WWSB-TV in Sarasota for not even two full weeks of 2014, and my entry consisted of work from a single day’s ordinary newscasts. Either the judge really liked my work on a mundane news day, or only three people entered and all of us made the finals.

You may judge for yourself:

Anchor of the Year? Update: Not Quite

Looking back at previous posts, I see that I mentioned that I was a finalist for the Society of Professional Journalists Florida Anchor of the Year. And I left you hanging.

Now I have this to hang. The award ceremony happened in Miami last month, and I finished runner-up. Second place for the second year in a row. I obviously would have preferred to finish first, but second place in the whole state is not bad for a weekend guy at a small market station. It will have to do. I have likely anchored my last TV newscast. If so, I feel proud of the work I did, and glad to see it recognized as good.

Even if not quite as good as I'd hoped!

Here is the entry I submitted:

Anchor of the Year?

The Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has released the list of finalists for its annual Sunshine State Awards. I am one of two up for its "Anchor of the Year" award for my work with WWSB in Sarasota. In the whole state of Florida! See the list here.

Here is the entry I submitted:

Resignation

Eventually, someone will ask Google, "Why John McQuiston left WWSB in Sarasota?" So I'll try to explain, if only because you know that the absence of facts never stops someone from telling a story.

I resigned. In an email to station management I wrote, "I appreciate the opportunity to serve the station and its viewers. I tried to do work with which everyone there could feel proud to be associated."

All true. I don't know if my now former colleagues felt proud or not, but I did snag two Emmy nominations in the last two years for a station that had not even mustered an entry for the better part of a decade, according to the administrator for the NATAS Suncoast Region. When I called needing help with my submission in 2012, she could not remember the last time someone from WWSB had entered.

Why resign? In short, I felt overworked, underappreciated, and underpaid; and I ran out of gas. There's a longer answer, but it exhausts me just thinking about trying to write it, and I'm sure it would come off as whiny. Maybe later.

I have some plans already, including devoting myself again to my too-long-ignored video production business. (If you know someone who needs a story told in video, please send them to http://personal-documentary.com! If you care to, you can support it by liking its Facebook page.

Here is what turned out to be my last moments on the WWSB anchor desk, a week ago Sunday.

On the News

Excerpt of last night's newscast:

Viewer mail from an actual viewer

OK, former viewer, apparently. This comes, the author claims, from a minister. Ready?

Larrry

Dear WTVT:

I cannot understand why you would replace Wheel and Jeopardy (7 & 7:30 PM weeknights) with Millionaire. No sane person would even consider such a thing. I am so angry at WTVT because I really thought you cared about your viewers. Obviously I was wrong, you have no concern for who has been loyal to your station since WTVT 40 was on.

My wife and I, along with SEVERAL other families we know will no longer be watching WTVT 7. When your viewership drops like a rock and your annual renewal comes along for your license, it will be NO surprise how many people will file complaints against you.

May you all burn in Hell.

Rev. LRSmith

Note: This once loyal viewer apparently never noticed that WTVT are not our call letters.

Amazing? Ha!

All the anchors at my station had to do stories about a most awkward subject for the May ratings period — ourselves! The station dubbed them "The Amazing Men/Women of ABC7."

So, of course, I had to tell my story ironically.



I shot and edited the piece with my own cameras and editing equipment.

That's not her nose itching

I'm not sure that this woman who faces charges for practicing medicine without a license did herself any good when she noticed our station's camera focused on her during her first appearance before a judge Friday.

Blast from the past: WFLA

Wow. My website's stat counter tells me that someone found JohnMcQuiston.com by Google searching "john mcquiston wfla." It takes a long memory for someone to remember my two-year tenure at Tampa's NBC affiliate. I left that station 14 years ago.

I much more hair then. And fewer pounds.

Double Duty

Some recent changes at our station include our sports guy moving to co-host the morning show. Since he used to do sports on our weekend newscasts, which I anchor, that leaves me to carry the ball, if you will, on sports, too.

I spent the first dozen years or so of my career doing sports, so it's not difficult. The challenge now is writing and editing the sports segment AND still writing much of the newscast, too.

I'm not complaining. Although the double duty divides my attention and leaves me less time to polish the news scripts, once the stress of getting it all finished has passed, I have fun reading the sports on the air.



And if I am lucky enough that you enjoy my work on ABC7, you are lucky enough that I just signed a new contract to stay there.

I don't think this will give me a big head

Someone called the station today to ask if this was the weekend we were supposed to turn back our clocks to end Daylight Saving Time. After getting his answer ("no"), the caller changed the subject and told our newscast producer that I was too good for this market and should move on to someplace bigger.

When the producer passed the message on to me, I of course felt flattered. But I could not resist pointing out that the glowing assessment of my talent came from someone who had called a television station because he apparently could not read a calendar.

You can assess my talent yourself, if you wish. Here's an excerpt of one of tonight's newscasts.

Baby Born at Baseball Stadium

Hardly hard news here, but I liked this story, and its telling. Yes, I am biased.

21st Century TV Job Searching

I thought I had moved for the last time but I may get on the merry-go-round again.

Freelance work has dwindled to where the emphasis is on free and I have begun looking for work in earnest, even considering jobs outside of the Tampa area. I like living here and I like freelancing here but work here has evaporated.

Several of the outlets for which I have done regular work have gone belly up and I have not found new ones to replace them. I haven't given up on my video biography business but it has not produced a reliable income.

Fortunately, threat of destitution is far off but I'd rather avoid making it a contest.

I also thought I had left television news behind as a full-time occupation. When I moved to Florida in late 2004, it was more important to choose where I lived than what I did for a living. That was easier when there were more available options for work.

While I have long embraced the new media -- I built my first web site in 1997 and encoded my first online video the next year -- that have become the buzzwords of traditional news outlets, TV news as a business is getting younger and cheaper. I am not and I wonder if there is still a market for someone with my skills and experience (read: age).

Maybe. Instead of mailing videotapes, many job ads now ask for online links to examples of your work, such as those on the video page at JohnMcQuiston.com. This not only saves money and time, my web site's stat counter eliminates the mystery of whether anyone sees my work.

It can also compress the time someone will respond. It used to be that you'd send a tape First Class. That would take 2-4 days. The the tape would become part of "the stack" that you hoped a station's news director would find time to watch. If you ever heard anything, it could take weeks.

Now a news director can open an e-mail on his BlackBerry, click on a link, watch your work and call you that day. I know this because twice now news directors have called me within hours of my sending an e-mail to them. I was not prepared for that and I hope I didn't blow my chances at what sounded like decent opportunities stumbling through my shock.

Another news director asked to see more of my news anchoring. I dug a newscast excerpt out of my computer, encoded and uploaded it to my site, created a page for it and sent him the link. I offered to mail a DVD if he prefers.

Here's what he'll see:



Yes, that newscast is five years old. There are clips of my traffic reporting from as recently as June so anyone can see that I still have some hair and can still perform on camera.

If you know anyone who needs a standout storyteller who has reported and anchored every kind of story from hard news to fluffy features, sports and even traffic, please point them to me.

Tampa TV Reporters Fired For YouTube Video

WFTS-TV fired three people and disciplined four others for creating a mock newscast and posting it online. The spoof, anchored by Kerry Kavanaugh (left), reported that a Ch. 28 employee was one of Tiger Woods' mistresses. It was apparently meant as a gag gift for the woman's birthday. Click here to read details from the St. Petersburg Times.

Fake newscasts and blooper reels are as old as TV news. Before YouTube, they were the products of harmless fun that only a few people would see. You edited them on tape, gathered the intended audience into an edit booth and showed off the results in person. Tapes were inconvenient to copy, at least compared to copying-and-pasting a bit of text, so you were relatively assured that your inside joke would stay inside the group with whom you shared it.

Now, editing happens on computers, and you get a video file that is all too easy to upload to the Universe. Once there, you lose any control over who sees it and shares it. If it goes "viral," it can cause a fatal illness to your job, if not your entire career.

That's why I feel bad for those who lost their jobs. They thought they were doing something funny for a friend. It's the brain surgeon who thought he or she had to share the video on Facebook and YouTube whose career ought to be kaput.

Firing seems excesssive punishment. The station's GM told the Times that the video could risk the station's credibility, which I understand to a point. But I saw the clip before it was removed from YouTube and if the only people still watching TV news are ones who couldn't immediately tell that this was a fake story, I'm not sure that the business has much credibility left, anyway.

Meanwhile, I remain grateful that the bulk of my broadcast career happened in the ante-YouTube era. My on-air mishaps haunt me enough in memories. I'd hate to think how I'd feel if they were conveniently available for anyone to view.

How VJs Are Changing TV News?

The money savings that one-person TV news crews promise is convincing more stations to use them. Instead of a reporter and a photographer, a one-man-band shoots and reports the story him or herself. These one-man-bands (OMBs) are variously called video journalists (or VJs) and multimedia journalists (MMJs), depending on whose pig the lipstick is being applied.

Former CBS News reporter Deborah Potter writes on newslab.org that one-man-bands are changing not only how news is gathered but how it looks on the air.

Potter cites an unpublished dissertation by Kutztown University's Mary Angela Bock which reports that the challenge of shooting and reporting one's own work often forces OMBs to go for the easiest stories to turn, rather than those most interesting to viewers. "Because they work alone, VJs will be more apt to look for quick and easy access to story elements," Potter quotes Bock as writing.

Another problem with OMB work, Potter notes, is the physical demands of the job. Even common doorways can prove formidable obstacles to the lonely journalist larded with equipment.

Seriously. Those are the two salient points in the article, which seemed a veiled argument against OMBs. I hope that the 500 pages that Bock says her treatise spans includes more compelling information because the items cited do not detail accurately how increased use of solo news crews affects the news you see on TV.

First, OMBs are not the only ones who go for the low hanging fruit under the ever-increasing pressure of producing news for broadcast at 11 and for the web right now. It's not because they work alone that they pursue easy elements; it's because they have deadlines that come sooner than they once did. So do two-person crews and they're just as guilty of the "one-stop shopping" syndrome.

You can make a better argument claiming that former photographers new to reporting either seek or are assigned features because they lack either the confidence in themselves or the trust of management to tackle meatier stories.

And as someone who has shot plenty of my own stories (the homepage of my website, JohnMcQuiston.com, features a story I shot myself), I have never found a doorway that was a serious impediment. The physical strain argument overlooks the fact that the major station groups — including Gannett, Hearst and Scripps Howard — that have adopted OMBs to some degree have all bought small and relatively cheap cameras for them to use.

Their physical load is less than that of a traditional photographer.

Potter notes that Bock "reports that the National Union of Journalists in England is starting to hear health complaints–such as exhaustion or back problems–from VJs who have been on the job a few years."

I hope Bock also reports what percentage of VJs make such complaints, how many traditional news photographers make similar complaints, and whether the National Union of Journalists opposes the use of VJs. That would added needed perspective.

If you want to argue against OMBs, here it is: When one person does the jobs that used to belong to two, it's not going to be done as well. Looking for shots is a different pursuit than digging for facts and when you have to do both, they're going to suffer for it.

That's it. The rest is like the mumbo-jumbo of the Atkins diet when the bottom line is that you lose weight because you consume fewer calories. Conversely, the advantage of using OMBs is that they cost about half of two-person crews. Anything more is just the aforementioned porcine lipstick.

The most obvious thing you see with OMB work right now is that it's new (or so old as to seem new) to many of the people doing it. You have life-long photographers suddenly trying to write and read narration for a news story. Reporters get two days of training with their new camera and out they go to turn a story with it.

Of course it looks like left-handed writing by right-handed people.

This will change as aspiring reporters learn that shooting their stories is not just something they will have to do in college or in their first job out of school. Stations won't be trying to teach people to write with their other hand. They'll arrive already ambidextrous.

Will they produce work as much or as good as two-person crews do now? Almost certainly not. Would it be ideal to have teams of two collaborating on a story? Almost certainly yes.

But OMBs didn't cause the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. And they're not going away. An article about how to do better work under the circumstances would do much more good than one apparently wishing the circumstances where different.

College Newspaper and TV Newsrooms Merge

The seismic shift in news media has begun to reshape journalism schools. The University of Kansas has merged the newsrooms of its student newspaper and television station. The University Daily Kansan will move into a newsroom where KUJH-TV studio is located.

A cynic will say that now the TV people won't have to go as far to get story ideas from the paper.

KU says in a news release that the merger will "provide journalism students with greater opportunities to tell their stories more dynamically across print, broadcast, online and new and emerging media."

In other words, the TV people won't be going to get stories from the paper because they'll be the ones writing stories for the paper. And the newspaper reporters will be producing stories for TV.

"The students will benefit from learning in a true multimedia environment," said Terry Bryant, lecturer in journalism and media lab manager. "The variety of skills they master will serve them well when they become professional journalists after graduating from KU."

If the students think this is theoretical, heretical or just radical, they should take a look at WFLA-TV and the Tampa Tribune, Media General-owned outlets which operate from a single newsroom with reporters and photographers shared between the two media.

WFLA-TV photographers have been given Nikon DSLR still cameras with which they shoot photos for the Tribune. More than occasionally, photographers will write and narrate their own TV stories. Newspaper reporters turn stories for TV. TV reporters write for the paper.

Convergence is not just a crazy idea in some bean counter's head somewhere. The debate about whether this should happen is moot. More and more large market TV stations are hiring what they call multi-media journalists — those who shoot their own stories and tap out a text version for the station's web site while they're at it.

If that's the real world, it's good to see journalism schools begin to prepare students for what they're in for when they get there.

Suspect Suicide Caught on Video. Do You Air It?

Media aren't the gatekeepers of information they once were.

The story about a porn star suspected of murder hurling himself off a cliff as Los Angeles police tried to subdue him is a great example. Though police failed to grab Stephen Clancy Hill before he fell to his death, he was captured on video.

Do you air it?

It's not pleasant to look at but it's not nearly as graphic as the Budd Dwyer gun-in-mouth suicide televised live in 1987. Airing the video might counter accusations of police brutality. Hill was black and the LAPD is not known for just treatment of minorities. Rodney King, anyone?

It has the makings of a great debate.

One rendered totally moot by YouTube.

As stations and now newspapers and radio stations with their video-enabled web sites gnash their teeth weighing the merits, viewers have already decided for themselves if they want to see it. Those who do have no trouble finding it online.

If you're a news director or an editor or just an idiot arguing on a message board you are debating as an exercise. Your verdict has little to do with what news consumers actually see. That itself introduces a new dynamic in the decision-making process. I wonder how it will change news outlets' thinking (A) about showing the video and (B) covering the story?

Interesting times.

Advice to Reporter Advising Candidate: Don't

Media consultants help politicians better deal with reporters and communicate on camera. Basketball players have coaches, why not public servants? And who better to coach you on how to deal with reporters than a reporter?

(If you are looking for media training, I know a guy.)

The problem is when the media consultant is a current reporter who is covering the candidate's campaign, especially when the candidate names the reporter while introducing his campaign staff.

This happened in south Florida where congressional candidate Allen West says in the video below that West Palm Beach TV reporter Angela Sachitano "does our media relations."



The Palm Beach Post reports that Sachitano's boss at WPTV-TV, Jeff Brogan, doesn't believe the relationship compromised her journalistic integrity but that her work for West was "inconsistent with our policy."

It was also inconsistent with having a brain.

Look, if you live somewhere long enough you are (I hope) going to know a lot of people. One of them may run for congress. You might even give him some tips on how to perform better on camera, what reporters are looking for and how to answer their questions.

But if you're a real journalist, does anyone need to tell you to stay away from his campaign appearances? Or to inform your bosses at work that you're friends with the guy and shouldn't do stories about him or his opponent?

Full disclosure: I worked with Brogan at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati from 2002-2004. Please do not construe this post as casting aspersions on him.

The Story vs. The Facts

Do media need to get the facts right or just the story?

There is a difference. If you tell me that two plus two equals five and I report that, I have reported the story correctly but I have reported the fact incorrectly.

Is that OK? Should we be happy to get the story straight, even if its information is wrong? The news director at WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh seems to think so.

Last Friday, the WPXI reported that former Pittsburgh Steelers player Santonio Holmes was escorted off a commercial flight at Pittsburgh International Airport. Turns out that Holmes was not escorted off the plane. He was merely admonished for not turning off his iPod prior to landing. He left the plane with the rest of the passengers.

The station later updated its story without clarifying that its earlier report was untrue.

"The story changed and we changed it," WPXI news director Mike Goldrick told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "We didn't feel like we needed to correct it because we don't feel like it was wrong. The story we got, we reported, and when the story changed we reported it."

"The information we had at the time was right. The information changed," Goldrick said.

I guess that depends on what the definition of information is. The facts the station had at the time were wrong. The facts didn't change. Holmes was either escorted off the plane or he wasn't. Unless there were two separate flights, Holmes was not escorted off the plane earlier in the day and left it on his own later.

It happened only one way. If you reported something else, you got it wrong, no matter how accurately you reported the story you heard.

Now that the news cycle is no longer 24-hours but second-to-second, we can expect a lot of stories to change as first reports increasingly become less factual. As getting it first takes more priority over getting it right, people will become more skeptical of media reports. They'll need, like reporters once did, independent confirmation from another source before they'll believe what they see, hear or read.

When that happens, what will separate the mainstream media from ordinary bloggers?

CNN's Rich Sanchez Ad-Libs a Tease

Apparently not knowing what "ad-lib" means. Sanchez is a one-man blooper reel. Here's the latest example as he does a Ron Burgundy, blindly reading whatever shows up on the teleprompter.

Tip for wannabe teevee news anchors: When it says, "Up Next... Ad Lib... A Tease," you're not actually supposed to say that. You'd think that would be unnecessary advice but, as you can see below...