By Deborah Potter & Annie Lang It's one thing to take a television news story that doesn't make much sense and suggest changes that might help. It's quite another to make those changes based on a set of rules anyone could apply, and then to compare the first version …
By Deborah Potter and Annie Lang Can changing the order of information or adding a simple graphic make a once-confusing story understandable? The answer seems to be yes, based on preliminary results of research conducted at Indiana University. The research compared two different versions of four complex stories. …
It happens all the time. A tragedy thrusts ordinary folks into the media spotlight. They're peppered with questions, pestered for photographs of deceased loved ones, and paraded onto newscasts and news pages. That can be quite a jolt to those already traumatized. Journalists walk a tightrope …
A study of news coverage in eight markets By Charlie Tuggle and Suzanne Huffman Watch enough local television news and you might get the impression that "live" and "late-breaking" are one …
Listen to viewers and they’ll tell you flat out: Local television news is boring. One in five of the people we surveyed about local TV news said that’s a major reason they don’t watch. As one viewer put it, “It’s a rehash of the same …
What makes a story great? What makes it memorable? At the NewsLab conference "Reinventing TV News," we asked those questions of master storytellers--people who tell stories in different ways and in different media. What was striking was how much they agreed on the essential elements …
Many newsrooms are well-prepared to cover a major disaster. They have a plan in place, they practice it often, and they've used it more than once. But others either don't have a plan or can't remember where they put the one that somebody (who no …
When Springfield, Missouri, was searching for a new school superintendent, one reporter got the scoop everyone wanted: The leading candidate for the job had turned the offer down. John Shields broke the story on KYTV-TV where he's the education reporter, and sat back to watch …
Ask Kim Olson, who graduated last year from Western Kentucky University, if she felt totally prepared for her first job and she laughs. "I felt adequately prepared," she says. Kim anchors morning newscasts at WLAC-AM in Nashville, TN, a bigger market than she expected to …
Live! Late-breaking! Only on Channel 28! Local television news often is a high-decibel production. Stations eager to draw more eyeballs to their newscasts heavily promote their coverage as well as the tools they use to gather the news. But are viewers impressed? A preliminary NewsLab survey …
Surveys tell us that local television is the number one source of news for most Americans, and that two-thirds of those surveyed rate its quality as excellent or good.1 But local television news is not as popular as it once was. It's beginning to lose …
Ask Kim Olson, who graduated last year from Western Kentucky University, if she felt totally prepared for her first job and she laughs. "I felt adequately prepared," she says. Kim anchors morning newscasts at WLAC-AM in Nashville, TN, a bigger market than she expected to …
