Monthly Archives: May 2018

The average TV news director has been news director at that station for about five years, according to the third installment in the 2018 RTDNA/Hofstra University Newsroom Survey released this week.

Other interesting highlights from the report:

• TV news directors ages range from 23 to 76.
• There’s a record high percentage of women and people of color holding TV news director roles.
• Radio news director ages ranged from 17 years old up to 92.
• The average radio news director has held the title for 12.1 years; the median was 8. Both of those numbers are down.

There’s more information to come from this survey in June and July.

In case you ever wondered, the plural of emoji is: emoji.

This is one hundreds of updates recently made to the AP Stylebook. The new version was released today.

Do you rely on the AP Stylebook? What do you think of the changes made to AP Style in recent years?

A television station in Milwaukee is helping college students get a hands-on preview of what it’s like to have a career in TV journalism.

Janet Hundley, RTDNA Region 4 Director, writes that WTMJ-TV works with UW-Milwaukee to offer a class titled “The Making of Television News” that meets in a WTMJ conference room for two hours each week to learn directly from reporters, photographers, and others in the newsroom about how they do their jobs.

“We are able to have them watch live newscasts, observe every technical aspect from the control room and beyond, and put what they learn into practice,” said instructor Jessie Garcia Marble.

Read more about it here

What is your newsroom doing to help the next generation of journalists?

Is it difficult for a listener or viewer to contact someone in your newsroom? You might want to put yourself in their shoes and give it a try after reading this piece about how difficult it can be to reach someone in a newsroom.

If you have good examples of news websites that make it easy to find contact information for the newsroom, we’d love to see some examples.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

The Knight Foundation is taking a look at the current and future state of the audience for local news. It’s Part Five of a five part series titled “Local TV News and the New Media Landscape.”

Key findings from this report:

• The local TV news audience is slowly — but not consistently — shrinking. Mostly, the local TV news audience is aging.
• The 55+ local TV news audience is actually increasing — as the U.S. baby boomer population ages.
• The shrinking local TV news audience is less a function of fewer 18 to 34-year-old viewers than it is a loss of 35 to 54-year-old viewers.
• Ongoing urbanization of the U.S. population is contributing to a drop in local TV news viewing in key markets. Eight local TV markets account for 88 percent of the decline in nationwide local
news viewing.
• There are a number of local TV markets experiencing rising audiences of 18 to 34 and 35-to-54 year-olds. The question is what they’re doing that’s different from so many others.

How do you think these developments will change local news?

It’s tough to make investigative pieces work well on TV, especially when the stories involve a lot of paper. That said, they are important stories to tell.

Poynter now has some tips for journalists on how to make investigative stories more visual. Some have turned this into an art form.

Do you have any interesting investigative pieces to share?

The RTDNA is looking behind the scenes to see how this year’s Murrow Award winners are making award-winning content.

In this article, they talked to Daniel Wanschura, the reporter behind Interlochen Public Radio’s Excellence in Sound win, about how “Tuning Pianos at Interlochen is a Job That Never Ends” came together.

Is there any award-winning work that you like to point to as an inspiration for broadcasters?

Wisconsin TV anchor/reporter Charles Benson is participating in a RTDNA effort to promote leadership from news anchors.

Charles Benson (WTMJ-TV) will participate in an event titled “Anchor Leadership: Truth and Trust in the Digital Age” on July 12-13 at the University of Loyola in Chicago. Ahead of the event, Benson wrote an article on the RTDNA website making the case that anchors should think of themselves as reporters, especially as it relates to building relationships with sources.