Spectrum News 1 Texas MMJ Ashley Claster Delivers a Great Story
 

Characters Drive A Story

Posted August 12, 2020
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My mentor in this business was Fred Friendly

He told me, among many other things, that small stories work the best

Take a look at this story by Ashley Claster, an MMJ with Spectrum News 1 in Texas.

(She took our bootcamp a few weeks ago).

This is the kind of story that a local TV news station would cover, but they would send the reprorter and camera person, do a stand up, shoot some b-roll, get a few Man on the Street soundbites and interview someone and call it a day

Predictable and pretty much unwatchable.

What Ashley did was different.

She found a character BEFORE the parade and then went to the parade with him.

This is what we call character driven stories

And it works.

It makes a big difference

And, of course, she did it all on an iPhone. 

Well done Ashley!  

 


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Character-driven journalism is not new to newspapers, though it once was. It was once called The New Journalism in the 1960s — see Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe. Today it is industry standard. Why not take the Sopranos or Breaking Bad formula and marry it to TV journalism? (How many interviews have you seen in The Sopranos? How many Man on the Street soundbites have you seen in Breaking Bad?)


In a recent study by The Reuters Institute, 40% of Americans no longer watch or read the news at all. They find it too depressing. All doom and gloom.


There is a great deal of concern, well placed, that few people under the age of 30 watch TV news. Viewership of TV news in general has fallen off, so naturally, TV executives across the boards are searching for a solution. How to appeal to a demographic that spends most of their time on social media?


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