Spectrum News 1 (Texas) MMJ Lupe Zapata
 

To Tell A Big Story, Tell A Small Story

Posted August 23, 2020
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My mentor in the TV business, Fred Friendly, used to tell me that small stories work the best

People can relate to small stories; stories about people that they can easiy relate to

The trick, he said, is if you want to tell a big story, like racism in America, for example, tell a small story.

A small story about a single person

But that person has to open the door to a much larger issue.

George Floyd is perhaps now the classic example of this.

A small story that represents a much larger issue.

This is one of the main points we try to teach in the bootcamps.  Find a small story, find a character, and then tell a larger story through the eys and experiences of that one person's life and experience.

At last week's bootcamp, Lupe Zapata, an MMJ with Spectrum News 1 in Texas found, shot, edited, produced and reported on such a story.

Take a look.

Highly personal

Highly powerful

And, of cousre, all done on an iPhone. 

 


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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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