TV News and The Viewer Experience

Posted July 24, 2024

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Reading Walter Isaacson’s bio of Elon Musk, I had a great insight into how to improve television news stories.

Musk, as Isaacson points out, was hardly the first person to try and build an electric car. Ford, GM and the other big car manufacturers had been trying for years, but with limited success. GM’s EV-1 was hardly flying off the shelf. In fact, only 3 years after General Motors launched the car, the operation was closed down.

Musk thought that all the electric cars on the market looked like golf carts. They were very well engineered, the focus of companies like Ford and GM was on the engineering, but no one wanted to buy them- not because they didn't work well, but because they were, well, ugly.

If he was going to make an electric car, Musk wanted to make a car that people would WANT to own, would want to have in their driveways. A car that worked well, but also looked great. Musk was a fanatic about every aspect of the car’s design. He re-did the headlights a dozen times. What did the seats feel like? What was the instrumentation like? His focus was on what he called ‘the driver experience’. How did the car ‘feel’ to the driver? This was something that eluded GM and Ford and the others, but not Musk. For him, Tesla was going to be all about ‘the driver experience’.

Reading it, I saw that Musk’s fixation on ‘the driver experience’, was, in many ways, quite similar to that other Walter Isaacson’s subject, Steve Jobs. Like Musk, Jobs was also fixated on ‘the user experience’ when he was designing his Apple products, from the Macbook to the iPod to the iPad to the iPhone, Jobs’ focus was always on ‘the user experience’, along with the engineering.

There is a reason that Tesla is now worth 12x Ford and that Apple is a $3 trillion company.

When we run our video storytelling bootcamps for TV news organizations, our primary focus is on what we call ‘the viewer experience’. It is a given that the journalism is well researched and accurate, but if no one is watching; if there is no ‘audience engagement’ with the story, then you are in fact showing it to no one, which is tragic, and avoidable.

When we send our reporters (armed only with an iPhone) out to do a story, we instruct them to approach the story both as a journalist, which is a given, but also a viewer. All of our reporters watch movies and TV in their spare time — as viewers, so they innately know what a viewer, like them, would want to see — would find compelling to watch. That is what we tell them to focus on — first while shooting and later when assembling the finished story for air: The Viewer Experience. How will the story ‘feel’ to the viewer when they watch it? We are seeking an immersive experience. It goes far beyond the traditional ‘news package’.

Have you made something here that a viewer would WANT to watch — as opposed to ‘have to watch’. There is a difference. Netflix, with its 260 million paid subscribers doesn't have to run BREAKING NEWS across the bottom of the screen to hold your attention. You want to watch it. You want to watch it so much that you not only pay for the privilege, you also binge watch, hour after hour.

Why is that?

It’s because it is a story about a character. It has an arc of story. It’s about a journey. That is what the viewer experience is all about. You feel captured by the story.

We take that Netflix model of storytelling and we marry it to great reporting and great journalism. And what do we get? Take a look at the story above, done by Taylor Schaub, a journalist with Spectrum News 1 in Los Angeles. He did this story, with an iPhone, in one day, by himself during our 5-day bootcamp. It was one of the first video stories he ever did.

A few weeks ago, it won an Emmy.

That’s what focusing on The Viewer Experience can get you.