TNC Staff Travels to the Middle East to Train Journalists

Recently TNC President Herb Brubaker and Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi traveled to Muscat, Oman to train 48 print journalists in reporting and interview skills. Television News Center crafted a practical, hands on program to meet Oman’s specific needs, and the results were impressive.

For more information about the Oman training program or to customize a group training session for your organization, please contact hmbrubaker@televisionnewscenter.org.

Television News Center…  In The News

Television News Center frequently appears in the news, either being profiled for its unique and effective educational services or being quoted as a reliable, expert industry source.

From Broadcasting & Cable

Back to school for TV journalists
Stations rely on continuing education to keep staffs up to speed
By Kim McAvoy

As the TV news business continues to grow, so does demand for better journalists. Stations are meeting that demand by sending their staff to educational seminars and workshops, and by investing in more on-site training.

"People are beginning to awaken to the fact that there is more competition, and that the best way to compete is by doing a better job," says Herb Brubaker, president of the Television News Center, Rockville, Md.

TNC trains journalists, technicians and directors in their own newsrooms and out in the field. "All of us need training," Brubaker says. "You can't rely on smoke and mirrors...what's needed is more solid reporting." Brubaker, who was a producer, writer and assignment manager at NBC News, visits a station and develops a specific training program: "We go into the control room and edit with them. We go out in the field to do stories with them. We sit down with their news directors and general managers." TNC also sponsors two-day seminars at the University of Maryland on anchoring, writing and reporting.
 

From The Washington Post Magazine
By Paul Fahri

"This is a shooting on the Beltway, people! This is something people care about! Because it could-happen to them! Rush hour traffic! Unsuspecting drivers!"
 
We're in a basement TV studio at the University of Maryland. Maury Povich is teaching us how to become TV anchorpeople. In a room down the hall, our other instructor, veteran TV news producer Herb Brubaker, is teaching eight more would-be Brokaws and Rathers the finer points of writing TV news copy. For Jaycee Cooper and the others, this is serious business. They've paid $500 each for a day of intensive training from Brubaker and Povich, who used to be an anchorman before he became, well, "Maury!"

Lured by Povich's star power, my classmates have come from all over-Orlando, Los Angeles, Dallas, Las Vegas, Baltimore, Charleston. Some are kids still in college. Most are TV pros looking to move on or up.
Maury and Herb explain the drill. Everyone gets one rehearsal behind the desk, and then the cameras roll. Herb hands out a three-page script that contains the four packages, or complete voice-and-tape stories, that we'll be presenting.

"This isn't acting school," Brubaker says forcefully. "We're not Barbie and Ken dolls. We're journalists." He certainly knows whereof he speaks; he's been in the business since the early 1960s, which is when he met and first worked with Povich, who was then a radio reporter.

Over the years, Brubaker has worked as a producer for dozens of anchors and reporters, including the inimitable Irving R., Levine and Jessica Savitch, the late "golden girl" anchor of the 1970s whose personal life was so glamorously tragic that she ' became the subject of two posthumous feature films. He now trains amateurs and pros alike through his nonprofit consulting company, the Television News Center, headquartered in Rockville.

"Good journalism sells the news," he says. "As this business gets more and more competitive, that's the thing that distinguishes one competitor from another."
 

From USA Today

Bad Weather vs. Bad Reporting
By Herb Brubaker

With the hurricane season upon us and square in the midst of a near-nationwide heat wave, this is a good time to critique television news' weather coverage — and overcoverage.

TV news consultants have a word for it: "anticipointment." Viewers anticipate something big and are disappointed with the results, as when a local TV station promises accurate weather forecasting with its super-duper Doppler radar but doesn't deliver consistently and responsibly.

Anticipointment involves more than simply having a storm — such as Tropical Storm Barry this week — that doesn't live up to professional forecasters' early predictions. Barry, the second storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, had been heading toward Louisiana, but then veered north toward Florida, dumping heavy rains but never reaching hurricane status.

Instead, anticipointment occurs when newscasters promote the upcoming weather as the Disastrous Event of the Century, and it just isn't — not because the forecast changed, but because the weather's severity was hyped in the first place.

In winter, for example, some stations roll out their "team coverage" for any anticipated snowfall. Breathless live reports pepper the evening newscasts. Then barely a flake falls.

Are viewers disappointed? Perhaps not, because they didn't have to fight rush-hour traffic in heavy snow. But many end up spinning their wheels with needless activity, such as rushing to the supermarket to prepare for a winter Armageddon that never materializes.

Going by the numbers
Why all of the weather hype? Ratings, of course. Weather is the No. 1 local TV news story, and the station that garners viewers for the weather has a good shot at being No. 1 in its market.
But the public relies on radio and television more than any other media for weather news. It should be reported quickly and accurately without exaggeration. The urgent team coverage should be saved for major weather threats — any time of the year.

The effects of TV weather hype on a family's life can be as great as those of bad weather itself. Jim Parker, former news director of WOI-TV in Des Moines, recalls that when he was a child in Cleveland, there had to be a foot of snow before schools closed and working parents were forced to scramble. Now, he says, even schools in the good old Midwest close for a couple of inches of snow. Part of the reason, he acknowledges, is that officials are more concerned about liability in today's litigious society. But, he claims, TV meteorologists' overwrought warnings also influence decisions to close schools and government offices.

The sky is falling — not
And there's a potential Chicken Little effect: If stations repeatedly beat the drums wildly and nothing much happens, some viewers may become so blasé that they ignore valid warnings about truly dangerous weather conditions. Federal researchers said last month that the number of major hurricanes hitting the East Coast will increase in coming decades. Will viewers who've seen the weather hyped again and again pay attention if a real Big One comes?

Today's hyperactive weather coverage is symptomatic of a general problem in the industry. "Death, destruction, murder and mayhem" are themes permeating local news, and the very consultants who coined the word "anticipointment" are part of the problem. They tell general managers and news directors that's what the people want to see — even though surveys indicate that local news viewership is declining, and lack of credibility may be a reason.

The "watch us or you will die" mentality is backfiring. Station owners should get back to reliable reporting. It's responsible journalism — and I'd forecast it's good business, too.

Herb Brubaker, president of Television News Center, which trains TV journalists, was a producer, writer and assignment manager at NBC News for 20 years.
 

From The Washington Post

Blanketing the D.C. Area with Snow Coverage
By Paul Farhi

You know it's a big weather day when the TV telestrators come out early and often. There's Bob Ryan (or Doug Hill or Sue Palka) with the moving pen, showing viewers which way the animated, four-color bands are gliding over the 3-D topo map, courtesy of Doppler XT.

You know it's big when you've got "team" coverage, multiple live "remotes" of reporters standing on snowy freeway overpasses or near the dune-sized drifts on downtown corners. Or when the school closing information appears at the bottom of the screen for hours, long after anyone would even try to go to school. Or when the same long shot of the snow-obliterated beltway keeps cascading into view.

Weather has always been a big local TV story, but now it's bigger and more important than ever. It's more than a story, actually, It's a stations "brand" – a way for Channel 4 or 5 or 7 or 9 to affix its identity and establish its credibility with viewers. That's why Ryan, the area's senior weathercaster, always sits at something called "Stormcenter4, even when it's 80 degrees in July. Someday, Channel 4 figures, there's going to be another storm, and you'll remember who's got a Stormcenter.

"We don't want to overplay it but surely we don't want to underplay it, either, replies Katherine Green, Channel 5's news director. "We try to warn people and give them every possible alert to impending bad weather. You don't want to oversell it."

But usually they do, asserts Herb Brubaker, a former NBC News producer who now trains on-air anchors and reporters. "It's gotten out of control," he says. "All you need is one suggestion that it's going to snow and they crank the machinery up."

By Brubaker's reckoning, TV reporters not only just talk about the weather, they actually wind up doing something about it. He says, for example, the frequent shots of people dashing for a loaf of bread at the Giant create further panic. "It all just feeds on itself," he says.

That wouldn't be so bad if every storm were as big a blockbuster as yesterday's, says Brubaker. But most aren't. And you wouldn't know it, he says, by watching the TV news.