TORONTO – "Once you do 19 hits in one day, that becomes the expectation," Global National anchor Dawna Friesen lamented Saturday morning in Toronto during the network news anchors session at the RTDNA Annual Conference.
The relentlessly hungry news beast that is our 24/7/365 world demands more and more from reporters and anchors all the time said Friesen, who appeared on the panel with CTV National News Anchor Lisa LaFlamme, CBC TV’s Diana Swain and moderator Seamus O’Regan, CTV National News correspondent.
All three said that because work never ends, sheer exhaustion is a real issue along with “just the inability to report,” added Swain. Anchors and reporters in hot news zones are, for all intents and purposes, “tied to their trucks” she added, as the cable news channels demand constant updates. “You can’t really get any further than 500 feet away from your filing station” which means the stories of people beyond that are no longer dug up by network news and therefore the viewers may not be as fully informed, said Swain.
Twitter has added another dimension to their time-pressed roles, all three agreed. LaFlamme recalled a recent workday where she spent much of a day tweeting updates on a certain news item “so by the time I sat down to write my story, it felt days old.” This pointed, she thought, to a real need for the TV news programs and their anchors to dig deeper and provide the context for the non-stop, day-long stream of news bits and bites. “On one level we have too much information, but on another, it’s not enough,” she said.
Friesen and Swain agreed Twitter has become the global news ticker for most journalists now and Friesen explained she tries to “take a step back during the course of the day” to find a balance between being the endless stream of news available through Twitter and preparing to provide depth and context to Global’s TV news consumers. “We have to keep delivering that,” she said.
Social media surge
When O’Regan asked about the exploding trend of “citizen journalists” (whether bloggers, or people tweeting or Facebooking what they see when caught in a breaking news event) LaFlamme noted she and her team try to find those “on the ground and trending as a regular person,” to better find out what exactly is going on.
“We can’t deliver as fast as social media,” she explained. “We’re always playing catch-up and I think we always will.”
The three anchors, however, didn’t think that the exploding role of social media and the Internet in newsgathering and disseminating was going to put them out of business. In fact, they think what they do is even more important. Because of all the noise – they can try and quiet it for their viewers and help them make sense of the waterfall of news flowing into Canadians’ computers, tablets and phones all day long and answer their main question: “What does it mean to me?”
“We’re not necessarily going to a dark place or pointing mainstream media towards irrelevance,” said Swain of social media.
Investigative and the unsexy fading
That said, there are still competing interests in the news business. At one end, the hunger for new news is never sated, which means resources are poured into that so investigative, long-form reporting is diminishing and “boring” policy stories don’t get the airing they deserve, even if government policy directly affects the lives of far more Canadians than Princess Kate…
While agreeing that “an uninformed citizenry is the biggest problem”, LaFlamme said that getting the news out on all platforms is nothing but a good thing, but “policy stories tend to fall off the map because they’re not sexy enough”.
“They’re thought of as not easily graspable, or boring,” added Swain.
“As newsrooms shrink, it’s harder and harder to commit an investigative reporter to just dog one thing for a week,” added LaFlamme. “Maybe we need to be more creative on how we do it, because it’s expensive… There are other reasons besides the bottom line to invest in it… but it’s a tough fight.”
