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The tragedy on the north-eastern seaboard of Japan highlighted two clear trends in traditional media. Firstly, rolling 24 hour TV news struggles to handle more than one big story at a time. Secondly, TV news feels very old, repetitive and plain slow when faced with the barrage of real-time citizen’s reporting from smartphone and digital camera-toting members of the public.

As a signed up member of newsaholics anonymous my greatest guilty secret is to have rolling news droning on constantly in the background. It’s some deep-seated need to know what’s going on at any moment, anywhere in the world.

Except that’s not really what rolling TV news does. It typically homes in on the big story of the day and sticks with it. That’s why, when tragedy struck in Japan with the quake followed by the tsunami, it pretty much pushed all but the smallest mention of other world stories, such a Libya and Bahrain, off our traditional TV screens.

Of course, by any measure events in Japan represent a huge story on so many levels. Japan’s largest recorded earthquake is but one angle and it has developed into a big nuclear concern as reactors damaged by the tsunami struggle to contain meltdowns and the release of radiation into the environment.

But the key difference around these terrible events is the sheer magnitude of material appearing on the web, coming out of one of the most advanced first world countries on the planet. Just about everyone with a phone has the ability to film and share developments provided they can get a connection.

Meanwhile out telly has become a rolling but often very repetitive series of experts talking to the studio anchors, as is the modus operandi of TV’s 24/7 news operations, interspersed with on-the-spot reporters mediating the video footage of the devastation.

Meantime, back on the web, the rate at which people have been uploading personal footage and accounts to services like YouTube simply goes on to highlight the gulf that’s begun to open up between the news we’ve been used to receiving and the unmediated images coming in from those in the thick of the action.

Of course TV does attempt to bridge that gap, interviewing real people in the middle of unfolding events over their Skype connections. But these tend not to be media-savvy, camera-aware people, meaning it often results in adding little to the wider picture of unfolding events. It can also get very predictable as TV news anchors inevitably ask these people whether they are scared, want to get out, etc. Asking someone living a few miles from a melting nuclear reactor if they are frightened is not going to win any investigative reporting awards.

TV is attempting to adapt to these changed times but, ironically, it seems that it has a real conundrum. Rolling TV news has an insatiable appetite for new images which demands that reporters are constantly attempting to submit fresh footage from the flash-points under the media spotlights. This is a task that’s always happened but the news cycle has sped up hugely and yet still struggles to keep ahead of developments when faced with a sea of unwitting citizen reportage. That leaves precious little time for these same reporters to then engage with new media channels to tell the story in these terms – using Facebook or Twitter. But that’s increasingly where the punters are looking for the very latest updates and submitting their own accounts of unfolding events.

Perhaps the time has come to consider new models (a bit like storyful), where citizen journalism is given more visible billing on the websites of the TV news makers. Providing an authoritative platform, where experienced news editors can use their judgement to distil the best of what’s out there from the digitally enabled hordes, would be a good meeting of two very different worlds. Provided it was done with a minimum of interpretation and extraneous voice-overs stating the sometimes bleeding obvious!

Ralph
ennclick.com
@ralphenn