Peter Howe on print vs. broadcast journalism, the shifting media landscape
We would like to thank Peter Howe, Business Reporter at New England Cable News (NECN) for stopping by our office this morning to talk to our staff. Readers of this post from New England likely know Peter well as a former reporter at The Boston Globe, where he worked for 22 years, mainly covering the telecommunications beat. He left The Globe voluntarily to make the jump into broadcast journalism, and it was very interesting to hear first-hand about the adjustments and the difference between being a newspaper and TV news reporter. As part of this, he gave us valuable insight on how to pitch stories, how they put stories together and where he sees professional news gathering actually heading in light of the Web and social media.
Peter contrasted how he spent his time at the Globe, which was always looking for page 1 stories, but also thinking about small, medium and large items and being more planned, to NECN, which is about "feeding the voracious goat called 24-hour news." His job is to report top stories at the top of the news cast, so he's looking only for that two-minute story that will carry the open. As a result, his stories typically relate to the big news of the day, which lately has been the economy at large, real estate and energy (gas prices). As a result, when he is pitched a story, it needs to tie in with the flow of the news of the day or week. Unlike the Globe, it's virtually impossible for him to plan stories.
The best TV stories are ones where there are interesting pictures and sounds (he described a story on Evergreen Solar opening its new plant on the former Fort Devens and how a sound from a robot arm worked really well), as well as interesting personalities. His approach is to get footage for the story, then write the script to fill in the gaps where the visuals and personalities don't tell the stories themselves. He cited another example of a report on New Bedford's economic development where the visuals and New Bedford's mayor told the whole story. In this vein, Peter stated that it's hard to do IT stories for TV.
On the new media landscape, Peter had some interesting color on the crisis at newspapers from having been on the inside at the Globe. Traditional broadcast news is also being affected by the Web and new media, but Peter shared his opinion that we're headed towards a world where the whole news production enterprise gets smaller, and it has to figure out how to use all the platforms for packaging and delivering the content. At the same time, he's not convinced that blogs will kill off professional news gathering, as he feels that there are just not a lot of blogs where the audience size is comparable to professional news outlets.
A couple of other highlights of the discussion:
- NECN is driven first and foremost by New England news, but as the Evergreen Solar example above shows, national trends are important.
- Peter described NECN as having a niche (24-hour local news) and doing well in that niche. What works for it is not trying to be a poor-man's CNN or MSNBC.
Thanks again, Peter. Keep up the good work.
