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Among the inevitable first questions asked of all journalists by outsiders is ‘How do you get your news?’ Reporters do not spend their time simply patrolling the streets on the off chance of witnessing something interesting; neither is sole reliance on information from members of the general public a consistent way of filling anything other than a limited agenda. For those working in television the answer to the question is by no means a simple one, as so much depends on the financial and technical resources each news service is able to put into news-gathering, which is a complex and intricate operation in its own right. The small and poor, with little of their own to call on, may well have to be satisfied with second-hand material passed on by the sister radio services often run in parallel under the same roof, or the international television news agencies. The large, prestigious independents, with fat budgets, are able to bargain for exclusivity and/or make mutually beneficial deals to share coverage with like-minded non-competitors.
Between the two extremes there lies a vast amount of common territory open to news organizations in general, whether they are engaged in putting the word out over the airwaves or on the printed page, for an audience of millions or a few hundred.
Much gathering and sifting of news is routine. Much of the news-gathering work happens in local radio stations, local news agencies and through Net-surfing. Regular enquiries are always made of police, fire and ambulance services, usually for news of immediate importance to a local region. The post produces its share of publicity handout material prepared by government departments, political parties, public relations firms, private companies, industrial and social organizations. To this rich harvest can be added ‘house’, trade and business magazines, official statistics, advance copies of speeches, invitations to exhibitions, trade fairs, inaugurations, openings, closings, the laying of foundation stones and other ceremonies of varying importance. Well-established fixtures – the parliamentary and political agenda, court sittings, state visits, sports events and anniversaries of all types – join the queue with scores of other public and semi-public events which are carefully weighed for their potential interest.
Those surviving the first hurdle are noted in diaries of future events for more serious consideration nearer the day. These so-called ‘diary’ stories or their immediate consequences (follow-ups) probably account for the majority of news stories which appear on television and in newspapers. The rivals to television news, whether they come in the shape of other newscasts, the Net, radio, magazines, daily or weekly papers, are scoured for titbits on which to build something bigger.
Staff, freelances and stringers
Journalists, working either for themselves or for other publications, offer suggestions (for which they expect to be paid) on a fairly regular basis. Freelances, or ‘stringers’ as they are called (and there are whole networks of them), are wooed by news editors against the day when a really big story breaks in their area. It is the stringers who provide much of the basic news. With good contacts among local police, politicians and business people, they are usually first on the scene of any important event in their community, and are swift to pass on the information. Local or specialist news agencies, concentrating on crime reporting, sport, finance and so on, also add their contributions, but it is the larger operators in this particular field who provide most of the bread-and-butter written information and still photographs on a regular basis to the broadcasting organizations and the press, with computer links to their customers speeding delivery on its way.
Subscribers obtain much of their domestic news from the British national agency, the Press Association (PA, founded 1868), which is owned by the chief provincial newspapers of Britain and the Irish Republic, and which supplies a complete service of general, legal, parliamentary, financial, commercial and sporting news. No serious rival to the PA has emerged since the Exchange Telegraph (Extel, 1872) stopped running a parallel general service to concentrate on financial and sporting topics. Reuters (London-based since 1851) is the main source of foreign news for the UK, with full-time staff based in more than 70 countries. Back in 1993 the agency made a powerful addition to its activities by taking a controlling interest in Visnews, then the world’s largest television news agency.
The agencies themselves rely for their material on either full-time staff journalists or on the hundreds of stringers who owe first loyalty to the publications employing them. The end product of all their work can be seen every day in the hundreds of thousands of words which fill computer screens in every newsroom twenty-four hours a day.
The aim of all agencies is to provide their customers with fast (preferably the first) straightforward and accurate news of any event within their sphere of interest and to maintain their coverage for as long as the situation demands. Television, with its expensive and complicated news-gathering base, tends to weave agency material closely into its programmes, fashioning it into acceptable ‘broadcast’ style. Newspapers prefer to use the raw material as a reference point for reportage by their own editorial teams, although there are of course many occasions when the agency report appears alone or with limited alteration. These general newspaper reporters, traditionally under the wing of the news editor, are also deployed to cover the various diary items day by day, or may be detached for longer periods to work on projects or campaigns of special interest to their publications.
General reporters in television news are used mainly on the diary or follow-up assignments offering the most picture-worthy possibilities, and they are also engaged in spot news stories broken first by the agencies. But whatever their titles and however highly paid, generalists have always been fewer in number than their counterparts on individual national and big provincial newspapers, and are regarded in some quarters as a vanishing breed in the face of the appointment of subject correspondents.
These specialists, who concentrate their activities on particular areas of news, are regarded as experts after years of devoting themselves to a single subject and building up highly placed personal and trustworthy contacts, and in turn themselves become reliable sources of much that is important. The political editor, fresh from an off-the-record chat with a senior government minister; the economics correspondent, back from talks with people influential within financial, business or industrial circles – each is ideally placed to begin piecing together information which might well develop into a big news story, perhaps not today or tomorrow, but next week. This increasingly important group of specialist correspondents, as members of recognized groups or associations of journalists working in the same field for different news outlets, enjoy confidential lobby briefings from government departments, and are on the regular mailing lists of professional bodies sending out material of a technical or restricted nature.
The television news organizations are also able to rely fairly heavily on their own out-stations, which in turn employ specialist correspondents and staff and freelance journalists. Material originated locally can be pumped into the network news programmes live, or recorded onto videotape for playing at some convenient point later on. BBC News centrally is served by national production centres in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, plus newsrooms in England. All are partly in business for the purpose of providing the national news with items deserving wider than purely regional coverage, although forays by teams from headquarters are by no means discouraged, and a recent development has been to base national reporters permanently in the most newsworthy regions.
It is also a two-way process, which allows regional broadcasting to tap into local stories which come out of London. A separate department at the BBC, complete with its own playout and swap-around facilities, is based inside the BBC News Centre in west London to help its regional outlets receive and exchange material. Facilities for regional services for both BBC and ITV companies are also at Millbank, a few hundred metres from the Palace of Westminster. So, for example, a Member of Parliament being interviewed on a subject of interest to people in one part of the country can be linked direct with any one of the nightly regional television news programmes or be questioned by a London-based political journalist on their behalf.
Yet another source is the BBC monitoring service at Caversham, about 30 miles west of London, which inputs into the BBC’s news computer system information collected from a round-the-clock listening service to the radio and television broadcasts of foreign stations – often the quickest and most reliable way of obtaining international ‘official’ news.
Independent Television News has natural links with the newsrooms of companies making up the independent television network. It prides itself on an ability to act swiftly in the movement of people and equipment from London around Britain and beyond. ITN also provides news for Channel 4, Channel 5, and a substantial range of international news services for other broadcasters. ITN’s studios, library, design and other facilities are also available to other production houses and broadcasters. Companies within the independent television network, who also put out nightly regional news programmes, exchange on-the-day raw material between themselves, and coordinate some coverage as a way of avoiding duplication of staff and equipment.
Sky News has been another force in British broadcast journalism, delivering a 24-hour service from its base at Osterley in west London. Sky makes considerable use of domestic and foreign news picture agencies, as well as having links with other broadcasters, but it also deploys its own staff reporters and camera crews. GMTV is also part of the domestic national UK news operation worth the job-hunter’s consideration.
On the foreign side, some staff journalists are employed permanently away from base in any one of a number of important centres. These, by the nature of international affairs, are considered the most likely to provide a steady stream of news stories of interest at home: Washington, Moscow, Johannesburg, Brussels, Berlin, Jerusalem and Hong Kong, for example. Equally importantly, all these centres are themselves at the crossroads of international communications systems, but advances in technology have brought with them the flexibility for broadcasters to transmit their material from almost anywhere else in the world.
Maintaining a permanent base overseas anywhere is an extraordinarily expensive business, hence a recent tendency to develop bureaux and share some of the overheads with other broadcasters. Every correspondent needs transport, office space, ancillary help and somewhere to live. So the value of each foreign news bureau is kept under continuing close scrutiny for those who have to foot the bill for it, and changes are made to keep pace with the emergence of new areas of special interest. As a result, adjustments in the late 1990s have tended to produce more offices in Europe and southern Africa.
Figure 3.1 Many journalists stationed abroad find it useful to have a place where they can socialize and swap gossip with other professionals. One typical watering hole for those in broadcasting and print is the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.
Like their counterparts at home, foreign specialists see that they understand the local language, meet the right people, mix with the representatives of other news organizations, read the local papers, watch television, listen to radio and get themselves accredited as the official representatives of their television stations at home. This, as a rule, will ensure a constant flow of information to be sifted for use as background material to items transmitted later on.
Although based for convenience in one place, the foreign correspondent might well have a huge territory, perhaps a whole continent, to cover. This means having to travel thousands of miles to reach stories breaking in remote areas. Time differentials frequently weigh heavily. The correspondent may have to work through the night to produce the goods for bosses for whom it is still daytime. He or she will probably wear two watches, one keeping local time, the other home time as a constant reminder of deadlines. With skill, experience and good fortune, the foreign correspondent will become an accepted part of the local scenery, sometimes as an honoured guest.
Elsewhere there may be hostility thinly disguised as toleration. The correspondent’s home is bugged, the telephone tapped. Personal movements are monitored, contacts threatened or harassed. Eventually the correspondent commits what the government of the country regards as unacceptable professional behaviour, and is expelled. Reasonable comment or criticism in one country is regarded as sedition in another.
If that does not happen, after a few years in the same place, he or she is likely to be summoned home and reassigned by employers who fear the ‘going native’ syndrome effect on objectivity.
Where full-time television newspeople are not based, the foreign equivalent of the home stringer may be employed. Sometimes this is a local national serving any number of overseas outlets, but just as often the stringer is a foreign freelance accepting occasional commissions outside normal duties, or a staff correspondent of one publication which, in efforts to keep down the cost of maintaining a presence abroad, allows the supply of material to others, as long as priorities are maintained.
In addition to these permutations, there are also staff based abroad whose principal activity is to service radio but who – thanks to a policy which encourages the ability to operate across other disciplines – are able to turn their hands to television reporting and online writing when the need arises.
In some foreign countries the television news representative has easy access to locally based camera teams who are hired for a daily fee. In one or two particularly busy areas for news, crews are employed on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, and some of these provide highly sophisticated facilities which amount almost to studios in their own right. The material they generate is either shipped home by air for editing or transmission, although increasingly the nature or immediacy of the news dictates that it is handled locally, using hired staff, and then transmitted through the global communications system. This saves many hours and is being used more and more widely by those television organizations which see news as a highly perishable commodity and consider the outlay for hire of satellite time to be money well spent.
The other main users of the global system are the international television news agencies which supply the foreign material for hundreds of news programmes throughout the world. Their links with the main broadcasters give them immediate access to a staggering choice of first-class news material, and they also employ their own staff and freelance camera crews in important centres.
For the poorer news services, unable or unwilling to meet the expense of assigning their own staff to foreign stories, agency coverage is relatively cheap and rarely less than adequate in terms of coverage quality, whether broadcast in its entirety and supplemented by subtitles in the vernacular, or reduced in length and transmitted alongside a locally written commentary from the paperwork accompanying every tape.
The biggest agency is now Reuters Television, which began life in 1957 as the British Commonwealth International Newsfilm Agency (BCINA), undergoing a change of ownership to become Visnews a few years later. Reuters took a majority shareholding and changed the name in 1993. Part of its operation is to supply by satellite or video cassette a daily service of news and sport to more than 400 broadcasting stations. It was also involved in BrightStar, a permanent satellite link between Britain and the United States. In addition, Reuters has its own network of camera crews, many of whom have made an important contribution to the coverage of world events.
Reuters’ main rival is Worldwide Television News (WTN), formerly UPITN, which was founded in 1967. At the beginning of 1994 WTN had fourteen principal bureaux around the world and camera crews in 87 cities, providing news and features by satellite and video cassette to about a thousand broadcasters in nearly one hundred countries. WTN also produces its own programmes, including Roving Report, a weekly half-hour current affairs magazine, series on the environment and health, as well as an annual review of the year. It also controls Starbird Satellite Services, previously shared with British Aerospace.
A new addition to the club came in November 1994 with the arrival of APTV, an offshoot of Associated Press, the long-established American agency. APTV’s stated mission was to take advantage of its network of (at that time) 93 bureaux in 67 countries, adding dedicated television staff to provide a daily supply of world and regional news stories coordinated through its newsroom in London. CNN, although not an agency in the same sense, contracts to make its coverage available for transmission by other broadcasters. The main broadcasters are also sellers as well as buyers, striking reciprocal deals with the agencies and complementary news organizations. The BBC, ITN, Sky and the Japanese, American, Canadian and Australian networks, regularly form twin partnerships for the sharing of resources and news material. The relationships, however, are constantly changing, sometimes for editorial reasons and sometimes for solid business reasons. Much of the material offered by the agencies has the merit of being the first pictorial record of an important news story, to which the wealthier services may decide to dispatch their own teams later on. The agencies are also important sources for historical or background items for news programmes. Potted biographies, moving pictures and still photographs of events and places previously, or likely to be, in the news are rapidly made available when occasion demands, even though the material may consist of no more than a single portrait of an obscure politician or a few precious seconds of moving pictures.
Figure 3.2 The Eurovision control centre of the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva, through which members make their news coverage available to others on a reciprocal basis every day. The material is free of copyright and can be used in news services without any restriction, the overall cost of the network being shared on an annual subscription basis. The centre moved from Brussels in 1993, bringing all EBU activities to one location. The EBU has set the pattern for similar cooperation between news organizations across the world. (Photo courtesy EBU: Piraud and Grivel; © Fabrice Piraud Geneva)
Most television news departments maintain their own archives, largely built up from material they have already transmitted, supplemented by purchases from outside. These represent hundreds of thousands of separate news items, each carefully catalogued and indexed. Computer technology has been introduced to streamline the storage and retrieval process.
The once vast libraries of press cuttings and previously broadcast news scripts, complete with the smell of old paper and ink, were replaced in the late 1990s by software specifically designed to aid the breakdown of search words to as narrow a range as possible. Older newspaper cuttings (back beyond 1800) are available on microfilm. Old radio and TV scripts have not been destroyed but have been kept safe for the broadcasting museums of the future and are also sometimes needed as part of a graphic display for historical documentary features.
To this wide and fascinating mix of home-grown and expensively gathered news material can be added the occasional unexpected bonus – the tip-off from a member of the public, or home video which turns out to be a genuine exclusive for the organization lucky enough to get it. Modestly priced digital video cameras capable of excellent picture and sound quality are now so widely in use that some news programmes serving huge or remote areas actively encourage the creation of networks of enthusiastic amateurs on constant lookout for news items they can pass on for broadcast use.
Another sector is the ‘video news release’ (VNR), a video version of the printed press release. VNRs are made for companies and government agencies as a form of public relations, employing the expertise of television production companies. The product is professionally shot and edited and then distributed to television news services for use in their programmes. For hard-pressed editors, with rarely enough news camera crews available, VNRs represent a very useful source of pictures and information, but some journalists are also suspicious of what they see as a threat to editorial integrity. They fear some organizations will prefer to compile VNRs, over which they exercise complete control, rather than allow television news teams access to shoot their own material. Various pressure groups and campaigners will also offer video material to news organizations and, although they do so for non-commercial reasons, journalists still worry about how impartial the material will be.