As promised, we present the worst TV story ever. Produced in 1979 for a station in Columbia Missouri called KOMU, the subject matter is fairly self-evident. The TV station dispatched the reporter, a University of Missouri student, along with another student (Kevin Sullivan, now a tireless CMO with a big Atlanta law firm), to the [...]
Archive for October, 2008
16 Oct
Neonatal newsgatherers
This week the University of Georgia’s Grady school of journalism took over a real-life on-air TV station. Used to be that UGA’s J-school kids had committed acts of television for a cable-only station in Athens. Now they have an actual FCC-licensed TV station. This means TV viewers in northeast Georgia will be subject to an [...]
14 Oct
ENG romance
Maybe you saw this. It happened last week. It was cute, especially since one local TV station in Lubbock, Texas allowed a weatherman from a competing station into its studio to pull it off. Would that happen here? Not in a million years: Plenty of TV marriages succeed, sometimes in highly competitive environments. Like the [...]
14 Oct
Critic’s choice
We hear that Ellen Crooke, the new news director at WXIA, likes to write detailed critiques of the station’s newscasts. In that spirit, we watched WAGA’s 6pm news Monday. We won’t bore you with too many details. Morse Diggs’ lead story was the best piece in the show. He produced a story about the restructuring [...]
11 Oct
Donnybrook in Perry
It’s a big election year, and the biggest statewide event of the election season took place in Perry Thursday. And Atlanta TV’s coverage of it was breathtakingly poor. The event was the first debate featuring Democrat Jim Martin and incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss. With polls showing the race tightening — and with 2008 being a [...]
10 Oct
Too little work / pt 2
WGCL has produced a third piece in its crudely titled “city workers wasting time” series. In so doing, one of the central premises of the original piece quietly disappeared, and the series became more unconvincing than ever. Investigative reporter Wendy Saltzman originally reported that Atlanta sanitation workers racked up overtime by sitting around until the [...]
9 Oct
Yoda, your writing coach
TV reporters, writing in a style that substitutes gerunds for verbs. Stories, dribbling out over the air that are replete with nonsensical non-sentences. TV news managers, too distracted to rein in this stuff. Blogger, irritated every time he hears it, now picking on the new kid at WAGA, who wrote way too much of a [...]
8 Oct
Voodoo trucker
It may not be the biggest story of the week so far. It may not even be the most interesting — Brian Nichols’ taped confession will be hard to top. But the voodoo curse story out of Cobb Co. was certainly appealing for its mix of political mischief, desperation, alleged criminal behavior and flat-out Southern [...]
7 Oct
Silent newscast
We didn’t see it, but the story is circulating about WXIA’s audio-free newscast Saturday night. It played on WATL at 10pm. Apparently only viewers noticed at first. The talent and producers figured it out as the minutes dragged on. It went on for fifteen of the scheduled thirty minutes, then the silent newscast abruptly ended. [...]
5 Oct
Too little work
Today’s question is this: Whose work is more slipshod — the Atlanta sanitation department, or the TV station investigating the department’s allegedly slipshod work habits? The “lazy government employees” story is a local TV perennial. WGCL’s latest version of this bit of investigative schtick is a classic example of why viewers should watch these stories [...]
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