When the sincere-looking anchors read me the Six O’clock News on my local schlock-station (“coming up, you won’t believe what one local stripper is doing with a banana”), is there ANYTHING related to the delivery of the news on all those papers they’re constantly shuffling? Or, in the case of one local station, the laptop computers that sit, sometimes unplugged and closed, in front of the anchors?
For that matter, do the talking heads have anything at all to do with news, other than reading it to us? Do these people write any of the copy, or have any input into the content of the show?
You probably won’t be satisfied with this reply…it depends.
It depends on the station you’re watching and the policy of the news director and the consultant.
Most of the places I have worked (I’ll be in the radio department downstairs) the papers contain what the news announcers should be reading off the TelePrompTer. It’s backup when the prompter messes up.
If the news director is really a Murphy’s Law believer, the papers might even contain information about what you should have seen if the tape operator screws up with the wrong sound bite or no sound bite at all (usually preceded by the news announcer staring at the camera with several long seconds of silence).
These days a fully modernized TV newsroom usually integrates the production of a written script and the video clips that it will contain. But every on-air word SHOULD appear (and often a transcript of the key stuff on the tape) on the pages in the on-air person’s hand.
And teleprompters DO break down. When this happens, you get to see the eerie skill that good TV newspersons have; they can glance at a page, take in six or seven words, spit them out while looking into the camera, and do it over and over again so that you hardlly notice they’re not looking at “you” all the time. Try it, it ain’t easy.
Some newscasters write all or most of what they read on air. Most famous anchors write at least some of their own stuff, but everybody has an editor. You NEED an editor. (Heck, I need an editor–if I had one there wouldn’t be so many #%& typos in my work.)
During the depths of the “happy news” phenomenon ("So, Alice, it seems that two thousand people died in a typhoon in India last week!), there were pretty boys (okay and maybe a few gals) who never wrote a word of their stuff. A famous story about one such “face” who was fired from a flagship station, took a job in a somewhat smaller market, and was sitting his dressing room, leisurely inspecting his make-up about 5:45 PM when the news director walked in:
“Say,” Pretty Boy demanded," isn’t anyone going to deliver my script?!? I really like to look at it before I go on-air…"
He was genuinely shocked when he found out that he was supposed to have written most of it himself.