Designing The News

Listen:

U.S. Department of Energy from United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I have been reading Walter Isaacson’s new bio of Elon Musk.

It’s a fascinating read, and it has given me lots of ideas about the TV news business.

Musk, as anyone knows, even without reading the book, is a true force of nature. He has built some of the most successful and most influential companies in the world. With SpaceX, he became, and remains, the first private company to achieve orbit, and has now launched more space rockets that the United States, Russia, China and everyone else combined. In fact, his Falcon 9 is now the workhorse of NASA.

He also built not just the world’s most successful electric car company with Tesla, but now, at $625 billion, is valued at 11 times the value of Ford and 12 times the value of GM. He has pretty much single-handedly taken the US and the rest of the planet into the world of electric cars.

How is he so successful?

He is, of course, a visionary and just incredibly driven. But beyond that, the thing that struck me the most reading the book was both his attention to meticulous detail and his passion for design.

He noted that prior to Tesla, there were electric cars, most notably GM’s EV-1, which GM has just taken out of production for lack of sales. Starting Tesla, Musk noted that all the other electric cars looked like golf carts. They were ugly. “No one wants to buy an ugly car.” So, Musk obsessed on every detail of design, from the front headlights to the seats. He was and is a perfectionist and extremely design driven – even if it adds to the cost of the car.

In this, he is so very similar to Steve Jobs, another Walter Isaacson bio subject. Like Musk, Jobs too was obsessive about design. This proved true in every product that Apple made. Chief design officer at Apple for years, Jony Ivy worked with Jobs constantly fine-tuning and re-engineering the Macs and the iPods and iPhones to make them aesthetically beautiful works of art as well as functioning machines. As a result of his obsession to design detail, Apple is now a $2.62 trillion company.

Obsession with detail and creating beautiful design is the hallmark of almost every successful high-end company in the world. You have to create a product that people love, not just for how well it performs, but also for how beautiful it is.

It is the aesthetic, the attention to detail and design that makes Prada or LV or Gucci so expensive. It’s why a Montblanc pen costs as much as $1,000 and a Bic pen costs 30 cents. They both do the same thing, but one carries seems far more valuable in the buyer’s mind.

This is certainly true in the music business. You may write a great song, but it is in the mixing and production process that it is turned from a simple tune to something of great beauty. This is why the Beatles and George Martin spent days and weeks in the studio tuning and retuning and fine-tuning songs. This is why Phil Spector created The Wall of Sound and in doing so, took Motown to the heights of success. Design counts.

So, it is funny that in the TV news business, which is inherently a creative process, we pay so very little attention to design.

This is because, for most of the history of the television news business, it was largely a non-competitive industry. The inherent restrictions imposed by the need to send television signals through the air to get to viewers meant that the limits of the electro-magnetic spectrum meant that you could only have a very small, and very finite number of broadcasters. Thus, NBC, CBS and ABC early on locked up access to the airwaves, thus eliminating any competitors.

In a relatively competition-free environment, there was little incentive, or need for that matter, to be concerned with design. News, in fact, was supposed to be a loss leader. It was the ‘price’ the networks paid to the public in exchange for their FCC provided frequency. They would make their money on entertainment programming and offer the news as a kind of public service.

If there were only three clothing companies in the world, no one would pay much attention to design either. For a reference on this, take a look at men’s or women’s clothing in the Soviet Union or Communist China. Prada, it was not.

Thus, talking to NBC Nightly News about the ‘design aesthetics’ of their news stories or ‘packages’ in the 1960s would have seemed insane. It was enough, in their minds, to have a reporter stand up, say a few words, do an interview, shoot some b-roll of police tape or the exterior of a building and call it a day. “There,” they would have told you, “all the elements you need for a story,” much as a Soviet commissar would have told you – “ the Lada? Beautiful car. Four wheels and a motor. What else to you need?”

In the Soviet Union, where there were only three cars, the Lada, the Volga or the Zil, no one bothered with aesthetics of design.

The arrival, first of cable, and now of the Internet has changed the competitive nature of the news business. Now, the news consumer has choices. What will they choose to watch and why? Like Elon Musk making the Tesla and entering an extremely competitive automobile world, or Steve Jobs making the iPhone and entering a world already flooded with mobile phones (see the ugly Nokia); the news business is an incredibly competitive market.

So how can a ‘Tiffany Network’, differentiate itself?

By design. Applying the basic principles of design to news stories can differentiate a news broadcaster in a crowded field, and add perceived ‘value’ to the product.

What then are the elements or design for a TV news story?

First, of course, there is excellence in photography. Even though television is a visual medium, the news, for the most part, pays little attention to the images they shoot. There are, of course, exceptions, but generally TV news stories are little more than b-roll, acquired in a kind of ‘spray and pray’ manner. This is a remnant of fractionalizing the work process. When one person is the reporter/writer (or at network these are two people); another is the editor and yet another is the shooter, the shooter is inclined to get as much material as possible for ‘coverage’ of whatever the writer decides to write and whatever the editor needs to ‘cover’ what has been written. We used to call this process See Dog/Say Dog. The video becomes illustrative. If the reporter is going to ‘talk’ about strawberry cupcakes, you better show them.

When the video is illustrative it is no longer contextual to the story. Thus, the pictures are a kind of afterthought, at best used to reflect what has been written. This makes the pieces schizophrenic, from a visual perspective. The visuals jump from picture to picture, driven by the track.  Great design is visual. Thus, the pictures should instead weave together elegantly to tell the story on their own, flowing with the narrative.

Finally, there is the emotional element. Great design, whether it is in a car or clothing, should make you feel something. When you see great design, your heart should race a bit. The same holds true for a beautifully and elegantly constructed TV or video news story.  Does it ‘capture’ you in the way that, say, an old Jaguar e-type might?

I am appending a video story, done by Tom Walters when he took the Bootcamp with us several years ago.

It is a very personal story. It conveys emotion. It is beautifully shot, but more importantly, the visuals weave with the story to form an elegant whole.  It is, to my mind, a classic example of excellence in design.

And, of course, he did it all by himself, on an iPhone.

Click here to receive more articles like this in our weekly newsletter.