“Dr. Strangelove” Directed by Stanley Kubrick, distributed by Columbia Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Local news is in trouble.
More than 2400 newspapers have closed in the US in the past decade, with more to come.
Local TV news is also in trouble. Viewership is down and the all important younger demographic is not even interested in watching.
Last week, the Poynter Institute produced a study offering solutions to help fix local TV news.
In a nutshell, Mr. Wiser suggests that instead of local TV news as it is currently constructed, it should, instead emulate talk radio. This, to me, is a terrible idea. It takes the medium further from what it should have been all along. Radio is not television. Television is a visual medium.
Wiser’s suggestion, however, is very much the product of TV’s birth, and also of its original sin, because television, particularly the news, was the child of radio, which is the foundation of why TV news doesn’t really work.
When TV was first launched in 1939, David Sarnoff, who had pretty much invented broadcasting and broadcast news unveiled the new technology in Rockefeller Center saying “now we add pictures to the sound.” Sarnoff, and NBC had been all about radio. He saw TV as radio with pictures added. This curse has followed TV news since its inception — pictures added to the sound.
The progenitors of television news all came from radio. Their model was Edward R. Murrow, the great voice of CBS News radio. My mentor in the TV news business was Fred Friendly, Murrow’s longtime producer. When all the great radio journalists moved to TV, they continued to work in the same way they had worked in radio — writing a script, doing interviews, and lacing the sound together. The pictures were added almost as an afterthought. They were driven by the writing and the interviews. That’s how TV news was done in 1950 and it is still how it is pretty much done today. The video is called ‘coverage’, or the video is video images of the reporter either doing a stand up or interviewing someone. This is still radio. Radio with pictures added.
Now we come to Stanley Kubrick.
I am reading the most recent Kubrick biography, Kubrick, an Odyssey by Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams. As I read the book, I have come to understand that it is not radio that should have been the foundation of TV news, but rather pictures and visual storytelling — the foundation of movies. And this is what made Kubrick so powerful a master of what is essentially a visual medium. He was from the beginning driven by the pictures.
Stanley Kubrick was born in the Bronx, but started taking pictures when he was a kid. By the time he was 17, he was working for Look Magazine, the competitor to Life and by the time he was 19, he was one of their best photographers. His orientation was visual — he saw the world in pictures and he created stories in pictures first.
His first major feature in Look, Prizefighter, an 8-page spread on boxer Walter Cartier was pure filmmaking in stills. He followed Cartier from the moment he got up, going to the ring, through the fight and to the conclusion. It was a visual character-driven story. A year later, Kubrick took his first shot at filmmaking, The Day of the Fight, and reproduced his Look Magazine story in film — again following Cartier through his day. Kubrick’s emphasis was always on the visuals, and that would become his trademark through all of this films, from Lolita to Dr. Strangelove to 2001: A Space Odyssey and so on. Kubrick was a visual storyteller.
What also differentiated Kubrick was that he shot all his own stories, and he also edited them. He demanded complete creative control. Even when he directed Sparticus, his first big budget Hollywood film, he grabbed the camera and reduced the cinematographer (with 30 years of experience — Kubrick was 29) to mere observer. Kubrick also insisted on editing his own films.
This is the path that TV news could have taken — driven by the pictures and the events as opposed to the radio script — because television is fundamentally a visual medium.
What made it possible for Kubrick, at the age of 21, to start making his own films, and more importantly to start experimenting with the medium and maturing and evolving as a filmmaker was that he had his own camera.
In the TV news business, until very recently, the cameras was incredibly expensive and complex. Most stations only owned a few. But as we move to iPhones, where everyone has one, we can now allow reporters the freedom to experiment with what TV news could look like. TV news is a medium with vast untapped potential. The idea that a program like 60 Minutes pretty much looks the same as it did in 1968, 56 years ago, simply tells us how terribly calcified the medium is.
With both Spectrum and now CBS, we have trained more than 40 reporters in each station, working with iPhones to shoot, edit and produce their own news stories. 40 cameras in play every day, in the hands of 40 reporters all the time. That opens the door to the potential for a very different kind of TV news — one that is first driven by the visuals and the events, the way Kubrick was driven, but more importantly, a place for creativity and experimentation. When you move from a few camera crews to 40 cameras in play all the time, you allow freedom to fail — to try new things. Sometimes they’ll work, sometimes they won’t. But the medium will expand and mature.
Over the years, Kubrick’s work matured as he tried and learned new techniques of what was essentially visual storytelling. TV news could become the same kind of hothouse for experimentation in what is fundamentally a visual medium, also based on storytelling.
TV news could become one of the most exciting places to work for young storytellers like Kubrick once was. Open the door to them and you’ll find that the whole demographic of your audience will change as well.
