Good News is actually Good News

For the past 35 years, I have been carrying out a very interesting survey of journalists in the TV news business.

For those 35 years, I have been running video storytelling bootcamps, in which I teach reporters to shoot, edit and produce their own stories, now using only iPhones.

At our last count (and God only knows how accurate that is) we believe that close to 70,000 journalists from all over the world have gone through the 5-day intensive bootcamps, either in person or virtually.

We have worked with journalists from a wide range of news organizations, from The BBC to CBS News to The New York Times and many others, so it’s a pretty good sample.

During the 5-day bootcamps, participants find 2 stories to shoot, track, edit and produce. They are free to pick any stories they like.

Above is an example of a story done only last week by Amelia Mugavero, a reporter for CBS News. It’s a lovely story, done entirely by her on an iPhone.

What makes the story work is that it makes you feel good when you watch it.

In a recent study by The Reuters Institute, 40% of Americans no longer watch or read the news at all. They find it too depressing. All doom and gloom.

Ironically, when I ask working journalists to self-select stories they want to work on for the week, I think it is fair to say that not one, out of 70,000 has ever chosen a murder, a shooting, a fire, a car crash, a shark attack and so on. The ‘bread and butter’ of ‘news’.

To a person, they almost always select stories are are upbeat, uplifting and heartwarming. This tells us something. This tells us what people actually WANT to see. These are stories that universally make us feel better about our world, our community and ourselves.

There is no actual definition of ‘news’. It is an invention of people in the news business. And for many years, the dogma of the news business was, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. But perhaps today, in a world drowning in bleeds, we might want to reconsider this dictum.

Maybe it’s time to move from TV news to TV journalism.