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The camera: both a convenience and a curse
Posted June 26, 2009 at 23:11 in blog
I’ve been interning at the TV station for a couple months now, and I’ve begun to notice how being in front of a camera can either enchant people into spilling their life stories or destroy their composure.
My face better not be on the 6 p.m. news
I recently received a call at the news desk where a woman was pretty worried that her face would end up on the news. She was out enjoying her day at a local park, but the station happened to be there covering a breaking news story (a body was found in a lake). She thought she would end up in the background footage.
I could see why the woman was upset. She was an innocent bystander amid a tragic situation, but since she was in public, she really couldn’t have an expectation of privacy.
We don’t normally think about it, but it’s amazing how intrusive a camera can be.
Another example of cameras destroying a person’s composure was when I got to venture out with a reporter. The story was that a local resident had kept about 93 pets in her home and had them all confiscated. Some were dead, and the rest were in terrible condition. The reporter’s job was to talk to the neighbors.
She ended up finding a neighbor, and the man was a big talker. He spilled some details, but when she mentioned filming him, he immediately backed off. He refused to participate in an interview. It was a frustrating situation for the reporter: he was the key to a really great package, but he refused to help. No matter how much he talked, she couldn’t get it on record.
Like moths to a flame
When I was a metro reporter and metro editor at The Independent Florida Alligator, the college newspaper, I remember how hard it would be to get the simplest of information from sources, whether it was from the city or from police. I remember moments where we would struggle, a half-hour before deadline, just to get a spokesperson on the phone with us after we had been trying to contact them all day.
A few weeks ago, a shooting happened involving a sheriff’s deputy. An hour or so later, the county sheriff herself took time to visit the TV station and give a personal interview to share the facts and set the record straight. I remember being shocked as I led her into the newsroom.
Was there magic in TV cameras? What was it about them that had important political and social figures in Gainesville automatically opening up?
There are also moments when these figures or spokespeople call the news desk with tips, tips that we at a college newspaper or small newspaper had to scrounge for.
Print vs. Broadcast: Does one have it easier than the other?
From what I’ve seen so far, yes and no. This also relies on solid connections and how a medium maintains said connections. Print is always less intrusive. It’s easier to talk with someone who’s holding a notebook rather than having a camera three feet from your face and a tiny microphone fed through your shirt.
But disbursing broadcast news is so instant and personal. You can instantly pin a name to a face.
Over the next few years, I suppose we’ll see how Internet news alters all of this.