Welcome to The Evening News
How ITV News Wales uses narrative to inform its viewer
Barnie Choudhury
Hello, good evening and welcome
ITV News Wales (at Six) is a daily evening news programme which sums up the important stories affecting 3.1 million people in one of our four nations. In 30-minutes, it must reflect what has happened in its six cities and hinterland that day.
In mid-2019, 65 per cent of Wales were aged 30 and over. This is significant because, like other terrestrial channels offering news, ITV’s audiences have plummeted by between 20 and 7 per cent from younger to older age groups.
As of 30 June 2020, 5.8 per cent are Black Asian Minority Ethnics (BAME). Once again, an important consideration to the industry as a whole, and ITV in particular, with the announcement of its diversity acceleration plan this July.
Not to put too fine a point on it, anyone wishing to progress within ITV will have to pay more than a passing nod to who they are reflecting in their output.
Orlebar describes genre as “the sharing of expectations between audience and programme makers about the classification of a programme.”
In this case, ITV News Wales fits in the journalism genre, encompassing specifically the technique of the visual medium of television news storytelling. The viewer knows exactly what to expect when he or she sits down to watch — a round-up of what has happened in his or her community that day.
As Harcup and O’Neill point out, “[]of the millions of events which occur daily in the world, only a tiny proportion ever become visible as ‘potential news stories’.”
This hints at the tough editorial choices and decisions that the programme producer, the internal narrator if you will, faces.
The multi-modal synergies of video, audio, online and social media act as dissemination tools for what is, in reality, an expensive-little-return-on-investment exercise called the public service remit. This runs counter to Fulton’s thesis that “film narratives have to be ‘commercial’.”
Within these parameters come the added consideration of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news. It is a dichotomy which Sjovaag describes as “the hierarchy that separates the higher and lower form of journalistic genres, professional practices, ethical issues, and journalism’s potential socio-democratic impact.”
ITV News Wales confronts this dichotomy head on, and it sets outs its intentions from the very beginning.
In its opening gambit, the headlines open the store to its consumers. The strident music of an accentuated eight-bong-beat (audio) climax over images (visual) of the patch (forewarning movement), letting the viewer know to watch something important.
This importance is pressed home further by the immediate visual appearance of the presenter (main narrator) in mimesis (showing) mode, speaking over the music, voice and tune simpatico.
After months of delays and technical glitches, the Covid-tracing-app is FINALLY launched. But how will it work, and will it make a difference?
Comparing what happened three months ago with the promise of better technology and today’s actual delivery of that vow, creates the temporal marker right at the programme’s opening, a narrative device repeated throughout.
So what?
For the past nine months one topic has dominated the news agenda, and that is the Covid pandemic. So, it is of little surprise that one third of the programme should be given over to that issue.
What is at issue here are the devices used to tell that story. Television news is, sadly, formulaic, the imagination limited not only by the technology but exigent time and suitable characters available to illustrate a particular thesis.
The most common technique is the scripted package where a reporter, adopting a diegesis (telling) role, voices over images, intercutting in and out of interviewees, the actors, who make the case for proving the story’s angle.
In this episode the focus was on the introduction of a mobile app which alerts people to the possibility they may have been near someone who has contracted the virus.
But what the programme demonstrates early on is the propensity for news to create conflict.
“People are genetically wired to pay close attention to negative news and acquire a news-consuming habit to deviant individuals, ideas, and events,” according to Lengauer et al.
Take this as an example.
We have a manual effective test and tracing system already. Our track-test protection team in the last week got to 94 per cent of new cases. So, it’s about helping them to do their job, and crucially it will allow people to share information in a more rapid way.
While the words of Wales’ health minister, appear prosaic, their implication is pounced on by the narrator to interrogate the idea that the test-and-trace app will infringe civil liberties. Actors on both sides of the argument, as well as a vox-pop (voice of the people), are used in a rudimentary fashion to inform public opinion with no real conclusion.
Due impartiality rules in news prevent broadcasters from picking sides.
As an important aside, this item did pay attention to racial representation with two different minority groups being featured and given a fair share of time in a stand alone two-minute-thirty piece of reportage.
The same appears to be true about age and gender representation throughout this broadcast.
What we cannot tell from viewing is whether overall diversity is truly representative. It is not possible to measure social class, sexual orientation or, to a certain extent, religion by watching without further in-depth follow-up research. Similarly, some disabilities are not visible, so we do not know whether 12 per cent of those on-screen have a disability.
What this segment did show is the temporal nature of news as well as the geographical movement to represent north, east, south and west of the nation.
While the first piece focused on Cardiff, south-east of Wales where the capital is based, the viewer moved to the west to Prestatyn.
Not only was the new narrator geographically and economically in a different part of Wales, he used the movement to introduce a different visual technique, known as a donut (where the studio presenter hands over to the reporter, and the reporter interviews a guest).
He concentrated on the introduction of the 10pm curfew which had been announced days previously.
The continuity strand, what I call timeliness, in Galtung and Ruge’s 12 News Factors will explain why the app and not this was the lead item.
What this entire segment lacked were visual keys, graphics, which put data into context. How many coronavirus cases were detected in the past 24 hours? How many recorded deaths? What does that make the average in the past seven days?
These simple facts on a daily basis, compositional balance, are a necessary public service to hammer home the message that this pandemic is not fake news.
At a time when a nation with eight universities have students who could test positive and cause the R-rate to increase exponentially, it is an important error by omission.
Still to come
So how do you let the viewer know that the lead topic is over, and it is time to move on?
One production technique could be a news belt of three stories; 15 to 20 second voiced-over stories by the presenter who is out-of-vision. This has the added value of allowing a programme to show that it was pan-regional and representing all communities.
But it is possible that health and safety considerations of staff, fewer technical resources owing to the pandemic, may have limited usage of this technique in this programme.
Yet this may be lazy journalism because the mobile phone and apps allow reporters to gather pictures, edit and post these back to base.
Instead, the show relied on the tried and tested still to come segment, a way of keeping the viewer interested by teasing the delights on offer, like a store producing luxury items from the back, only for select customers.
Handbrake turns?
The dilemma over hard news-soft news is heightened in a broadcast newsroom. Never more so when a substantial part of the programme, in this case 11 of the 30 minutes, has been spent on one topic.
The narrative tool of movement is never more important than at these points. Theoretically, this should not be that difficult.
Barnett et al. declared, “[]bulletins present a series of functionally similar units — news items — each of which is separated from other items in the bulletin by the subject they deal with, and by the reporter conveying the information.”
It is a bit more complicated than that in the real world. We need to consider factors, such as someone being unable to meet a deadline for reasons beyond their control or breaking news meaning that the running order goes out of the window.
In ITV News Wales’ case the juxtaposition from the hard and divisive news (conflict) of housing asylum seekers, to the softer and racially diverse inspirational story of a pioneer jarred.
Whatever the reasons, my preferred option would have been to run the sport related pandemic story after the asylum seeker tale. This would have allowed a smoother segue into sport before the traditional and finally quirky or uplifting story.
Do I need a brolly?
We British always talk about the weather, and in regional news this is considered the final, final item.
It allows technical flexibility because it is live, and often the weather can dig producers out of a hole. Presenters are expected to talk anywhere from 60 seconds to three minutes, unscripted, accompanied by graphics.
It is still unusual to have an item after the weather, and there are good reasons for this. The weather closes the programme and leaves the viewer wanting to come back for more.
In this case, the weather was educational. Temperatures had dipped to minus-five degrees Celsius in Scotland overnight, and the weather in Wales had suddenly changed.
Why is this happening? It’s a buckle in the jet stream. We’re going to talk sport. We’re going to talk low pressure as a football and this beachball as high pressure, they’re having a bit of a battle at the moment. Effectively the beachball is chucking the jet stream to the north, buckling it and then bringing it back down towards the south.
The importance of visual representation has never been greater. But neither has the tone of voice and conversational language which fits the social demographics of ITV News Wales’ core audience.
Language
The problem with television news is that the words often fight the images on the screen. Anyone who has written a television news script will tell you that less is more, avoid sub-clauses, and that the script should not make sense without the pictures.
Learning these simple lessons could have avoided clumsy writing which stalled the delivery of the lead story.
As Wales sees Covid case numbers rise, there were 348 more today, working out exactly where the virus is, and clamping down on it quickly is more important than ever.
These are 30 soporific words over generic pictures. How about?
We’re all taking measures to stop the virus from spreading. Yet there were almost 350 reported cases overnight. But there’s some good news too.
The legendary broadcaster, David Attenborough’s fight of the giraffes is an exemplar of televisual scripting, use of natural sound and music.
As the former BBC head of the College of Journalism, Vin Ray, put it, “Before you start, stop. And ask yourself: what’s the story?”
Goodnight and stay safe
As with the top of the programme, what the still to come sequence lacked was the wow moment, a sharp 10-second sound bite or a dramatic piece of film to grab the viewer’s attention.
This lack of a gotcha moment may highlight how the pandemic has curtailed real imagination which will hopefully return post-pandemic.
The pandemic does provide an opportunity, however. By reflecting on practice and considering ways to create innovative and breath-taking content in a visual medium, we can perhaps recapture the attention span and diminishing consumer appointment to watch screen-time.
It would seem click bait means gratification is key.
How do we do that ethically as a profession?
“Journalists are expected to reskill, deskill, and upskill their practices and working routines, generally without any direct say in the way the organizations they engage with operate,” suggest Dueze et al.
With the advent of digital platforms, cheaper high-quality broadcast technology, and a generation able to interrogate data, ITV News Wales, and others, will need to evolve, innovate and market its wares more aggressively.
Otherwise the threat is that the evening news will not survive. The continuing rapid fall in television audience figures shows us that.
