My part in 50 years of (recording) history
Our newsroom is celebrating five decades of storytelling and community service this year, while also looking ahead to the next 50 years.
My small role in the recent celebratory broadcast was to help craft an explanation for how our work has evolved in recent years. In doing so, I got to re-use some of my favorite newsroom “dad jokes.”
The first is that we speak many languages in the newsroom, but none of them are English. That is to say, we use certain stylized language on TV and across all of our digital platforms.
I suspect my interns would say this is my No. 1 cliche.
I also talked about catching the waves of public interest in various platforms, as we’ve done over the years, and trying to see whether our platforms of news and public information would float in the new waters.
Finally, I shared a favorite set of numbers: 1, 5, 15 and 50… as in inches… as in screen sizes.
Each screen size fits into a different niche in the audience’s life, with different customary uses. Serving the audience properly through each screen means understanding how to speak the right language for each screen — this is a metaphor I recently used when interviewed for our newsroom’s 50th anniversary.