Television+News+Genre

//This page is still under construction. But please feel free to edit something already! Subheadings will follow!// toc

**Television News Genre and Subgenres**
News Night with Aaron Brown on CNN

Japan

History
While I did not focus on the history of the television news genre rather than explain why it is difficult to divide the news genre into subgenres I will link some interesting websites about the history of television news.

For a really short overview and some important dates visit: http://library.thinkquest.org/18764/television/history.html http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/television9.html

For a more detailed overview visit: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/History%20of%20Television%20page.htm

**Difficulties in Defining the Television News Genre**
Dividing television into different genres, e.g. drama, quiz shows, news, and soap operas, enables the audience and the program makers to understand and identify special characteristics of particular program types. While distinctinction between fiction from non-fiction is one major classification, boundaries between these genres get washed out and they shift from one genre into another. Docu-soaps and docu-dramas are a good example for this. Jackie Harrison therefore emphasizes that constituting the news genre and its subgenres is difficult because programs adapt from other programs or change. Even broadcasters had different opinions about what constitutes the news genre, as Harrison shows in newsroom fieldwork conducted in Britain. She also refers to Dazan and Katz who emphasize that researchers develop broad genre categories like news, documentary, comedy, soap opera, variety, and so on. However, research, which goes further to disassembly features of any of this genre is still rare. Classifying different subgenres when the use of the concept of genre has already diverse problems (Harrison 2000, 33) and “boundaries between genres are shifting and becoming more permeable” (Abercrombie 1996, 45) is therefore a problem.

Television News Programs
News in general has a distinctive look and sound. Core communicative features, which involve for instance familiar logos and recognition of the presenter, allow the audience to perceive this program as news program and makes it thus recognizable. All television news organizations have an increasing amount of "entertainment values in the production, selection and presentation of news” (Harrison 2000, 28). Every news channel or news show involves more graphics, a warmer and more friendly set, a presenter which is almost famous, a greater range of human interest storys, dramatic content, personalization, faster presentation and so on to keep the audience interested. Within the new technical broadcasting progress and twenty-four-hour television news, fragmentation of television news and their audience has been continuing in the late 1990s and early twenty first century. Harrison argues, while news programs can be easily divided into categories like “time and day the program is broadcast, the size or nature of the audience the programs are transmitted to or whether the program is aimed to children or adults” (2000, 34) it is not eligible for an in-depth analysis. For this reason she created an ideal-type model of the news genre for television news broadcasted in 1990 in Great Britain.

Ideal Type Model For Subgenres
The center of the model represents what Harrison calls "pure" news. That means news, which were covered from every news program like elections or a death of an important person - for example the death of princess Diana. The different circles are all different gernres, which overlap. This shows their "possibility for innovation and variety" (Harrison 2005, 36). While a lot of different subgenres overlap, clear distinctions are sometimes collapsing when news channels like Channel 4 News in Britain incorporate features from both current affairs and documentary genres. While Harrison gives different approaches to start partitioning the news genre into subgenres like asking what is not television news, she shows that it is hard to find a dividing rule. Sometimes the borders between television magazine formats and television news are drifting together when news program copying the friendly, cosy style of magazine program presenters and combining hard news stories with sofa chats.

Ideal type model of television news genre for 1990. Harrison 2000, 35.

Are Those Subgenres?
Drawing lines and making clear distinctions between subgenres – and sometimes even genres in general – can be rather difficult, as Jackie Harrison states in her chapter on the overlapping of genres through adopting and changing. The following examples, which are taken from different epochs, will give an impression of these overlaps and will illustrate the difficulties to classify the news genre.

1. [|Cox], a former editor of[| Independent Television News] (ITN) in Britain between 1956 and 1968, gives an insight into the development of current affairs programs or so-called “news in depth programs” at [|BBC] ([|Panorama] - the longest-running current affairs television program) and ITN (This week). News in depth programs are developed from the news programs. In contrast to Newspapers, where the chief editor is in control of the daily news as well as its analysis and comments on it, Cox describes an artificial division made in British television. While BBC Television News and ITN were in charge of getting and presenting the news, the current affairs program examined, explored or indeed enlarged upon these news. According to Cox, this was an artificial division, because “there are no clear boundary lines between hard news, and news in depth.”

2. When Barkin talks about “Celebrity News” and questions whether the content of the show ([|Entertainment Tonight]) is primarily news or primarily entertainment (2003, 119), the shifting of boarders between genres also becomes clear. Barkins therefore states that “the question itself becomes moot” (2003, 118). For the last three decades, TV shows dealt more and more with fame and celebrity, therefore more celebrity-shows or -news developed. Van Messel, executive producer from the beginning of 1987 until July 1995 of Entertainment Tonight, defends the journalistic practices and standards of this program when he says:

//“The journalistic standards that we have are no different than the standards that I was involved in for 20 years before I came her. … We don´t have compromise any journalistic principles when we do our job. Now the focus has to do with celebrity, with Hollywood … with television and the media, but how we cover it and how we present it are no different than if we were a news program on one of the networks.”// (Interview by Barker, January 1995)

Watch a short cutout of Entertainment Tonight on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fcXWNog1JQ&mode=related&search=

3. There were different developments in the news genre over the last years and different epochs, which mark out the news. Craig M. Allen analyses the years from 1967 to 1971 and shows the development of [|“Eyewitness News”]. Abandoning the news anchor from his serious position and transforming him/her into a “real person” was the main trait, but also “action video, story-telling reporters and space –age studio sets and Madison Avenue razzle-dazzle” (2001, 89) were part of this new format. In 1971 “Eyewitness News” was broadcasted in more than 100 cities. How should this format be categorized?

Eyewitness news: Hurricane Andrew Live 1992

These examples should show how difficult it is to make unambiguous distinctions and to clearly define genres and subgenres within the television news.

References:
Abercrombie, N. 1996. //Television and society.// Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Allen, C. M. 2001. //News is people.// Ames: Iowa State University Press. Barkin, S.M. 2003. //American television news: The media marketplace and the public interest.// Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Cox, G. 1995. //Pioneering television news: A first hand report on a revolution in journalism.// London: John Libbey & Company Ltd. Harrison, J. 2000. //Terrestial tv news in Britain.// Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Image References

News Night with Aaron Brown. Created by CNN: http://feldmandesigns.com/davestelevisioncnnaaronbrown.htm

Japan http://www.worldpress.org/images/20050815-japan-poll.jpg

Model of Subgenres: Harrison 2000, 35.

Hurricane Andrew Live. The TV Rundown, Case histories: http://www.tvrundown.com/hurintro.htm