The State of News and Weather presenting and Reporting

Recently I’ve been comparing TV presenters from the 1990’s and earlier who are still around against the current crop of “talent” and have found the difference between the two to be like night and day.

It’s very clear how much the style of presenting has changed over the last 10-15 years and not for the better I would say.

One of the biggest things to change in that time is the amount of presenters has increased greatly with the growth of satellite TV channels and some increase in the existing channels providing extra content. Inevitably the more you have the less likely it is that the quality will remain as high due to the fact there simply isn’t the level of competition for jobs there used to be. Channels simply have to take what they can get rather than having what they want.

This expansion has led to a change in the way presenters and reporters are trained. It would appear to me that people now just go and do a quick course learn very little and get slung on TV the main things they learn are the latest buzzwords and catchphrases to blurt out every few mins. This is particularly noticeable with news reporters no matter what channel you watch on most reports these days they all trot out rubbish terms like “emotional roller-coaster” and “staycation” every show also has “the all important weather forecast” and then we get told what every item mentioned measures in Football Pitches, Olympic Swimming Pools and Double Decker Buses.

Presenters and reporters sound exactly the same no one has any identity or personality they are just cookie cutter people churned out by crap training programs. I’m going to give this group a name “protools presenters” as much like music made with protools all the life has been sucked out leaving nothing more than complete and utter blandness. TV companies may as well just employ robots and be done with it if this carries on much longer.

Weather presenting is a major area affected by this production line syndrome. Would be presenters go on a 3 day met office course in broadcasting which teaches the very basics of weather and to use a quote from them “ deliver a credible weather bulletin”. The end product is presenters who are basically script readers who don’t have a clue what they are talking about. They are just trained to do an impersonation of a real forecaster and a very poor one at that. Even the graphics used in their presentations have preset places to put the symbols and some of the latest batch of “presenters” have even had other presenters prepare graphics packages for them to use.

This so called training is complete and utter crap I think I could train someone to be a better presenter in 3 days than that course and that’s just from what I have learnt watching proper forecasters work over the years.

The comment I made about impersonation also applies to news presenters and reporters I think. Most are trained to look like what they are supposed to be rather than actually being it. Presenters and reporters used to join a broadcaster and work their way up through the company learning all sorts of jobs along the way so by the time they went in front of a TV camera they already knew what they were doing and in the case of weather actual forecasters were employed who knew what they were talking about. These people are a dying breed in the business today.

TV to me is where the best of the best should be working I don’t want to watch presenters who look like students on a work experience placement. I often ask myself a question about presenters and that is would they get jobs in their sector away from the TV and far more often than not the answer I get is no. The only place most TV reporters could get work at a national level would be at a tabloid paper as a good chunk of the people who “write” for them have trouble stringing a sentence together which isn’t littered with mistakes.

This really is a sad state the industry is in and it’s about time something was done about it.