What I’ve Learned in a Year on TV

Always take your mic off

Reader, I have been styled.

I was styled around nine months ago, after various bosses here at Sky News decided I could perhaps be a bit smarter on camera. I spent a morning with the rather wonderful Jane Field. We started with a coffee to discuss my fashionable aspirations, then took a tour of central London. The result was a smart dark blue suit and shirts with buttonless plackets. Much sharper.

Before:

After:

Sleek as a seal, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Going shopping professionally was not something I anticipated as part of a career in journalism and the journey from print to TV journalist has been full of surprises. My first day and first ever live was spent talking about the technology of the new £1 coin, which I ended by saying: “I suppose it’s great, if you’re into coins.” Oops.

It’s been a year since I left the UK edition of WIRED for Sky News, so I thought I would share what I’ve learned in that time. (There’s a long way to go yet.) Maybe it will be useful for anyone thinking of the same; it will certainly be a lesson in egg sucking to anyone already in TV.

Before some extended windbaggery, a few very practical nuggets of my tiny wisdom.

• Going to the make up department is deeply relaxing for some reason. And you can leave it on if you’re going out afterwards. (I have never done this, I swear.)
• Always, always take your mic off after you’ve finished filming.
• If you are connecting your phone to the giant screen (see below), make sure all notifications are switched off.
• If you are wearing a smartwatch on air, disconnect it from your phone in case your mum sees you on TV and sends you the one word text ‘wanker’. Thanks, Mum.

• After a chat at the studio desk with a presenter, always make sure you’re out of shot before exiting. On one hurried day, I took off my mic and legged it right after the final question. Unfortunately it was on a wide shot on live TV and it looked like I was storming off in a rage.
• Resist puns.
• You can get away with a hangover in print journalism. It’s a lot harder in TV (I’ve heard).

Below is how big the Sky News wall is. You don’t want texts from friends up there.

(Viewed as a small still image like this, the Wall also has the effect of making it look like a journalist is a Borrower standing on a MacBook. But that is in fact a human-sized Ed Conway.)

Windbaggery

First, back to style. The word itself used to make me a bit apprehensive. The opposite of substance. Surely clothes don’t matter: the story does. To think any other way would be vain and silly.

The story is all that matters. But if you want viewers to get the story, you need to get out the way — and looking scruffy is a very good way to distract viewers from the story. And actually, it’s not too dissimilar from print journalism, especially feature writing, where style has a much higher cachet.

Looking smart on camera isn’t the same as writing like Nabokov. It’s more like the equivalent of not annoying readers by committing a grammatical howler, and so worth taking seriously. What you wear is the most basic component of your visual style, on which you build the other parts — voice, delivery, body language and so on — which the most talented broadcasters possess and which I’m working on.

Second, pictures. WIRED is an incredibly visually led magazine (check out their excellent Tumblr) but even there the art department would grudgingly let some black ink slip through — often up to 4,000 words of it.

TV is moving pictures (you can see how I nailed the job interview) and if you don’t have good pictures, people won’t pay attention to the story. Thinking in images instead of words is the biggest change from print. Using those pictures to create a satisfying two minute narrative for a VT/package is the trickiest part of this whole job.

The trouble is that technology (which I cover) often doesn’t lend itself to fantastic footage. People coding at their computers isn’t riveting TV. So the challenge is to think of an interesting way to present a story visually. Here at Sky News, Ed Conway, our economics editor, is great at taking a complex economic story and presenting it in an engaging way, whether that’s renting a hot air balloon to talk about help for house building, or commissioning bespoke wallpaper and putting it up wearing dungarees (see point #1 on style) to talk about George Osborne’s record as chancellor.

The other way to get around this is by planning. Ahead of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report on the security services and privacy, we went to Bude, Cornwall, with a drone to get some great looking images of a GCHQ listening station. The story itself was the ISC’s report, but the footage hopefully gave viewers a different way in to the 150-page tome.

Third, to get good pictures, you need good cameramen. And lots of other people, but especially producers, designers and editors. That’s probably the most enjoyable thing about TV: collaboration.

In print, you can do it all yourself. In TV, no chance. And that’s incredible fun. Talking through stories with editors, coming up with creative visual treatments with producers, going on location with a cameraman and endeavouring to find the telling shot, storyboarding graphics with designers, sitting in the edit suite with editors and pulling it all together — all against the clock. When every part sings, it’s brilliant. Also, nerve racking. If something goes wrong, even though it’s a team effort, as a correspondent, it’s your name on the report.

Fourth, the technology of TV is very cool. Watching a satellite track whir into action, the dish unfolding and repositioning to find a line of sight with a satellite 22,223 miles away in space, and establishing a live broadcast link — I haven’t quite got over that yet. Or if you sit in NOC (news operation centre) and watch scores of live feeds coming in on the monitors there. Increasingly, you don’t need the truck: it’s possible to film on a traditional camera, and broadcast the signal through a 4G phone. Or you can broadcast in HD straight from your smartphone into NOC, using an app called Dejero. Add drone filming to the mix and as a technology correspondent, it’s all a bit kid in a sweet store.

Sky News is also very fast to experiment with new formats for delivering that information: we’re a partner with Snapchat and we were quick to Meerkat and Periscope as an organisation, as Joe Tidy showed to great effect behind the scenes at the Battle for No 10 programme. When I draw up my plan for covering a story, I’m thinking about the main two and half minute “package” or film to run at 1700, but also Twitter, lives with a presenter, the written article, the iPad explainer and extra video content, the main portrait video for Snapchat Discover, Instagram, Twitter and Meerkat/Periscope. Each platform needs its own approach, and coming up with them as new platforms emerge is fun.

Regrets?

What do I miss about print journalism?

Time, most of all. Making a two and a half minute film is a lot more labour intensive than a 500 word article: if you’re on a story for a day, you’re on that story alone. Inevitably, this makes it harder to carve out time to chase your own stories. The amount of coffees and lunches I’ve had to rearrange is astonishing — if you’re one of the people who have been on the other end of my apologetic emails, I’m sorry once more. Taking a couple of days to go to a conference and dig out stories is tricky.

Hard, but not impossible — managing time and logistics is one of the big challenges of TV journalism.

And even if you’ve been styled, your natural dorkiness will still sometimes shine through:

Here’s to year two.