Hard Nuts vs. Cookies

From a very readable article in the latest edition of Technology Review* “You Don’t Understand Our Audience“, an excerpt that applies equally well to the media in India.

The background to this extract is a series on Al Qaeda that John Hockenberry (the writer of this piece) had proposed to NBC bosses in the aftermath of 9/11 which was deemed to be less interesting/relevant than a series on firefighters. Read on and think how sharply this applies to the Indian mainstream media.

Excerpt:

“…This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the “emotional center” of the American people. Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate.

The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown.

On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn.

This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone’s lost kitty…”

I call the “informational edge” stories, hard nuts and the “emotional center” items as cookies…Guess what most of us prefer.

As an example, consider the mystery behind the locked cellars in the Taj (hard to explain) vs. Taslima admitted to AIIMS for ‘drug effect’ (nice, easy to swallow)

Related Posts:

The great joke that is Indian media – Part IV

Can I turn “right” here, please?

* Published by MIT, requires registration (free); Image courtesy: Wikipedia