I'm pretty new to this whole anchoring gig, but I've already figured out why people think that news anchors have no emotion. While I try to give the news a little bit of my own personality, the teleprompter seems to ruin everything. That black screen with words scrolling across it always seems to give me a case of amnesia – I can never actually remember anything important about what I just read. What you see on TV is me reading words but not actually comprehending them.
Putting the anchor blogs on the front page of tv.ku.edu would draw attention to what we're covering.
Image Courtesy: tv.ku.edu
One of the biggest jokes in the newsroom is, "Don't worry about messing up, nobody watches us anyways." Well heck, if they're not watching us then maybe they'll read about us. Everyone knows that my generation spends more time getting news online than from the TV anyways.
I think that if we started blogging on tv.ku.edu and could convince the university to let us link from the KU homepage we would definitely see an increase in traffic. And who knows, maybe if more people see us on the web, maybe they'll watch us on TV too!
The idea of getting the staff to blog about their work is something that some stations and some newspapers have tried. The ones I have seen have not been that interesting. But remind me to pull up the "Baghdad blog" in class so we can discuss the topic.
I think that blogs are an amazing tool for anchors, especially in this web driven culture. It would allow them to demonstrate they are more than "readers." One might bring up the question, though, of how that effects credibility. If a blatant opinion on a story is expressed in blogs, it may give the station a reputation of bias. So I am all for anchor blogging, but I think it needs to be regulated by the station.
I have heard that no one watches us as well. I don't agree. We are on at the same time as all the other major news stations. If people are flipping through channels during a 6news commercial break, they will stop on KUJH (if we don't suck too bad). If we make ourselves a quality news source, we have the ability to keep those viewers. The reason that we don't is because we have the mindset that this is not a serious program. It is a serious program as long as we respect it as such.
Also we get a lot of hits on YouTube.com: another reason to get serious. Some of our stories are top hits in google even without You Tube.
In fact, if you type my name into google, my KUJH profile, with all of my stories on it, is the first hit!! It's nice because before KUJH, my name pulled up a 53 year-old transvestite from Wisconsin.
Back to the original point of your blog… I totally feel you on how hard it is to show emotion when the teleprompter is in front of you. Sometimes I look like am clueless on air. It is not that I don't understand the story; it's just the words in front of me don't always process as fast as they are moving. Sometimes I capitalize words or phrases in the script to tell me where to put emphasis on the words while I am reading the teleprompter. I know that as soon as the director says "cue her" my mind will go blank.