CONDICIONES BÁSICAS PARA EL PROCESO DE ENZEÑANZA-APRENDIZAJE

In all, 872 news bulletins were subjected to Level 1 Content Analysis. Some bulletins were missing from the archive or unavailable online¹; in 2007 particularly, the incomplete archive had some impact. For example, in May 2007, local elections in Wales, Scotland and England and the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann dominated news schedules. Unfortunately, many pertinent bulletins were unavailable, meaning that these particular events were generally absent within the research sample. In order to mitigate the impact of missing data, statistics throughout this analysis are expressed as percentages of wider news agendas, rather than as raw numbers.

The ways that TV news delivers messages must be considered alongside the messages themselves, so following the protocol established by Harrison (2000), this TV news content analysis attends to both format (conventions, story lengths and so

1 All bulletins that were unavailable from both the DVD archive at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies and the Box of Broadcast online resource are listed in Appendix 1.

107 | P a g e on), and content (type of news covered). The analysis begins by focusing on format.

At this stage, the unit of analysis is the broader news story, rather than the more specific news item². Table 5.1 shows the total number of bulletins logged as a percentage of the total per year, the number of individual stories and average stories per bulletin.

Table 5.1. Overview of bulletins and stories.

Table 5.1 indicates that in both years, ITV1 covers more stories per bulletin than BBC1. In 2014 for example, it covers almost three more stories per bulletin. In order to capture news data accurately, non-news elements such as idents, mid-bulletin summaries and warnings of forthcoming stories were not coded (Brunsdon and Morley 1978). Therefore, only real news has been counted, and Table 5.2 provides temporal detail.

Table 5.2. Sample and average lengths of bulletins across channels and years.

Given their compressed format, TV bulletins are carefully arranged and packaged (Cushion et al. 2014), and an apparently long-standing shift towards shorter TV news stories (Gitlin 1980; Hallin 1994) prompts concerns that less information will be

2 “Stories” and “items” are different. In summary, a news “story” refers to the whole topic as reported in the bulletin. In practice, a story might consist of several “items”, which might be an anchor introduction, a live interview, an edited package and so on.

108 | P a g e disseminated (Harrison 2000). The data presented in Table 5.2 does not support this,

since both BBC1 and ITV1 increased their average story lengths between 2007 and 2014. This represents a considerable increase in average story lengths from 1996 for example, when late evening bulletin averages were 120 seconds on BBC, and 96 seconds on ITV (Harrison 2000), and also compared to 2002, when averages were 126 seconds on BBC and 90 seconds on ITV (Hargreaves and Thomas 2002).

ITV1 average story lengths are similar to those found by Montgomery (2007), but average lengths of BBC1 stories are appreciably longer in both years, consistent with the channel featuring fewer stories. Irrespective of any advertising breaks not included in news time, ITV1 have increased both the number of stories per bulletin and average time per story. Adding further detail, Figure 5.1 shows the lengths and frequencies of all stories on each channel in each year.

Figure 5.1 The distribution of item lengths in 2007 and 2014.

Figures 5.1 indicates that in terms of story lengths, there is a strong degree of homogeneity across channels and years. In all cases apart from ITV1 in 2007, these

109 | P a g e are bimodal distributions. The tallest spike in each chart indicates that for both

channels and in both years, the modal (most popular) story length is between 16 and 19 seconds. In all cases, again apart from ITV1 in 2007, the next most prominent story length is around 180 seconds on BBC1, and around 150 seconds on ITV1. BBC1 news stories therefore, tend to be longer in both years, despite ITV1 increasing both story time average and number of stories per bulletin. These increases within the same ITV1 bulletin are possibly due to less advertising breaks, and less summaries, idents and trailers resulting in increased “news time”.

The disturbance to the general pattern of homogeneity is the additional spike evident in the chart showing ITV1 lengths in 2007. Here, stories 49 and 50 seconds long were the second most popular length after the usual 16-19 second mode. Further analysis reveals that 29 of the 38 stories lasting 49 or 50 seconds were previews of the following morning’s newspaper headlines. This is entirely an ITV1-specific convention and one not featured on BBC1. The additional ITV1 spike had disappeared by 2014, and the mean average for the newspaper preview drops from 48.1 seconds in 2007 to 31.8 seconds in 2014. The disappearance of the 2007 spike, and the return to the neater bimodal pattern in 2014 can be therefore explained by ITV1 spending less time previewing newspapers. When interviewed for this study, ITV Head of News and Current Affairs Michael Jermey³ recalled that truncating the convention was not “a summary of news events late in the bulletins where the featured headlines had been previously covered during the bulletin. In 2007 and 2014 however, the ITV1 headline convention usually referred to newspaper headlines not featured elsewhere within the bulletin. Further contrasting with BBC1 covering fewer stories for longer, and supported by the words of Michael Jermey, it could be concluded that ITV1 covers a wider news agenda, first by addressing more stories, then by supplementing them with a newspaper preview, referring, albeit fleetingly, to more stories not referred to elsewhere in the bulletin.

3 The full transcript of this interview is found in Appendix 8.

110 | P a g e Moving now to address the prevalance of shorter stories, the following are examples

of stories covered by the modal length in each year:

Based on these examples above, claims that only trivial stories are covered briefly cannot be supported. Instead, major stories might be featured fleetingly merely to retain them within wider news agendas, even if these stories have temporarily “gone quiet”. However, this explanation seems inappropriate for the significant episodes outlined above, concerning, for example, Obama’s suggestion, the Bank of England’s reaction, and Jeremy Hunt’s announcement. None of these stories appears to be experiencing a “lull”, confirming that the space or time given to stories does not correlate with their importance, and that they might instead be shortened in the interests of bulletin “balance”.

Despite TV news audiences preferring longer items (Rosentiel et al. 1999), there might also be practical and operational reasons for covering such significant events so briefly. First, short news items reflect assumptions about viewer attention span, and the need for simplicity to satisfy fitful audiences (Williams 1998; Barnett 2012).

The model of TV news comprising short, self-contained and isolated elements (van Ginneken 1998) can be elaborated further, since shorter items are arranged in particular ways. Figure 5.2 shows how these stories are often clustered together and involve a wide range of topics.

111 | P a g e Figure 5.2 Examples of “short item clustering” across channels and years.

Grouping short stories might be explained by the requirement for fast-paced TV news. However, while such brevity might appease audiences and commercial imperatives, the practice might also define TV news as featuring headlines but no substance (Mosey 2004; Barnett 2012). Irrespective of TV news conventions, it cannot be denied that late evening bulletins are a major source of public knowledge (Cushion 2012; Barnett et al. 2012; Ofcom 2015) and “a force to be reckoned with” in terms of providing citizens with information (Schaap 2009, p.2)

112 | P a g e 5.2 EBF news : less data-driven.

Turning next to Economic, Financial and Business (EBF) news, Table 5.3 shows the frequencies of stories and the corresponding mean and median lengths in seconds across years and channels.

Table 5.3 Frequencies, means and medians of EBF categories (in seconds).

Table 5.3 shows that the focus on EBF categories further amplifies the emerging trend of homogeneity, particularly within specific and generic business stories. In 2007 on ITV1, there were only 15 Economy stories, meaning that the issue was confined to an occasional feature rather than being the subject of any routine coverage. The gap between the mean time (207.7 seconds) and the median time (172.0 seconds) further indicates the existence of a few particularly long items, underpinning the “special event” status of the Economy, and perhaps, a stable pre-crisis financial climate. As ITV1 Economy stories increase in 2014, the mean story time reflects more regular and routine coverage.

The exception to the homogenous pattern is ITV1’s Market Summary/Stock Exchange. ITV1’s focus on statistical data about shares, markets and currencies reflects descriptions of market fluctuations being “ritualistic” (Svennevig 2007, p.10).

113 | P a g e The Market Summary/Stock Exchange convention clearly distorts the overall average

for 2007 (67.1 seconds). Without this convention (see bottom of Table 5.3), the homogeneous pattern of mean and median times is restored.

In sum, including EBF news and with few exceptions, both channels have resisted the urge to truncate story lengths. The abandonment of the Market Summary/Stock Exchange is an early indicator (in terms of conventions only at this stage) that EBF reporting on ITV1 has shifted from short, data-driven interventions to longer reports.

This humanisation of EBF news is defined as a new focus on unpredictable and irregular human elements rather than quantitative data which can be extrapolated into forecasts and predictions. In sum, while there is a “diverse range of terrestrial news formats, news philosophies and news values” (Harrison 2000, p.106), in terms of EBF story lengths, this cannot be supported by the data presented here. The general theme of homogeneity can be further developed by considering bulletin content.