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Thursday 10 March 2011

NEWSPAPER REVIEWS ON TELEVISION - HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?


It has become a common feature on all morning shows in major television stations in Kenya. A review of the day's newspapers. But just how much revelation is too much? At times one completely loses the motivation to purchase a paper, after sitting through a newspaper review on TV.

The general feel of what is on offer in the dailies is much appreciated, at times the details are unleashed with careless abandon to the point of discouraging one from wanting to purchase the physical newspaper.

It even gets worse, when the studio hosts literally embark on extracting the stories on a page by page basis, followed by a remarkably detailed discussion of the same, never mind the fact that the interpretation at times is a bit suspect.

True, it could be argued that not many people have the capacity to buy a newspaper on a regular basis and so the information they get from the television newspaper reviews is all they get to have.

But is that reason enough to deny those who can, the satisfaction of fully enjoying the actual printed stories, once they get their hands on their favourite daily?

Imagine if a film review is to give away the entire plot of a movie. How many people would feel compelled to want to catch the flick later?

Good film reviews give skeletal details, which on the contrary is essentially used to spur more interest in the movie being reviewed. That, I think, should be the approach taken by broadcasting stations.


There is no harm of course, in picking out particular stories for analysis and even inviting knowledgeable people to give their personal opinions, the stress being on personal, similar to what BBC usually does.

Of particular interest is the fact that the local newspaper publishers never seem to mind the way the content of their papers is dished out in copious amounts during the early morning television shows. This is just when many of them would ordinarily expect buyers to purchase the same newspapers.

7 comments:

Mhoss said...

Wait till you watch K-24 NP review, they do the review page per page. Am surprised they'll soon start reading the orbituaries page.

Anonymous said...

I feel you on the same, its like the TV stations dont have the energy to go out and get real interesting news or human stories to fill our lives instead of spewing out something we can read for ourselves. the shame is that as we are movings towards vision 2030 our TV stations have stagnated, there are no new ideas , they fill our evenings with mexican soap operas and nigerian movies. Its so sad that even a station like KTN which had the lead role in content has just been left as a mere copy cat in terms of their new innovative ideas. lets get some fresh blood in this places lest we find ourselves back to the dark days of KBC being the only informative channel. lets get a better future for our kids.

Anonymous said...

To say that someone looses the motivation to buy a newspaper because it has been reviewed on Television is an absurd argument. Those people who buy newspapers know why they buy them and those who rely on Television and lose motivation after reviews would rarely buy a newspaper even without the review!!

Yulemboismndialala said...

Well put. It's quite surprising how much information is dished out in these reviews, but being less of a conventional newspaper reader and more of the online snippet gobbler, my only concern is usually as concerns the views they peddle in their interpretation-correlation role of said info

Geo Nalugala said...

It still is wrong for a news source to 'plagiarise' another. Never does it benefit a viewer to be told all that a newspaper has reported before they leave the house. But one can understand why they do that: I get the feeling that the media do not focus training on reviews and summaries. A good critic would whet the viewers' desire to go out and buy yet keep the shows interesting. Otherwise, this could be media sabotaging the sales of others... Just a loud thought.

Anonymous said...

We also read the same newspapers on the internet

Anonymous said...

This is an absurd argument...it is like saying we should not have book reviews! What i dislike though is the fact that some of the morons on TV give little thought to their commentary.