You ever wondered why, among all the fabulous typos I gleefully run here in the blog, so many of them are TV graphics?
Like this one from last January:
Or this one from August of last year:
Or this really horrifying one from March:
Ahem. The bear cub’s name was Knut.
Well, I have. You’d think that once they embarrassed themselves once or twice or a dozen times, at TV news operation would think about bringing in a copy editor to check those things over before they’re shoved before our eyeballs.
John Christopher Burns is a television (and print) designer and reader of this blog. He tells us those little labels beneath the main picture is called a super.
John writes:
The deal with the supers is: As stations shift from having an actual live character generator operator (who, almost always without j-school-ish training, often served as the copy desk and the last line of defense against misspellings and, uh, lawsuits) to a system where reporters enter the text into templates in their newsroom systems (often AP’s ENPS system) which directly sends them to the character generator and then the director (who used to be one of about 5 humans in the control room; now he or she is there with a sole producer from the newsroom, if that) can glance at them in the less than a second before they hit air and if wrong, they can reject them.
And the attitude of the reporters, uniformly in a hurry, is “why the hell do I have to type these in?” So there’s a recipe for quality.
It’s really hard to make the case to station management that having a human in the chair really makes a qualitative difference — I’ve tried, I’ve tried.
I should say this is no big secret in the TV industry (just as the newspaper business is well aware of its own evisceration). It’s accepted, glumly.
So there really is no one to make sure that the logo for Seal Team Six really is the logo for Seal Team Six…
…and not a Star Trek fan invention complete with Klingon bat’leth weapons, a Klingon skull and an Eagle carrying a phaser. Which is a mistake a German TV network made last May.
And there really is no one to make sure that the picture of Sarah Palin behind an anchor…
…really is Sarah Palin and not Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. Which is a mistake Fox News made back in June.
John says there are really only two people running a news broadcast these days:
One person in the control room — the director:
- Switches video sources
- Runs audio
- Rolls clips off of a server
- Adds graphics
- Keeps a general sense of timing
- Corrals the robotic cameras into their preset positions…and has to scramble if for some reason the camera decides to suddenly shift its framing to random objects off in the distance (there are a whole collection of youtube videos that shows this increasingly common blooper.)
- And communicates with…
…a producer (in most setups, the only other person in the room) who:
- Arranges and rearranges stories
- Communicates with remote crews
- Types in last-minute graphics
- Ultimately is responsible for show timing and content
- And talks to anchors and reporters through their earpieces.
Increasingly, this duo doesn’t just do one or two newscasts an evening–because their station manager has made a deal, they also originate the Fox or CW 10 p.m. version of the very same news.
In the mornings, the shows stretch on for hours. Productivity!
From there, John and I got into a bit of a conversation…
Q. Can you define “super”? I presume that’s short for superimposed text.
A. Yeah, a “lower third super” is a interviewee’s name and title, or a headline, or a ‘locator’ like “Midtown Atlanta/last night”.
I think the late Don Hewitt of CBS coined the term. Many people call these superimposed titles “Chyrons”, after one popular piece of CG hardware.
Of course, many of the TV typos we find are in these “lower third supers.” Like this one from Charlotte last month:
Or this one from Harrisburg, Pa., last May:
It was a tree that fell on her car.
Or this one from the BBC in September:
Or this one last week from Los Angeles:
Or this one from ABC News Wednesday night:
Q. For what it’s worth, the reason for increased errors in newspapers is similar. Papers have cut back drastically on copy editors.
A. As well I know! I was a print major at Ohio U’s j-school and most of my closest friends from school have been through the hell-cycle of buyouts and cutbacks. Some have actually survived…one, in fact is the best copy editor on the planet (but I’m biased, we’re old friends.)
Of course she does that for a magazine chain, not a newspaper, these days. I survived–did well, in fact–by becoming a designer for television. I’d like to say I foresaw all of this, but really I’ve worked in TV because 1) they would actually hire me and 2) they pay marginally better than print.
I was actually a member of SND back in the mid-to-late 80s… always been trying to bring print design techniques to broadcast and, to some extent, vice-versa.
Q. A couple of years ago, a large paper in a large city warned its reporters that copy would be posted online and occasionally put onto pages without any copy editing at all from now on. When that memo was leaked to me was the moment I decided I needed to advocate a little more strongly for copy editors.
A. Yeah, I read your stuff regularly for that very reason. Important to call out all these little screwups and bad choices… in the aggregate they tell a sweeping tale of decline.
A product of Goddard College in Vermont and Ohio University, John worked in master control for WTCG Channel 17 in Atlanta — yeah, Ted Turner‘s station. He was there as it morphed into “SuperStation WTBS”, eventually becoming manager of creative services for Turner Broadcasting. He left to create Television by Design, a design firm for TV stations and networks. He sold his firm in 1988 to do solo consulting work, including redesigns for CNN Headline News, Good Morning America and a ton of others.
Just a few quick samples of his work:
Find his portfolio site here, his official bio here and his blog here.
