Covering Foreign Events

Flying television and online reporters to the United Kingdom to cover the funeral of the Queen of the British Empire involves a lot of money: airfare, hotels, rental cars, meals and hair. Cameras are lighter now so we’ll assume they travelled with their own equipment.

This is wasteful because it doesn’t improve the quality of what we will see on television. All thousand cameras from global television stations will show the same moving photos e.g. the funeral procession, the Anglican Church chief reading from an ancient bible, grieving princes and duchesses etc.

In other words, no television station will have exclusive coverage of the funeral. Excessive camera presence in such events used to be necessary because there was no internet. Viewers used to wait for the six o’clock news to learn how the funeral or wedding went. Today everything is in their phones live, which means the same moving photos for the rest of the world.

Exclusive. What will be exclusive is commentary. Television stations have started with opinion about arrangements for the funeral and flowers outside palaces to mourn the deceased. They are combing the archives for her old photos. They are interviewing historians and royal biographers about royal funerals and what the horses will be wearing.

Twitter minimized the need for big camera crews a long time ago, but in this case, those cellphones outside the gates cannot get images as sharp as television cameras.

Still, breaking news is collected and shared digitally now so there is no need for television stations from all over world to fly to one destination, to collect one image. It is possible for one source to do the coverage and feed it to all channels. Big media crews are redundant.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.