i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

This hilarious 2 minute video entitled "How to Report the News" is a satirical piece looking at the structure of news on TV. The video is in the format of a 2 minute news story but rather than present an actual piece of news each element of the news spot is replaced with its abstracted element.  The video is a metadata view at the predictable composition of the news.  The video's creator has done an excellent job of marking up typical news videos into an almost "microformat" of sorts.

example: "a walking, talking preamble pacing steadily towards the lens, punctuating every other sentence..."

The video is poking fun at how news on the television follows a prescribed formula....but is this really a bad thing?  Sure, news does not get generated in the most artistic and creative manner but if this were the case wouldn't the vehicle distract the viewers from the underlying message being conveyed.