The TV I-Team is Back: Better Be Ready!

[by Howard Fencl, Hennes Communications] They’re the bane of guilty players everywhere. They pop out from behind buildings and bushes as you’re scrambling to get into your car. They run you down with a microphone stuck in your face and a Frezzi light blinding you. You’re trapped like a deer in a headlight with an investigative reporter barking impertinent, probing questions at you.

Washington Post Media Columnist Margaret Sullivan recently wrote about the return of investigative teams (“I-Teams”) to TV newsrooms after their widespread extinction brought on by the economic meltdown of 2008/09. Why did they vanish from so many newsrooms? I-Teams are expensive to run. You’re typically paying a high-priced investigative reporter or two along with an investigative producer and a videographer. They don’t “turn” frequent content by their very nature – a thorough investigation takes a long time. Print management knows and accepts this. But TV people are a little more antsy.

With a 24-hour news hole to fill – a news hole that is continually shortening because of the demands of social media – TV news managers need to “feed the beast” with new content to attract viewers and deliver them to advertisers.  It’s a Sisyphean task.

An I-Team on your payroll that produces only three or four investigative pieces a year doesn’t help that task. So like any other conscientious manager, I’d try to maximize our investment by urging our investigative team to crank out stories to coincide with the Nielsen ratings periods when we could heavily promote them.

Now, according to Margaret Sullivan, TV people are realizing they need to crank out original, investigative reporting to differentiate their stations from the competition. This is not a new revelation – we knew this back in the day. An I-Team plays a huge role in TV stations reputation. But when the Great Recession hit, so did the bean counters. Now, I-Teams are back.

What does this mean for you? When you are facing a crisis and hoping beyond hope the media doesn’t shine a light on your thorny issue, the return of the I-Team means your hopes just got a little dimmer. Best to fess up and tell everything you can as soon as you can to your key audiences – or risk finding yourself on the business end of an ambush interview.  And what’s the best way to handle an investigative reporter if you are ambushed by an I-Team? Be sure to read our next e-newsletter for that.

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Howard Fencl served as assistant news director at WKYC-TV, Cleveland, Ohio and held newsroom management positions at WEWS-TV and WBNS-TV.