This week, we mainly watched two episodes of The Newsroom. The show give me a clear idea of how the newsroom runs and what’s the important element of a great show.

At the beginning of the show, The main character Will’s speech show a lot of problem of the media industry. For a journalist, don’t shows your own political opinion is actually importance, you won’t offended your audiences. Every move you made on the TV show won’t be ignored and the anchor’s choice will be judge be the audiences and no matter what there will be people against it. Internet troll are all over the society right now. If you have certain amount attention and fans, the internet troll will pay more attention on you and they will twist your opinion to get more attention. The speech Will made almost get his career over, his producer hopped and take most of his stuff with him afterward. But in my opinion, his speech was just telling the truth.

After the whole drama, they produced a great show. It really told us what’s the most important element of a great show. Jim, the senior producer became to be the center of that episode. He discovered the news which has potential and actively followed up. When his supervisor disagree with his thoughts, he didn’t shrink back, use his knowledge tried to get deeper news. At this point, he fortunately get some secret news from two of his informants. So the secret of success in the newsroom is that you need to have sharp observation, full of knowledge, good resources and good luck. That’s how you determine the right news. But run the show is a totally different story. It takes a whole team to create a show. The anchor Will don’t need teleprompter, the EP can pull things together really quick, and it need all kinds of assistant to create a complete show.

Through the story moving we can tell, Will is becoming a nice character on the screen, adjust the content of show for the audience rating over and over again, he forgot the original passion of making news, I think that is a problem for us right now. Unlike decades before, we only have six major companies are running the television, the competition has been brought to upper level. On one side, that’s a good sign, became people will have more motivation to create new things, but on the other side, producers will make compromise for better audience rating.