Nova’s newsroom recently came up with the We Live With You (Žijeme s vámi) campaign. Is this campaign the culmination of several years of changes in journalism? Or is the commercial TV channel planning further changes? This is what Kamil Houska, director of News at Nova television, revealed in an interview.
Does the We Live With You campaign conclude the changes in news coverage that began about eight years ago?
No, this campaign is a natural continuation of them. We have transformed the news significantly over the past eight years. It's not the Nova it used to be. The news is much more serious, we deal with serious issues etc.
And this campaign is to draw attention to that. It's one thing that our viewers know this already, but people who may not have watched us in the past may not have noticed this transformation. We want to remind them that our news is modern, different. We want them to notice that.
The campaign is designed to do that, and we also deliberately chose the slogan "We live with you" so that people perceive us as their television, that we are not someone in Prague who broadcasts something for them, who is far away, but that we are part of their lives.
The campaign is actually the culmination of the changes, it is meant to underline them and to emphasise to people that we are there for them.
How did you think about that? Why this particular slogan? Did you have other options?
We started from the fact that even before the campaign we had started doing a column called On Your Side (Na vaší straně), where we advocate for people, whether they complain about the quality or poor quality of food in supermarkets, or if they have had disputes at the airport, for example, or have been tricked by scammers.
Actually, the slogans On Your Side and Living with You are awfully similar. The main idea is the same: we are here for people, we want to show them that we live the same lives, we are concerned about the same things as them. We want to help them, so in a way, you could say, it builds on each other.
For example, when we did the first supermarket check, the broadcast assistants couldn't keep up with reading emails and answering phones. Because it turned out to be a pressing problem. People were sending us hundreds of photographs a day, specific stores, what they had encountered and where, and it helped us a lot in that column because we could then go specifically to where those people were complaining that something was wrong.
As part of the current campaign, we have then started to communicate again on an increased scale by mobile phone to the editorial office and email address and we want people to send us tips, to tell us what is bothering them. I have to say that I've been very pleasantly surprised that there are dozens of contributions a day.
You can see that people trust us to check everything out, which of course we do. Since the spring, we've aired twenty or more reports that have come directly from viewers.
Last year you introduced a new studio, in the autumn you started a new format called Weekend Breakfast (Víkendová snídaně), you changed Breakfast with Nova (Snídaně s Novou)…
And now we're focusing on the On Your Side column. Because we think it's missing here in the Czech Republic, when someone really stands up for ordinary people, because the problems they have in relation to the authorities, to companies, to business, are many.
At the end of June we launched our new column Storm Chasers (Lovci bouřek). After the first shoot, we already had a fantastic reaction because the team filmed the supercell, they were in the places where the storm was progressing. We had tens of thousands of views online.
And maybe that's another thing that we want to emphasize especially now in the summer months, because we think that weather is the segment that our viewers are interested in, it affects everyone's life.
Do you foresee any personnel changes within the newsroom?
We have very good people, interesting faces, if I use our TV lingo. On the other hand, of course, we are always looking for new talent, both unknown people who we think have potential, and of course we are also looking for people who work elsewhere but are interesting and would be an asset to our newsroom.
We're going all ways, so you might even see some new people with us.
In the visuals for the Living with You campaign, Lucie Borhyová and Rey Koranteng stand side by side, but the other two pairs are separated...
We did that deliberately because we wanted people to see them as six separate people when they look at the billboard, not as individual couples, so we partially scattered them. That was the only reason, there's nothing else to it.
I can say for sure that we are very happy with the pairs in Televizní noviny. They are everything that the show should represent, whether in age, experience, we have a young couple, we have one of the most popular couples in the Czech Republic ever...
You're not planning on expanding the team?
I've long been an advocate of having a minimum of presenters on every show because you, as a viewer, need to remember the face and you need to identify with the show and the face. As they've always said, every show should have a fixed airtime and an interesting face.
Three couples is the maximum. As soon as you put more people on, you're going to fragment attention unnecessarily. On the other hand, you can't have one couple, not even two, because if one gets sick, you get in trouble.
Three is absolutely the ideal number for us at the moment, it's still a compact unit so that people can identify with them and have them associated with one show and it also allows you to comfortably divide shifts between them and function comfortably.
You said in an interview about two years ago that you would like to have just one pair.
At one time, we entertained the idea of having one pair that would serve Monday through Friday and then one weekend pair. But it runs into a lot of organizational problems. So as I said, three pairs is kind of the ideal, but we certainly don't want to expand the number.
When you say Televizní noviny, the viewer really needs to imagine a limited number of people who symbolise that show with their faces.
For some programmes we have significantly reduced the number of presenters, such as Snídaně s Novou, which used to have up to five presenters, one for each day. Now we only separate the weekend format (Víkendová snídaně) from the standard one, but we have one pair on the standard breakfast Monday to Friday. That's a show where it can be done, that's where it makes sense.
Are you looking for inspiration abroad?
Very often. We focus more on the United States than Europe. It seems to us that American media is further away in some ways and many things that work there are transferable to the Czech Republic.
We are constantly analysing trends abroad, trying to implement these things here, because there is no need to invent some things if they already exist somewhere else, they just need to be reworked to make them work in the Czech Republic.
In addition, we use a lot of CME, which has other TV stations in several Eastern European countries. We work very closely together and I have to say that we can inspire each other with a lot of things. Some things are purely local, and what works in Romania or Slovenia, for example, doesn't work here.
In some aspects the audience is different, but many things are usable. In addition, we also cooperate on the basis of, for example, graphics or artificial intelligence. Together we are trying to test it to see how it can be used in the future.
When CME has this kind of coverage, you don't need that many foreign correspondents.
This is where we run into a language barrier. Czechs understand Slovak, we use Slovak reporters very often in Slovakia in live broadcast, but you cannot do this with a Romanian journalist. Not that our colleagues would not do it for us, but it would have to be in English and we would have to translate it. But we get along, we share materials and videos often.
Hypothetically, if I want to shoot something in Croatia now, I'll call my colleague and she'll be as helpful as possible and she'll film the material for me and I'll do the voice over here in Prague and put it together myself.
So you only have a foreign correspondent in Brussels...
We have a foreign correspondent in Brussels because we think it's important that many things that affect the daily lives of Czechs happen there. It's not just something we wanted to try. No, we're serious about it and we're going to be there for the long run, and now other CME TV stations have joined in, and they've already got new people there.
But in general, I would say that a wide network of foreign correspondents doesn't really make sense for commercial television at a time when all sorts of collaborations are in place, agencies....
Brussels makes sense because you are there every day shooting something that has an immediate impact on the Czech Republic, otherwise we use agencies and exchange material between friendly CME-based TV stations or others with whom we have good relations.
Why do you think Televizní noviny is the most watched?
I think it's the most watched because we don't play games. We report on common things that people are concerned about and then I think it's the clarity of it. We don't want to make television that only a person with three college degrees can understand. We want to lay out what we're saying, even a complex issue, in an understandable way that a college student as well as a factory worker can understand.
The world really is a terribly complex place, and we say so in our campaign. And that is also true for a person who is informed, whether he is a journalist or a politician. Our strength lies in the fact that we are able to make it understandable to people in a good way, to retell what is important and to explain it.
You'll be the last to start with TV News at 7:30. Do you have a survey of how many people start with the first news on CNN Prima News, then switch to Czech Television and watch the first news there and end up with you, and then if they finish watching your Televizní noviny?
I would like to say two things about that. The first one is that there is a certain overlap of people who watch maybe two or three shows and switch over. The second is that times have changed enormously. Evening television news, whether ours or our competitors’, is no longer about people learning something new. In the age of the Internet and social media, they know what's going on in their neighborhood and in the world.
We used to be very mindful about what news we would open the evening broadcast with, that would give it the greatest importance and urgency at the same time. Today it is not so important. People don't approach the evening news programme, in most cases, in the style of "Now I'm going to learn something new". We give them a comprehensive summary and explanation of what happened and why in the evening.
That said, it's no longer the case that the most important piece is at the top. But neither are the negative predictions that people won't watch the news on TV because they'll consume news on the internet. Because it turns out that viewers will sit down in front of the TV in the evening anyway.
We know from the surveys that their main argument is: we know this, but you wrap it up for us tonight in some kind of a whole and we'll wrap up our day, we'll sum it all up at the end of the day.
Do you see CNN Prima News or Czech Television as the biggest competition domestically?
In terms of news, for me, it's primarily Czech Television, and that's due to the strength of the coverage, the amount of people, the amount of information that they bring. I don't mean to say that Prima is no competition for me, the competition for me is everyone, including your iDNES.cz, just everyone in the media space.
But yes, if you ask me who is the main competitor for me, it's Czech Television. That's a strong newsroom and we want to compete with it, even for certain events, like the coronation of the British king, and we managed to win that battle there in our target group of 15-54.
Has the return of the Víkend magazine to the airwaves during the week proved successful?
It's very nice positive journalism. When we incorporated it into Víkendová snídaně before, we wanted to link it logically and thematically to that, after all it is called Víkend (Weekend). It worked well within it too, but people wrote to us saying they were used to the format on its own.
So we experimented again. And it turned out that when we put it on Mondays, it showed excellent numbers, so changing the day and the slot benefited it tremendously. So we are very happy with that.
Source: idnes.cz
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