THURSDAY NEWS

We know we are a little late with this post, but we had to let it sink in just a bit before commenting.

The first thing we would like to mention is C News' Neil Beekhee's interview with Monsignor Christian Perreira of the Catholic church (his name was spelt Perreria and shown twice during the interview). For the entire five-minute interview, we saw only a profile shot of Monsignor Perreira. Neil, when you are doing one-on-one interviews, take a page out of the books of the BBC & CNN correspondents who stand with their backs as close as possible to the camera so that the interviewee is facing the camera. Otherwise you will end up with an interview where the viewer is not paying attention to what is being said, but constantly asking themselves "Why are we only seeing the side of his/her face?".
But that's not your fault entirely, since your cameraman and producer should have discussed this with you before you went live.

And at the end of the interview, instead of the cameraman giving the viewers a single shot of you while you gave your closing remarks, he stayed with the shot on both you and Monsignor Perreira, who seemed to be looking at you in the monitor on the floor in front of him. Again, if you and your cameraman look at the international newscasts, you'll see that the cameraman automatically zooms in on the reporter at the end of the interview, cutting the interviewee out of the shot, because let's face it, his work is done and he is no longer needed in the shot.

Then we go to CNC 3's Shelly Dass, who seemed to have some difficulty pronouncing the name of the Tobago athlete in the men's 400M. Say with us Shelly, Qu, Qu, Quow. It's Rennie Quow, not 'cow' as we are sure we heard you say during the voice over. At least we heard you give the correct pronunciation when you came back on the screen.

Next it's over to TV6's Joel Villafana for the Olympic Wrap. He said something about Day 'tirteen', while his colleague James Saunders told us of the Dutch water polo sensation Danielle de Bruijn, but his pronunciation of her name was more along the lines of "de Boohin". See for yourself if he gave the correct pronunciation by typing in her name on this website and hit Say It!.

And Astil Renn of CNC 3, we were hoping you wouldn't give us any more shaky fan footage of T&T's World Cup qualifying matches, but you did. Sigh! Astil, we understand your exuberance in receiving that video and wanting to share it with your viewers, but it's really no fault of your viewers that your newsroom couldn't spend a couple thousand dollars to send a cameraman to Cuba to shoot the game properly for you. You have to realise that just one shaky, out of focus, poor audio and video story (unless that video was shot during a thunderstorm or earthquake so the shaking would be justifiable) drags down the otherwise good quality of the rest of your sportscast.
Well at this point we have to say like Jacques Rogge on Usain Bolt: he is young, he will learn. At least we hope so.

And has anchorman Sampson Nanton been relegated to the sports desk? We came to that conclusion since he has been the exclusive reporter on a series of stories on the Great Race. We know your sports desk has been depleted recently so you probably have no choice but to use Sampson. And we are guessing that he will be reporting from Tobago at the end of the Great Race, unless you Astil can convince your bosses to send you across there for this all expenses paid party weekend.

And finally Astil you voiced a packaged story about a corporate sponsor, but instead of saying the HCL Group of Companies, you said the HDC Group of Companies (with a shot of HCL Communications Manager Lisa Ghany-Weekes). Tsk tsk.

BTW, as a follow up to news, on Friday night we heard this classic from Naette Lee. During the 7 o'clock hour she was telling her viewers that the bodies of two elderly women had been found.
"The decomposing bodies were found in a house....fully decomposed."
Well she paused for a few seconds afterwards when she realised she had said utter nonsense.
Naette, please read your scripts before you go on the air.
Yes you can blame the person who wrote the script, but if you had read it before, you would have caught the mistake and made the necessary change.