Here’s John Hockenberry, who worked for 9 years at Dateline NBC, on the cur­rent state of net­work journalism:

“You Don’t Understand Our Audience” What I learned about net­work tele­vi­sion at Dateline NBC.

At the moment Zucker blew in and inter­rupted, I had been in Corvo’s office to pro­pose a series of sto­ries about al-​​Qaeda, which was just emerging as a sus­pect in the attacks. While well known in secu­rity cir­cles and among jour­nal­ists who tried to cover inter­na­tional Islamist move­ments, al-​​Qaeda as a ter­rorist orga­ni­za­tion and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11. It had occurred to me and a number of other jour­nal­ists that a core mis­sion of NBC News would now be to explain, even belat­edly, the ori­gins and sig­nif­i­cance of these orga­ni­za­tions. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the fire­fighters. The story of fire­fighters trapped in the crum­bling towers, Zucker said, was the emo­tional center of this whole event. Corvo enthu­si­as­ti­cally agreed. “Maybe,” said Zucker, “we ought to do a series of spe­cials on fire­houses where we just ride along with our cam­eras. Like the show Cops, only with fire­fighters.” He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-​​time lineup for fire­fighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any sub­ti­tled inter­views with jihadists raging about Palestine.

Here’s Nick Hornby inter­viewing David Simon, cre­ator of The Wire:

““My Standard For Verisimilitude Is Simple And I Came To It When I Started To Write Prose Narrative: Fuck The Average Reader.”

That’s a good title, and the whole thing is decent, as per usual with David Simon inter­views. The dude likes to talk. Nowadays about half the internet is David Simon interviews.

Which brings us back to Average Reader. Because the truth is you can’t write just for people living the event, if the market will not also follow. TV still being some­thing of a mass medium, even with all the frac­tured cable uni­verse now reducing audi­ence size per channel. Well, here’s a secret that I learned with Homicide and have held to: if you write some­thing that is so cred­ible that the insider will stay with you, then the out­sider will follow as well. Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill—these are trav­el­ogues of a kind, allowing Average Reader/​Viewer to go where he oth­er­wise would not. He loves being immersed in a new, con­fusing, and pos­sibly dan­gerous world that he will never see. He likes not knowing every bit of ver­nac­ular or idiom. He likes being trusted to acquire infor­ma­tion on his terms, to make con­nec­tions, to take the journey with only his intel­li­gence to guide him. Most smart people cannot watch most TV, because it has gen­er­ally been a con­de­scending medium, explaining every­thing imme­di­ately, offering no ambi­gu­i­ties, and using dia­logue that sim­pli­fies and mit­i­gates against the idio­syn­cratic ways in which people in dif­ferent worlds actu­ally com­mu­ni­cate. It even­tu­ally requires that char­ac­ters from dif­ferent places talk the same way as the viewer. This, of course, sucks.

Also see this from The Atlantic for a dis­senting view on Simon the person and the state of his almighty verisimilitude:

The Angriest Man In Television

Notice how­ever that there isn’t a single claim in there that The Wire isn’t the best thing on tv. Not that I watch tv.

And finally here’s kindly David Lynch on the iPhone movie-​​viewing experience: