A Few Things TV News Could Learn from Documentaries
-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on March 4, 2026
The True/False Film Fest happens this week in Columbia. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s no surprise. It doesn’t draw the celebrities that Sundance does, nor the European glamour of Cannes. But quietly, for the past two decades, it’s grown to be one of the top five documentary film festivals in the entire world. Late each winter, the planet’s best documentary filmmakers descend on this Missouri college town to share their own films, watch each other’s films and advance the documentary discipline.
My history with True/False goes back almost to the very beginning.
When it started in 2004, it was as small as a festival can be—a handful of films shown in a venue that didn’t usually play films. I didn’t hear about True/False until after it was over, but I made sure to attend the next year. And, save one year, I’ve attended it every year since, making this year the 21st time I’ve attended the fest (that cover photo shows all my tickets for the fest in 2016—and yes, those are tickets to the 17 films I ended up seeing during that four-day festival). But I’ve done more than just attend. For half a dozen years, I was a screener for the festival. Screeners are the first eyes that watch films submitted for the fest.
As a screener, I would watch about 50 films each fall, reviewing and ranking them so the programmers would know which good films they should watch and which bad films should never be watched again. I like to describe my role like this: I didn’t decide what films got into the festival—the programmers did that—but I could sure decide what films didn’t get into the festival!
The festival played a role in my teaching, too. In 2014, when I stepped out of the news director role at KOMU-TV and started the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism with filmmaker Robert Greene (who was referred to us by True/False co-founder Paul Sturtz), we used the festival as an essential resource. We partnered with the True/False for off-season screenings, used its guests to populate much of our Visiting Artist series to speak to our classes and, as mentioned before, I became a screener. Watching hundreds of documentaries for the festival honed my ability not only to discern what I liked about the good films, but also what wasn’t working in the weaker films. That helped me work with students to figure out the best structure and execution for their films and develop a system to help plan and execute short documentaries.
Immersing myself in documentaries at the festival once again this week has me thinking about what these films offer to us in TV news.
We know documentaries are at peak popularity right now. What we typically think of as documentaries—nonfiction films that explore important subject matter—are always at the top of the streaming charts. Documentary-adjacent content like podcasts are also top of mind for people looking to be informed, engaged and entertained. TV news, on the other hand, has become something to be consumed occasionally, no longer appointment television for most families. Perhaps we could get back some of that excitement by embracing one element that makes documentaries a magnet for audiences—characters about whom we care. The best documentaries introduce us to and have us observe—or even inhabit—the lives of interesting people. We do that in TV news, too, humanizing our stories with people affected by what we’re covering. But we don’t do it often enough or well enough. It’s all too common to see a story that clearly affects a lot of people contain only talking heads from officials.
There’s a sense in many reporters that as long as they come back with some sound, they’re fine. But not all sound bites are created equal and sound from the person who just lost his job due to tariffs is a lot more engaging than sound from an econ professor explaining why it happened. Getting the facts of our stories is generally easy. Finding the right characters with whom the audience can connect takes more work. But if we do it well, it will pay off with viewer interest, just like it does for documentary audiences.
As we seek some better characters for our story, we need to treat them like documentary filmmakers do, as collaborators, not just sound bites.
The typical TV news interview is very extractive. We show up, find someone to interview, stick a camera and mic in that person’s face and start asking questions. As soon as we have what we need, we end the interview and leave. The person we’re interviewing gets very little from the process. We used to be able to at least tell interviewees they’d be on TV that night. No one cares much about that anymore, so it’s not much compensation. Let’s instead have them help us conceive the story, tell us what’s important for them and help us create stories that connect as documentaries do. Most of this work will happen off camera, before we begin the actual interview. That will mean any character we want to feature in a story will already be invested in helping create the report. Now, you may be saying there’s not enough time to do this on today’s newsgathering schedule, but I have an answer for that, too.
Documentary filmmakers have some luxury when it comes to their deadlines.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a film at a festival and, during the Q&A session that followed, the filmmaker talks about working on the project for years—even for documentary shorts. That’s an unreasonable timetable for TV news, of course, but there are some habits we have that are keeping us from spending more time on stories. Perhaps the most burdensome is the notion that nearly all stories should be turned in a day. TV newsrooms are still scheduling reporters the same way they did in the 1970s, with shooting, writing and editing stories in just a few hours as the most common approach. While I understand the need to get content out of each reporter on a daily basis, nothing says that each reporter has to do all the work in one day. With more creative scheduling, nearly all of a newsroom’s general assignment reporters could be working on multiple stories all at the same time.
Each reporter could still turn in a story each day for air, but those could be stories that have been in the reporting pipeline for a week or more. As long as reporters have multiple projects going at the same time (like most people do in their jobs), they can spend more time and connect more with the characters in the stories. I call this “project management-style” reporting, meaning each journalist is responsible for juggling a number of stories (projects) all at the same time. Newsrooms can keep a handful of reporters separate from this system to cover breaking news or stories that demand short turnaround. But slowing down the reporting cycle without reducing the volume of content would ultimately result in better quality reporting across the board, not to mention more audience appeal.
Documentaries do something else TV news has always been bad at—they give us more.
More facts, sure, but also more to care about. Today’s media mix means most people get the little snippets of news they need to keep up right from their phones. We wake up to our phones as alarms, scroll through to see what happened overnight as we get ready and check them all day long to see what news is breaking. Our TV newscasts don’t need to do the work they used to do filling us in on a couple of dozen stories, all 20 seconds at a time. A high story count used to be something to shoot for; now it’s yet another metric of a newscast that won’t break through the clutter. People crave something deeper into which they can sink their teeth. That’s why documentaries continue to grow in popularity, as do long-read magazine pieces. We get tired of information snacks and want a hearty meal from time to time. Newscasts should slow their pace and devote time to longer stories that feature the characters discussed above, giving those characters the time to take us on a journey with them. With this approach, reporters can employ other techniques that take more time to employ, like using the three-act structure to build pieces that appeal to the natural storytelling urge in all of us.
Documentaries often succeed by breaking the rules.
For the sake of this discussion, I’m not talking about breaking journalistic rules. That’s commonplace in many documentaries, as most have a point of view—a bias, if you will—that good TV news does not. I’m talking about breaking the visual rules of how we construct our stories. For instance, documentaries don’t care about jump cuts or, for that matter, editing in short, matched action sequences. That sort of editing is already getting hard to find in most TV newscasts, so we ought to embrace the creativity that comes from not worrying about such a rule. Trust me, I’m not advocating random, sloppy editing. Instead, I want intentionality in an edit that’s not constrained by rules that take us away from what we’re watching. If you’re following a character and you have to move the camera to follow her, that’s fine. I don’t even care if she goes out of focus while you find the shot again. Show me the complete scene of she’s doing and don’t put a random cutaway in to avoid a jump cut. We need to let the story arc we’ve worked out with our characters breathe on its own. The visuals should take a more natural path than they often do in TV news, less constructed and more organic.
If you’re a TV reporter (or a manager who supervises them), sit down tonight and pick a documentary from one of the streaming services. Watch it all the way through. Then, while it’s fresh in your mind, make some notes on what you liked about its structure, storytelling style, character use and visual approach. Repeat this process a few times over the next couple of weeks. In the end, you’ll have a shopping list of things to test out on some TV news stories. Not everything you like in the documentaries will work in the TV stories. But something will. And that’s the place to start.