They’re a staple in the news industry, in the entertainment industry. Even in politics. Teleprompters — with their warmly reassuring text scrolling by as the technician in the booth tries to match your cadence so as not to jump ahead too quickly — it’s the public speech equivalent of working with a net.
But I don’t use them.
It’s a policy I have with my team at Tuiris. It’s not that I don’t like teleprompters — I worked with them for 20 years in my previous career. But my approach represents the fundamental key idea of how I believe information should be spread. Person to person. A lively, engaging, HUMAN way of speaking. I’m not telling anyone the news. I’m sharing it. I’m not talking to them, I’m talking with them.
A guiding principle we try to use is — while we’re busy committing our lines to memory before we tape — imagine sitting in your best friend’s kitchen. Cup of hot tea in your hands. Be in that moment. Now — tell them a story.
Audiences deserve to have their intelligence assumed. They deserve to be engaged with as human beings. At the end of the day, the stories we’re sharing are everyone’s stories. They are universal truths of the human condition; everyone has an interest in these subjects, to one degree or another. And it’s precisely that humanity that sets our reporting apart.
It’s as much in the telling of the story as it is in the story itself. That’s what people care about, that’s what engages them. That’s how they — and we all — learn.