I hesitate to call most television reporting “journalism.� Yet, I got a very good taste of the difficulty of creating a TV news broadcast today in News On Screen. Our in-class writing assignment gave us 80 minutes to distill a NY Times article, some shots, and a couple interviews into a 300 word news story. At the end of that time, I wasn’t finished, nor was half of the class. It is very very hard to simplify down a story for television, to write to your footage, and to get the facts across in one and a half minutes of screen time. I have a newfound respect for news writers now, although I still don’t really approve of the whole process.