[Stockland Hillman]

I agree that this is one weakness of this set – it looks like there are just two relatively small vertical monitors. Having a big horizontal monitor or video wall off to the side would be nice to have as an option to do visual standups. And that's also why I think this set would be perfect for a midday rolling news block with a single anchor where there isn't a ton of that kind of stuff anyway.

Maybe a newsroom backdrop is just another office space to some people. Still, I think it's a nice visual reminder to communicate to viewers that the program they're watching is part of a larger news operation. There's an entire crew of people off-camera working hard to gather the news. Media literacy and trust in media is so low that I don't think we can take that for granted. I think there are sadly enough people out there who will cynically call the news "fake" if they think the content is "fake" and see only one presenter on air with a boring "fake" backdrop behind them. In their view, what makes that any different from someone doing the same thing on YouTube in their basement?

Bingo. That's a very astute observation and something some highly paid broadcast consultants have pitched.

All things can be faked, with much less effort these days, but you can sort both sides of the trust problem by placing the story within real - randomly moving environments, ideally with stedicam style shooting to make it very hard to recreate as fake news. It gives subconscious signs of reality to the viewer and shows a bigger scale organisation responsible for the content.

Fakes or low trust sources are static greenscreen shots of generic distant newsrooms or looping graphics; sometimes with mockup gfx of a trusted news source - it's easy to do and low effort/cost.

Want to build trust, then show the whole production process (sonething like v1 Channel 5 news at least) Shoot as dynamically as possible.

Humans are wired to see other humans in an environment, and can spot incongreguities with a picture. So it's vital that news organisations build trust by projecting its scale, and with a consistent visual language (its why the slack brand standards of the BBC are actually a bad thing, not because they annoy anoraks but they undermine the ability of real people to start identifying fakes)