Before a TV Storyteller can help the viewer understand, see, feel and retain information, she or he has to personally understand, see, feel and retain the information.

Which is why the ability to communicate on TV (just as in real life) improves enormously when the Anchor or Reporter:

• Processes the information through his or her own emotions, knowledge, memory, experience and humanity.
• Makes the information personal and human rather than impersonal and abstract.
• Shares the information with one viewer instead of declaiming it at an audience.
• Makes the written words disappear into the thought so the viewer hears what is being talked about, sees what is being talked about, feels what is being talked about and even, lord help us all, remembers what is being talked about.
• Takes ownership of the information away from the script and becomes the primary source of the information.

The best performers think the script’s thoughts, see the script’s scenes and genuinely share in the script’s emotions.

The performer – the living, breathing, laughing, crying, happy, sad, good, bad, caring, careless, living, dying, human being – has to take ownership of the information before it can genuinely and honestly be shared with the viewer.

If the performer is not genuinely involved, there is nothing to give to the viewer. Charm, good looks, teeth and hair perhaps. Great pipes possibly. Nothing more.

The TV performer’s job is to seize the information and make it personal. So when the time comes to go on camera, there is something of value, a gift to give to the viewer. But the information has to be owned before it can be given.

So the performer first processes and absorbs the information, takes ownership, makes it personal. Then gives it away.

When that happens:

• The performer builds an open, honest, human relationship with the viewer.
• The performer shares accessible, absorbable information with the viewer.
• The performer triggers empathy in the viewer.
• The performer brings knowledge and even survival information to the viewer.

Knowledge is memory. It is based on recognizing and retaining facts, putting them in context and making connections among them. (Knowledge is not the same as wisdom.)

Memory is the mind’s strongest element. Everything we are and most of what we do depends on memory. Facts, information, data have no meaning, no relevance, unless they touch, find connections, in our memories.

When the viewer is told something on TV the only way he or she can understand it is by putting it into context, connecting it to something already known. Something sitting there in memory. The viewer’s memory has to click in, recognize the information, categorize it, find its relevance.

The viewer can only do all this if the performer has done it first.

Here now, a definition of the ideal professional relationship between the performer and the viewer. As best I can work it out, this answers the questions "Who is the performer ... and who is the performer talking to?"

If the performer can do all this, she or he will serve Storytelling and the people very well indeed.