news anchor

The heyday of the TV news anchor might be over (sorry, Ron Burgundy), but many of us still remember the soothing tones of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Diane Sawyer floating through our living rooms growing up. Their voices were commanding and authoritative, yet friendly. They were deep and satisfying, and somehow without any trace of accent or regionalism. Just pure professionalism.

The best in the business make the voice sound so natural that it's easy to forget that "news anchor voice" is a skill that young journalists must learn and practice religiously. That said, sometimes reporters' real-life speaking voices can be drastically different.

Amanda Lee, a TV news reporter in New Jersey, recently showed off the stark difference between her "news anchor voice" and her normal Philly accent.

The veteran reporter and journalist has a strong social media presence and gets a lot of questions from viewers about her speaking voice. So, she decided to show us exactly how it works.

"We start tonight with breaking news," Lee begins in the all-too-familiar professional cadence. "First responders are on the scene of a major accident..." Sitting and filming in her car, she continues to recount the details of a fictitious story. Pretty convincingly, too.

Suddenly, she switches into her native Philadelphia accent. "It's crazy out there, yo... The house in the middle of the block? That jawn caught on fire 'round 8 o'clock, flames start shootin' out of that jawn like crazy."

(Jawn, according to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, is a "neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word thing.")

In the video, Lee is hamming up her accent a little for fun, but it's still fascinating to see the contrast in action.

Funny enough, the main element of a good TV news voice is that it does not contain any elements of accent or regionalism.

"The thing about working on TV in news, sports or entertainment is it's a very vagabond lifestyle, and if you're going to be successful at it, you'll be moving all over the place. To get a job somewhere you have to sound literally like you're from nowhere," says Amy Caples, a former news anchor and current broadcasting teaching "They're not going to hire you in Yuma, Arizona, if you talk like you're from the Bronx."

Other distinct elements of the style include exaggerated pronunciation, a slow speaking cadence, and a lower-than-normal vocal tone.

Lee discusses in another video that she had to work extremely hard to ditch her thick Philly accent when she went into TV news reporting. Words, phrases, and pronunciations she was used to using every day had to be rigorously trained out of her.

But, "I'll never stop calling [a sandwich] a hoagie," she jokes. "A sub is a train, not a sandwich."

Viewers were fascinated by Lee's ability to switch in and out of the TV voice, with the clip racking up tens of thousands of views.

"Now this is code switching at its finest," one commenter wrote.

According to the Cleveland Health Clinic, "Code Switching" is the act of "Adjusting your identity to blend in and conform to a larger group is at the core of code-switching. It can happen in a range of contexts for a host of reasons."

So, the TV news anchor voice isn't fake, per se. And it's not acting, necessarily. It's just an extremely dramatic shift journalists make when they're presenting their professional, unbiased selves versus the identity they may take on in a more relaxed setting.

After the popularity of her first video, Lee filmed a follow up: "Anchor voice vs Philly Accent Pt. 2" to further demonstrate the funny differences:

Some experts believe that the classic newscaster voice is dying out, in part due to its ineffectiveness at connecting with younger audiences.

People who are used to getting their news and entertainment from social media, which is by nature far more casual, may be put off by news anchor voice and find it untrustworthy.

Those of us who grew up with the nightly news on in the living room every evening came to find the voice dependable, professional, and authoritative. Younger people who haven't spent much time watching traditional news could find the strange speaking cadence, unnaturally low tones, and overly crisp pronunciation fake or unnatural.

Whether the voice will eventually go away or not, Lee's video is a nice reminder that the journalists we see on TV are in fact regular people with diverse backgrounds, their own opinions, and of course, a heck of a lot of training to keep most of that hidden beneath the surface while they deliver the news.