KAMIL HOUSKA: VIEWERS HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF POLITICIANS ARGUING ON THE NEWS


Source: borovan.cz
27. 11. 2025
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He started in TV Nova news from scratch - as a reporter in 2003. Gradually he worked his way up through the ranks from editor-in-chief and programme producer to director of news and journalism at Nova, the head of one of the most influential media outlets in the country. The guest of the First League podcast was long-time media manager Kamil Houska, who will "celebrate" 30 years in the business next year.

Kamil Houska (photo) has been the head of Novak News and the newsroom since 2017. First as co-director together with Martin Švehlak, a few months later he remained the only director of Nova's newsroom. His team is fresh from covering a newsworthy event - this year's parliamentary elections (in early October). This included a series of specialised reports, debates, interviews, continuous broadcasts with results and coverage on TN.cz, or new programmes such as the debate for young voters, Voice of Gen Z, or interviews with candidates for key ministerial posts Why, Minister?

"In terms of our work, the parliamentary elections are one of the important events for which we prepare months in advance. We have been preparing for these elections since January. However, if we talk about the audience, especially for those political issues, we have been observing a certain shift of people away from politics lately, not only in the Czech Republic but also abroad. So you have some increases in audience numbers for certain types of programmes before the elections, you have increases in viewership, readership of articles and so on, but objectively it's not what it used to be. I think overall there's a sense of a move away from politics by some people. Project-wise, elections are a thing that we throw a lot of capacity at, we dedicate a long time to, but it's far from being the most important event on the planet in terms of viewership. It just isn't,"

Houska said.

The commercial station did extensive research into viewers' preferences in news coverage some time ago. "There, it came out pretty clearly, one, we live in difficult times. Some people don't understand those times and are not happy with them. The second thing is that there is a certain disgust with politics. And what, for example, and we've been trying to change this in recent months, what those viewers of ours that we've been asking have been accusing us of, for example, is that sometimes they feel that the political coverage, not just here but in the media in general, is about things that are actually, like, from their point of view, inferior. They want politics that affects them. We understood from that that making every argument between two politicians who get caught in the House over some marginal issue, that's not what those viewers want anymore. That they're kind of sick of it. And they also missed positive topics," commented Houska, who said that at the same time people's interest in regional news and consumer news (how much, what it costs, how to save money, etc.) was growing.

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Source: borovan.cz

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