Know Your Newsroom – Page 8 – Survive Your Job In Television News

What Should An Associate Producer Do?

I often tell producers that having an associate producer is a great opportunity to prepare yourself for management one day. This is someone who often needs direction and training, and whose success can be tied to your own. Still, many producers just don’t know how to effectively utilize an associate producer. So let’s go over some basic rules of thumb about who AP’s are and how they should be used:

Helpers not writers
Segment designers
Second sets of eyes

The first mistake many producers make when given an associate producer is to have the AP write the entire newscast. Then the producer just goes back and fact checks it. Delegating is one thing, having the AP essentially do your job is another. Writing is a key part of producing. If you don’t relish it, don’t produce. Your AP is your helper. So you need to assign your AP specific things to write. Then you have an AP earn more opportunities depending on their skill levels. For example, an AP of mine initially wrote the national news segment for me. She wanted more, so I told her to match her words and video better. She did, then she got to write the wacky video of the day segment. Next, I let her segment produce more. I let her find the stories, come tell me what our options were, which ones she liked and why. Once she was comfortable with that, I let her write teases for the segments she produced. By then, she was understanding the sell of a story. As she pushed herself and grew, I got more time to dedicate to certain elements in the newscast where I wanted to push myself and grow. This in turn helped her see that producing is an evolution in many ways. We were able to have great philosophical discussions. She was eventually able to fill in for me, when I was off and the quality of the newscast did not suffer.

Another key area where producers do not utilize their AP’s properly is checking for errors. I had my AP’s read through every super and graphic in the newscast. They started at the bottom of the rundown and worked their way up. This forced them to pay more attention to the details because they had to look at the rundown in a different way. This was a great way for them to take some responsibility and for me to see how detail oriented each AP was.

When you become a manager, you have to be able to assess each person you oversee. You have to help build on their strengths and know how to minimize their weaknesses. Your AP’s are the perfect way to practice assessing these qualities. And if your AP never grows into a competent producer, it reflects badly on you. This is true of managers and their employees as well.

Wait, you want me to story tell when I cover what?

Roman poet Phaedrus once said: “Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many.” So why am I quoting a man who was born in 15 BC in an article about 21st century TV news? Because the central idea of the quote often plays a part in what we are asked to do.

How many times have you heard a news manager lament that reporters need to do more storytelling with the packages they produce? And then how times have you heard those same managers send crews on stories that are not “TV friendly” and seem to have no opportunity for storytelling. You know the ones I’m talking about. These are the stories that have zero visuals, zero interesting nat sound and seemingly zero opportunity to “story tell.” Most of us hate them. But by the same token, most of us have to cover them from time to time. So what do you do? Do you just curse those managers who send you on these stories and then “mail it in” by turning a TV news “report” rather than a piece of storytelling? I certainly hope not for a couple of reasons. First, you should always have more personal pride in the work you put your name on than to do that. Second, you can almost always do some storytelling no matter what kind of dog of a story you are assigned.

I can hear the groans and grumbles right now! Stop cursing at your computer (i.e. – me!) for just a minute and open your mind and I will show you how to do it. It’s pretty simple really. One little word is all you need to remember: Writing Yep, it’s all in **how** you write that package. Earlier I threw out the term TV news “report.” A “report” is a bunch of facts and words put into a package with little or no cohesive narrative and no relation to the video on screen. It’s boring television and should never be what you aspire to produce. “Storytelling” on the other hand is exactly what it sounds like. It’s telling a “story.” Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. They also have characters. In TV news a “story” also, ideally, has great visuals and nat sound. (Remember, the beauty of TV news is in blending visuals, sound and words in a way that makes the viewer feel as if they as “there” where the story is happening.) Sometimes those elements are all there, sometimes they are not.

So, what do you do when they are not there? Let’s talk about it. One of the most common retorts I get when I say “You can story tell with just about any assignment you get.” is “What about when we get sent to a boring meeting?” Again, it’s all in the writing. Suppose you are told to package a government council or commission meeting where they are going to be talking about some sort of tax hike. You get there and it’s immediately apparent that there are not going to be any fireworks from the assembled crowd… but you still have to package it. You can still tell a “story.” First, figure out who the main person involved in the tax hike issue is gonna be. Make that person your first “character” and center the piece around them. If there is someone, anyone, there that has an opposing view, make them the “antagonist” in your piece. Voila! You now have the beginnings of a true “story.”

Ask the videographer you are working with if they could please get a little extra b-roll of your protagonist and antagonist. When you interview them, don’t ask questions about the facts. That’s what your reporter track should do. Ask questions that get at the emotion behind their support for or opposition against the issue. Hopefully, going at the interview this way will get you some marginally less dry sound than you would’ve otherwise gotten. It does not always work though. But don’t fret.

Now it’s time to write. Don’t just set the boring scene and put the boring video over it:

“EXAMPLE COUNTY COUNCIL IS TALKING TAXES THIS NIGHT… BLAH… BLAH… BLAH.”

Instead, use your characters:

[VERY SHORT NAT BITE (3-SECONDS OR LESS!!!)]

“JOHN COUNCILMAN NEVER THOUGHT EXAMPLE COUNTY’S SEWER SERVICES HAD THE PROPER FUNDING AND IT REALLY STEAMS HIS SHORTS.”

[SUPPORTING BITE WITH JOE]

“JANE COMMISSIONER ADMITS THE SEWER SITUATION STINKS.”

“BUT SHE BELIEVES IN HER HEART… THERE’S A BETTER WAY TO FLUSH THE PROBLEM BESIDES A TAX HIKE.”

[SUPPORTING BITE WITH JANE]

Bam! You are now producing a “story” rather than a “report.” And, even if you don’t have any compelling visuals or nat sound, your “story” will be more compelling to watch than your competition’s “report” any day of the week. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than it would’ve been had you just mailed it in and it does not really take much more effort if any at all. Plus, you prove old Phaedrus right yet again and justify why we continue quoting him all these eons later.

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This article is written by a veteran reporter who has worked in small, medium and large markets and has won multiple awards for storytelling.

How To Time A Newscast

If you want to win, you have to time newscasts properly. This is a key concept for everyone in the newsroom to understand. Meters make or break you. If the newscast is not timed correctly, you will blow the meters. So let’s look at some common timing mistakes producers make and how to limit them.

Timing Tricks

Time each block

Hide pad throughout

Cheat the cheaters

Know anchors read speed

The biggest timing mistake producers make, is not trying to make time each block. When quizzed about timing, a lot of producers say things like: “Well my block always runs two minutes long.” or “I wait until the last block to worry about it.” These are BIG MISTAKES. Each block is designed to hit a meter. If you blow one block, you will blow at least one meter mark. That’s like standing outside the station with your cashed paycheck and throwing some of the money into the wind. It’s just plain foolish. There are stations that take timing so seriously they give you only 15 seconds leeway. You go more than 15 over at the end of a block, you can be suspended or fired. It’s a lot of pressure, but some of the stations who do this are the most profitable around. They set exacting standards and they reap big rewards.

So how do you time each block? You must have pad throughout the newscast. If your mangers or anchors are hands on with rewrites, you need to hide some of that pad. I used to have a lot of trouble with managers and/or anchors adding time to my rundown by putting “their touch” on scripts. To prove the point, I would hide time in commercial breaks, my start time etc. so the timing issues would look even worse. Then I would explain, there was nothing to give up and tell them to rewrite again. Meanwhile, I ended up with the content and wiggle room I needed to make time each block

Which leads to the next key trick: Cheat the cheaters. There is always a time hog reporter and sorry meteorologists, but often weather people go WAY OVER. Some of my meteorologists were told they had 1:30 hit times, when it was actually a 2:30 window (remember, hide time for the weather hit elsewhere). I would also tell the chronically longwinded reporter that he/she had 30 to 45 less seconds for their TRT than I was really giving them. That way if the reporter decided not to call in the correct TRT, I was not screwed. (Remember to also have a vo or two each block you can kill, just in case.)

The last timing killer is anchor read times. Computers never get it right. Frankly, your anchors can vary day-to-day, newscast to newscast. You have to get a feel for who is better at really pulling off that 10 second breaking news ad-lib or who can handle suddenly dropping the last line of a vo, in order to hit that precious meter point. Getting to know your anchors and their read times, involves more than their average read time. It really does entail, which one speeds up talking when they are excited. You should also figure out which one, tends to be tired at the end of the week and stumbles more. (See anchors voice) They can be inconsistent. You cannot. You have to make time.

I hope these tricks help. Do not be afraid to move things around in your rundown on the fly to make meter points as well. If you are running long and teased a story, you can always float it down to the next block, hit your meter point and kill something else. The key is monitoring your time each line of each story. If you see a timing problem developing nip it right away. Once it begins to snowball you may not be able to dig out.

Beating Reporter Deadlines With Your Own EOC

One of the toughest learning curves for young reporters can be hitting your deadlines. You know how it goes—you knock out a noon live shot and as soon as you’re done, the EP or Assignment Desk is calling, to say you’re now on a completely different story for 5pm… and you’re live in another town… and don’t miss slot!

So how can you do good work and at the same time keep management off your back so you’re not “the problem child” on the reporting staff?

Well, it starts, and ends, with 3 keys—think of this as your own personal EOC (Emergency Operations Center … for reporters).

Efficiency

The old saying goes: “Get off your ass, get out of the building!” And it’s true. You can save a lot of time by simply being efficient with your time. Let’s say you’re assigned a story in the morning meeting. Depending on how your newsroom works, maybe you don’t have to sit through the remaining 45 minutes of that meeting. Get your story and ask if you can take off. Grab your photog and go. You’ll be thankful for those 45 minutes as you hit crunch time before the newscast.

You can make lots of calls, but remember: it’s easier for someone to blow you off by phone than in person. So if may be more efficient to just show up at that police PIO’s office and ask for a quick interview or a copy of that arrest report than making 6 calls throughout the day.

Plan out your stops to save time— so you’ll go talk with the mayor first because he’s available now. You’ll call the city council member on your way to the mayor’s office (saves time vs. you staying in the newsroom and making calls from your desk) to see if you can interview her right after the mayor. Then you can head to the next stop for B-roll and other material. Then you’ll end up at your live location.

Quickly research story background and contacts, and remember you can do that in the car from your phone if your photog is driving.

Make notes as you record your interview so you don’t waste time when logging and getting ready to write.

If you have a photog (won’t work if you’re an solo MMJ), you log and write while he or she sets up the live shot. Better yet, you write your basic script while the photog is driving to the next location.

If you know you need help from the Assignment Desk, be efficient there too Let them know early if you need something researched or a call made. Assignment editors are insanely busy people and the last thing they need is a last-minute call from you asking for 3 calls to be made on your story.

Efficiency also can mean not biting off more than you can chew. If you’re assigned to breaking news just before airtime, don’t stress too much over whether it’s a pkg. Viewers don’t care about the format, and a good management team won’t either, as long as you do a solid, compelling breaking news live shot. So be confident, get on scene and let your newsroom know what you can provide: “I’ll have a live VO at the top of the show… possibly a live interview if I can track someone down.”

Organization

Keep a list of key contacts from your previous news stories. That way, you’re not re-researching potential interviewees every time you do a story.

Make sure you have the addresses you need and GPS your route so you’re not wasting time getting lost.

Don’t overshoot your stories. No need to shoot an hour of material for a basic pkg on a crash or fire or school board meeting. Make sure you have enough, but the more organized you are with shooting, the less you have to log for your script.

Don’t try to re-invent the wheel every time. Here’s a good example—

I worked with a veteran reporter in Tampa who was a master of working fast and efficiently. Knowing that reporters tend to cover many of the same types of stories over and over (fires, crashes, protests, budget meetings, elections), he basically had templates of these stories in his computer and in his head. If he was assigned a story about an election campaign stop by a candidate, he’d do some quick research on the race/candidate, then sketch out his script even before leaving the station. Why? Because he knew where the story was likely to go when he got there. So all he had to do is get his sounds bites and fill in the blanks. Now, the obvious danger in that plan is: what happens if the story takes a different turn? Well, then he’d just change it as needed. But the point is, he didn’t wait until the 4pm event ended and then scrambled to write the story for 5pm. He pre-wrote a skeleton script and then plugged in the holes.

Clear Communication

Be in touch with your Producer, EP and Desk frequently (at least every few hours or whenever you change locations). Be clear about what elements you have and what else you need. That avoids the dreaded angry EP conversation because she thought you were dong angle X for your story and you have angle Y.

Get script approval as early as possible. When I was a news manager, I can’t tell you the number of times 3 reporters called me at virtually the same time… an hour before the show… for script approval. That gives me very little time to concentrate on your script, make suggestions and have you change it for the better. Write it as early as possible and get it approved. Your managers will love you for it and so will your photog/editor, since they’ll have more time to make it look great.

So keep in mind your EOC to hit your deadlines—be efficient, be organized, and clearly communicate with your newsroom. Since far too many reporters DON’T do these, if you do, you’ll be a hero. Believe me.

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Steve Kraycik is the Director of Student Television and Online Operations at Penn State University. He has more than 27 years of experience in television news, much of that as a manager. He also is an agent with MediaStars. You can reach him at [email protected] and @TV_Agent_Steve.