Survival Kit – Page 10 – Survive Your Job In Television News

How to tighten your own writing.

When producers call and tell me how their work stands out, the number one statement I hear is“ my writing is tight.” Truth be told, when I review a newscast, that is rarely the case. Same is true of reporter scripts. I would get calls from the crews to copy edit and be told “You will love it, my writing is so clean and tight.” That is a tall order. Many were shocked to hear they fell short.

So how do you tighten your own writing? Copy edit yourself. Write your script or cold open or whatever it is, and then go back to it and try and shave time off. Often you will find entire sentences or sections that you can cut.

Another effective technique is to compartmentalize elements. When constructing a live pkg for example, assign facts for each element. Maybe the “what” and “when” are in the anchor intro, the “where” is explained in the live lead, the “who” is the start of your pkg which ends with the “how.” The live tag is the “what’s next.” This helps tighten things up. Often pkg’s repeat information from the anchor intro or live intro. Then the tag repeats information yet again. By compartmentalizing, you help story tell better (see Storytelling on a Dime) and you write more succinctly.

Print out multiple stories, take them home, then write them over again. Sometimes practice makes perfect. A little secret: Many of the best in the business take time out each day or at least each week for self evaluation (see Humble Pie). Your writing will improve. Your speed will improve as well.

Finally, make adverbs and adjectives really count. They must be crucial to the telling of the story, not just something you throw in for extra flare. If you do that, your writing will not only become more clear and concise, but you will also avoid exaggerating facts.

So there you have it, some ways to tighten up your own writing.

When reality hits. Questioning why you want to be on TV

The smallest market that Nielsen ranks is Glendive, Montana, #210. It is among the more beautiful places you’ll probably never see. The Yellowstone River flows through the middle of town, according to the chamber of commerce, and you can see a triceratops skull found in 1991 and attend Buzzard Day, no date given.

Glendive is one of those places people would rather visit than live in, though. That’s probably why it only has 4,000 TV-viewing homes. I’m sure there have been some wonderful journalists who’ve gotten their start there. But being that Buzzard Day is listed among the top attractions, I’m thinking it was a lonely start.

So what do you do? You’ve gone to college for four years and made your parents proud. Someone has actually hired you based on a reel you’ll replay in ten years and cringe. And now it’s time to move to someplace like Glendive and become a full-fledged, paid journalist.

Most of us have been there. But the shock was much worse for the young woman who wrote to me recently, whom we featured in last week’s article. She actually had a job in one of the nation’s top markets doing “fun stories and the traffic.” Yes, she’s beautiful. But that didn’t keep her from getting laid-off. She’s managed to find a job way down the ladder. Not in Glendive. But way down the ladder.

“I am not only burnt out but discouraged,” she said during one of our e-mail exchanges, which she is allowing SurviveTVNewsJobs.com to quote.

See, she not only worked in that big market but it was also her hometown. The natural support network of friends and family isn’t there anymore.

On top of that, she’s come to the realization that she’s not a journalist. Among other reasons, she just doesn’t have the fire in the belly that’s required to persevere through all the indignities heaped upon you in that first TV news job.

“Yes I should be thick skinned and not let this run me down, but in reality I think my mental health is more important than keeping up a fake smile to get through this,” she said.

Early on in our e-mail conversation, she told me that hosting is actually what she’s meant to do, not reporting TV news or anchoring. I was actually relieved. Would you want a doctor or an attorney whom you could tell really wasn’t into their profession? It’s a recipe for malpractice. However, this young woman was being honest that she didn’t feel the calling to be a journalist. She isn’t going to pollute TV newsroom after TV newsroom with mediocre work just to have her face on television, all the while secretly yearning to host a talk show.

You may fill in the blank with the name of the colleague in your newsroom who meets that description here: ___________________. Extra points if you think TV news was originally just going to be a part of his or her five-year plan.

So I told her to go for it. God bless her for admitting she’s not journalist material. Plus, with media companies clamoring to create their own syndicated shows outside the Hollywood system and adding local talk shows adjacent to their morning or afternoon newscasts, there is a growing need for hosts with the skills to pull them off. This has the potential to be the best time for on-camera talent to work in local television since the days when stations produced their own children’s programming and hired a host to introduce movies.

In this young woman’s case, though, she’s under contract. I know how much she wants to leave and get on the host track immediately. But I urged her to either stick it out in her current reporting job or try to come to some mutual agreement with station management. Broadcast news is a small world. Word gets around. You don’t want to be known as the person who skips out on contract commitments.

However, fate ended-up coming to her rescue. Another company is about to buy her station. The ownership change, she says, is offering her an “escape.” She turned-in her resignation letter last week and hopes to return home soon.

Best of luck to her, wherever she’s reading this now.

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Matthew Nordin is an investigative reporter at WXIX-TV in Cincinnati. Join him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @FOX19Matthew

When to wipe between stories.

With the constant push for more and more content, I am seeing producers use wipes between stories to keep up the pace. This can be a highly effective technique to showcase stories. It also can be very uncomfortable to watch if misused.

So when should you wipe between stories? There are three common rules:

If stories have the same type of subject with a common link (i.e. – three crime stories that happened overnight, three parades on a holiday etc.)
To showcase different elements of the same story (i.e. – “Here is what the fire looked like when it first started.”, then a wipe to more fire crews arriving on scene, wipe to helicopter dumping water, then a sot from a worried neighbor.)
To showcase a section of news (like national headlines, local headlines, craziest vids of the day etc.)

When you veer from these rules, you can put anchors in some interesting situations. For example, it does not work if you have a taped interview on a serious political issue, then wipe to vo of a charity event. A wipe needs the stories to be related somehow. Morning show or weekend producers, with one anchor, often use wipes to get around a pre-recorded interview. That is, they wipe out of the interview to avoid making it obvious that the interview is pre-recorded. But that is not the best technique. So what do you do? Well, you can have the editor end the taped subject on an image that does not show the anchor. That way you can show the anchor back on the set to do a transition line without sweating it. Or, you can wipe to a story that is related. For example, in the case of the pre-recorded political interview, wipe to a quick followup about a political story. Then show the charity event, with the first line on camera.

Bottom line: Wipes are effective when the stories have a common link of some sort. They do not help you pick up the pace if the stories have nothing to do with each other. In that case you confuse and slow the viewer’s reaction down.

When Reality Hits. TV News The Calling

Small Market, USA — No matter how many hours you’ve spent watching Diane Sawyer over the years and dreamed of anchoring Good Morning America or World News, for some people getting that first TV reporting gig results in a revelation: I wasn’t cut-out for this.

I recently got an e-mail from a young woman who was frank that journalism isn’t the part of the TV business she feels passionate about. Not only that, she worries she’s not doing a good job.

“I went to school, yes, but there’s things they don’t teach there,” she said in her first e- mail to me.

SurviveTVNewsJobs.com has agreed not to reveal the woman’s name or current market, which is small, in order to protect the relationship with her news director and allow her to be completely honest about her feelings in our e-mail exchanges.

“This is my first job outside my hometown,” she said. “I worked in (a large market) and loved it there…I did fun stories and the traffic. Well, I got laid-off and now I’m in (this small market) trying to keep-up my resume, but I’m finding that I’m starting to really dislike this job.”

Judging by how she ended that first e-mail (“you can be blunt with me,” she said), she was expecting the sort of tart-tongued tirade Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News would’ve delivered. She didn’t get that from me, though. I actually feel a lot of compassion for her. As I like to tell high school classes, journalism is like the priesthood. It’s a calling. If you don’t feel the insatiable need to be a journalist — if doing something else with your life would literally leave you depressed, thinking less of yourself, or feeling some other variety of intense and sincere mental anxiety — then this is not the career for you. Ok, I’m being dramatic. But you know what I mean.

So first, I had to make sure this young woman didn’t want to be a news anchor. If her desire is to go back to her big market hometown someday and deliver the news to millions of people, then reporting stories out in the field for years is the apprenticeship she’s just going to have to endure. When you’re an anchor, you have to know, based on your own experiences out in the field, which questions are and are not appropriate to ask your reporters in a breaking news situation.

For instance, in the first couple of hours of the Boston Marathon bombing coverage, I didn’t hear a single network or Boston anchor ask a reporter on the scene, “Was this a terrorist act?” That would’ve been irresponsible. We could all see the video. We could see that there were two explosions very close together and that white smoke rose from both. We could see that a lot of people were injured badly. But in those first crucial minutes on the air, your reporter hasn’t had a chance to talk with police. The officers who know anything are too busy to answer your questions and the PIO’s are likely in the dark, too.

What local Boston TV reporters did, which I thought was very good journalism, was describe the scene. I’ll never forget one of them saying in the early-going that he had seen victims who’d lost limbs and that we should prepare ourselves for fatalities. He told us what he saw. He didn’t speculate that this was a terrorist act. Are we bomb experts? Explosion experts? Most likely, no. Who’s to say that if x, y, and z go wrong underground that a utility explosion might not cause similar destruction?

My point is, when you’re sitting on a news set and guiding your station’s live coverage — and by the way, the teleprompter is blank — you’ve got to know what questions are inappropriate. Plus, as soon as persons of interest (yeah, I hate that phrase, too, but it’s a legal term of art we sometimes have to use) or suspects are named, you have to know on-the-spot as you’re ad-libbing which statements about them are fair in light of the on-going news story and which statements could get you and your station sued for defamation if you and the police are wrong. (See: Richard Jewell/Atlanta Olympics bombing coverage.)

The young woman hating her small market TV reporting experience never wants to be an anchor, though.

“Being an anchor, I never much cared for it,” she said in her second e-mail.

I told her not to feel bad, that I think a lot of people force themselves into the TV reporter box just so they can be on television. I really appreciated her honesty. I am also convinced her TV career isn’t over.

Next week, I’ll write about my advice to her about what she should do next. Based on that, she’s made a big decision that I’ll fill you in on, too.

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Matthew Nordin is an investigative reporter at WXIX-TV in Cincinnati. Join him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @FOX19Matthew.