The Key to Good Tease Writing

The easiest way to make your teases better is to have good stories to tease. You can be the best writer in the world, but if you're teasing the latest council meeting, no one's sticking around to watch. Teases are a CRUCIAL part of your show. You can't control the number you're delivered-- but you are responsible for the viewers you can hold through the show. When you're going through stories and deciding what to put where, make a special effort to think about what you'll tease.

Tease talkers.
Think-- if I'm going out after the show and meeting friends.. what are the stories I'm going to talk about? This is the... "Hey, did you hear about..." factor. If one of your stories falls under this category, hold it for a tease. These do not have to be local or even on the wires. For example, if you read something interesting in "Wired," you can run it in your show. Make a couple calls and verify the stuff in the article and make sure you attribute... "Wired magazine says the I-Phone is the hottest thing since hula-hoops."

Tease Consumer/health stories.
As long as they're not too obscure (read: arthroscopic knee surgery developements) health and/or consumer stories are always good to tease.

Anything with good video.
Be careful not to blow the tease though. There's a fine line between pictures viewers will stick around to see again ("Take a look at this accident caught on dashboard video... woah! We'll hear from the police officer who survived it") versus video that's probably a one shot deal (in which case you might want to freeze it before the good part).

Stories that impact a lot of people.
Going back to that council meeting-- if they're, say, deciding to cut city services to make budget, this might impact a lot of people and could make a good tease:

"The city's deciding where to drop the ax in the budget battle, could your trash services be dumped? We'll tell you what options council members are discussing."

And again, here, I'd have a photog go get video of garbage trucks... don't use council meeting video.

By the way, the lower you go in the show DOES NOT mean you have to go light. Don't assume you have to stick the feel-good holiday story at the end of the show. It's probably not a good tease. Put it at the end of the first block for a nice wrap up there and put something interesting as the kicker. Also, if a reporter has a good interesting story that's not a lead, but still valuable, try putting it in the second block and tease it. Better yet, you tease it in Headlines and have them tease the story live at the end of the first block.

This goes to the larger point of changing up the format of teases from one segment to the next. If you have something low in the show, you're probably teasing it a couple times.. so change it up a bit... use just video in one tease... maybe some sound in another (only a couple seconds though: "I couldn't believe it!" or, "It's the best thing I ever saw!" or.. nats full). Or try a tracked tease. Make a little :30 mini package to tease the story and wipe right into it.

Finally.. it helps to watch t.v. Watch programs you enjoy and admire (they don't have to be news) and see how they tease their next block. Steal ideas liberally!