Quote of the Day

As you stare at your rundown featuring a weak lead and worse kicker, remember:

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or doing it better."

-John Updike

Of Cams and Courtrooms

I just read an interesting article about a photographer in court who took a picture of a note that wasn't in evidence. The photographer's paper then used information from that note in a story.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_9086100

Blow up Your Show for Fun and Promotions

If you want to be a better producer and move up in your newsroom or to another market, nothing will assist you in this more than being able to roll with the punches. You may have created the most beautiful rundown in the world, but if some breaking news comes in at the last minute and you can't figure out how to put it in your newscast, you should seriously consider another career. What divides good producers from great ones is the ability to wing it and fly by the seat of their pants, especially in the control booth. It is the ability to manage chaos, to have everything thrown at you and still manage to have everyone on the same page and the show looking good.

Have a plan for spot news. For example, there's a big fire. Will the reporter be there live by the top of the show? If not, can we get a mast cam and have reporter on the phone? Or a spokesperson from the Fire Department? Or a neighbor from next door? Or will the anchor "tease" the fire at the top of the show, promising a live report later? Can you get a map?

Keep hitting the breaking news throughout the show if it's continuing. Whatever you decide to do, make sure anchors and the crew understand what you want to do. Tell them as early as possible. "I'm going to take Suzie off the top on the fire. If Suzie's not there, Bob will ad lib some info on the fire from the mast cam." Or whatever. Just make sure everyone knows what you're doing and how this impacts their part of the show.

Don't get too fancy. Put spot news in at the top and float everything else down. Change is confusing enough for the director so don't shoot yourself in the foot by getting too complicated.

Talk to anchors (and directors for that matter) in sots, pkgs or breaks. Resist the urge to tell them about stuff while they are reading. Feed anchors the info they need for the next thing they will be doing. Who's at bat, who's on deck? Don't feed too much information from the rest of the show, just feed what they need to know next.

Change is good for you.
Change is good for your show.
Put the best, newest stuff in your show, without exception.
Do this on a regular basis, even with small stories that trickle into the newsroom. Throw in a vo you were not expecting and you'll get in the habit of changing things up. It will make you better prepared to do major surgery to your show, should such an occasion arise. And it will.

Your show should look radically different and have substantially different stories than the show that preceded you. Anything else is the hallmark of a lazy producer.

Making a Graphic Request & Checking it Twice

Just saw a show with not one, but two spelling errors on the same full screen graphic. Please, for the love of humanity--- READ YOUR GRAPHIC REQUESTS OUT LOUD before handing them in. Your ears will catch mistakes your eyes don't see.

Also, consider designating someone, anyone, in the newsroom to look over your graphics requests for obvious errors.
It can be an anchor.
It can be someone on the desk.
It can an intern as long as you get a second set of eyes on them.

For producers who do some of their own graphics through system templates, this is even more important.

Your Face on TV, Every Time

Just had an email discussion with a reporter who's a friend of mine regarding the relative value of standups in a pkg.

I think reporters ought to have their face in every pkg they do. To me, there's no excuse not to have a standup or some kind of reporter presence in each and every story. Otherwise, why not just hire field producers? Or print reporters, for that matter? What you bring as talent to the piece is your ability to connect with the viewer and be their stand-in at the story.

The more faces you get in the show the better. It makes your show look large. I like to have people tape standups for stories... even if it's a reporter who did a pkg in the early and will be off by showtime. Have them shoot a one minute "looklive" from the field and insert a bite and video. Or have front a vosot from the newsroom.

The point is-- this is television. We get to see our reporters. That's why we hire so many good looking folks who can talk.

All I Ever Really Needed to Know about Show Producing... I Learned From Sesame Street

I remember having a discussion with a former boss of mine. I said something like, "Viewers began to have a shorter attention span with the advent of MTV. " The boss disagreed said it started much earlier, with Sesame Street. Watch the program and you'll see what he means. Each segment is fairly brief and when they switch segments, you see something totally different.

When I got my first show, another producer gave me some advice, "You just want each story to look a little different from the last one, so change it up a little bit each time. But of course, you already know all this." I had no idea.

Following his advice, here's what the top of each story in a first block might look like:

Lead.
2-shot (one anchor reads one graph)
Take Single Cam (other anchor reads one graph)
Toss double box to live reporter (one graph).

2nd story.
Ots

3rd story
Cam

4th Story
2-shot

5th Story
Chroma
((I throw the chroma in because no matter how small your market is, everybody has a chroma key. You may not have a flat screen monitor or video wall, but you have graphics make a chroma and voila- you have a new place to put your anchors or reporter. Make the chroma generic like "Tonight at Ten" or whatever and you can use it over and over.))

You get the idea. Play with it. There are no hard fast rules except keep it interesting.

Also, change it up in terms of visual elements. This helps with pacing. If you've had a couple vo's, throw in some sound or NATS full just to break it up. Toss an interesting vo or vosot between two pkgs. Again, no hard rules, but try to think about the overall packaging of your show in addition to the content. I like to pick a show I enjoyed watching and then steal ideas. Fox Report on the Fox News Channel has some of the best pacing on t.v. right now. But I may not be completely be unbiased.

Wipe Out!

When do you wipe between stories? When SHOULD you wipe between stories?

Wiping can help pick up the pace of a show, but it can also lend a sense that stories are connected in some way, when they might not be. Something to think about.

*So maybe you have a couple of consumer stories? Wipe yourself out.
*A block of a few national stories? Wipe away.
*Wipe into the next local story that has nothing to do with the last couple stories you've done? Not so much.

Also, keep in mind that you want your anchors to be seen as much as possible. That may keep you from wiping. In the national or consumer stories example... maybe have your anchor extablish at the top... wipe/wipe/wipe and then on cam tag to finish out that chunk of stories.