Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Team D 4:30 Newscast

This week's 4:30 newscast went pretty well overall. There were a few more problems this week compared to last week, but I feel we moved forward in a few areas as well.

I was happy to incorporate a sound bite from ABC Newscall for the first time. This allowed us to have an anc. act. and a copy story for our coverage on the recent accusations against Gov. David Paterson, as opposed to just two or three copy stories. I think it strengthened our newscast overall by giving it more variety.

We also relied more on our anchors and reporters from other newscasts by using their stories as copy stories in our broadcast as opposed to getting stories from the AP wire. As a producer, I would rather use stories that we can get first-hand within our newsroom instead of looking up the information on the news wire. The stories we report on are generally more important to a local audience and, by asking the reporter what the story is in person, we better understand what the story is and thus can do a better job telling it.

Our biggest problem was timing during the broadcast. I underestimated how long some stories would take when making the rundown and didn't take time during production to time how long each story actually was to the extent that I did last week. As a result, we ended up being very heavy right from the start of the broadcast and only had seven seconds remaining after the break. We got cut-off at the six-minute mark just as Erika was finishing her close. I don't think this would have happened if I had timed each story individually to make sure they matched the time in the rundown because then I could have fixed it ahead of time. Unfortunately that was not the case for this week and we can only take it as a learning experience.

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