More than one hat

Want to be a TV news producer or reporter? Be prepared to wear multiple hats. Mary Ellen Hardies, who produces the 6 p.m. newscast at WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, does a lot more than assemble a rundown and write lead-ins. She screens video on her desk top, makes all her own graphics, and now she’s Twittering five times a day about what stories the station is working on.

I don’t even know who they are but there are hundreds of people following my every move. It’s driving our traffic up. We have a lot of young viewers contacting our Web site because they saw something on Twitter.

She’s not the only one whose job has changed. During a panel discussion at the RTNDA convention in Las Vegas this week, Hardies said the station’s reporters are doing more, too. “All our reporters have Blackberries,” she said. “I’m in touch with them every hour, hour and a half, to get them to update what they’ve been doing.”

The reporters send in bullet points that the web producer turns into sentences, Hardies said. Those updates also go to everyone in the newsroom via a listserv, which has dramatically increased communication between producers and reporters in the field.

I know exactly what they have. I write lead ins based on what I know they are going to say. There is more being expected but as you are writing you are the most knowledgeable person on all of these stories. Our communication has improved because we are requiring more.

Dow Smith of Syracuse University questioned what’s being sacrificed in newsrooms where producers wear so many hats. If they’re spending so much time on technical issues, how much attention can they pay to editorial supervision and content?

To tell better stories it takes a lot of interaction with reporters…Producers have to get up from their computer and talk to the reporters one on one. 90 percent of communication is nonverbal. That helps the process of telling better stories. The future of local TV news is going to have to be better storytelling, otherwise, with the Internet, who needs it?

But Victoria Lim, a multiplatform journalist who recently left WFLA-TV in Tampa, said having to do more actually made her a better storyteller. “There’s more than one story to tell,” Lim said. “I’m taking advantage of the strengths of each medium” writing for TV, online and print. Hardies said technology also has changed the content of TV stories. While they haven’t gotten any longer, Hardies said, reporters are using their 1:10 differently.

The reporter isn’t telling the whole story. The producer creates a 45 second anchor tell with graphics that gives the meat of the story. The reporter is going to explain the impact, the emotion.

With everything that’s on her plate, does she ever have time to think…or even breathe? Absolutely, she said. As a self-described “control freak,” Hardies loves having more responsibility. “I still have ten minutes here and there to take a breath, step back and look at the big picture,” she said. “I don’t feel harried every day.”

Ask more questions

Sam Donaldson, who has spent most of his long career at ABC News covering politics, said he’s “apprehensive” about some of the campaign coverage on radio and television this year, suggesting that journalists haven’t been tough enough in questioning the candidates.

“It’s not our job to tear them down or fall in love with them,” he said. “It’s not our job to promote them. It’s our job to bring people facts about them and to question them.

“Don’t be rude–you know it’s my maxim,” Donaldson said, drawing laughter from the audience, who remember him shouting sometimes impertinent questions at U.S. presidents.

But ask the questions. Your job is not to win a popularity contest. Don’t go along to get along. Don’t give anyone a pass. Keep on them. On election day, go vote, but say to yourself I held their feet to the fire.

Donaldson said that journalists collectively should hang their heads for not pressing hard enough for answers before the invasion of Iraq. When it comes to covering candidates, he added, “Don’t be afraid to ask every question that you think is appropriate to find out what they believe in and what they have in store for us if they’re elected.”

Donaldson spoke at a ceremony at RTNDA in Las Vegas where he received the Paul White Award, given to recognize an individual’s lifetime contribution to electronic journalism. Past recipients include Christiane Amanpour, Charles Gibson, Charles Osgood and Ted Koppel. When he saw the list of previous winners, Donaldson said his reaction was “shock…and awe.”

A personal note: I’ve known Sam for more than 25 years. When I covered the White House in the Reagan years, Sam was already a dean of the press corps. When he yelled questions at Ronald Reagan, he did it not to be rude but to try to get answers. Reagan held very few press conferences and after the attempt on his life he was always surrounded by security who kept everyone back, including journalists. Days would go by without our actually seeing him in person, and then we’d only catch a glimpse as he walked from the Oval Office to his helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House.

Sam had the loudest voice in the press corps (although Bill Plante of CBS could hold his own), so he’d shout questions in the hope of getting a reply. Sometimes, Reagan would answer. But the tactic became less and less effective after the White House decided to keep the helicopter’s engines running while waiting for the Commander in Chief. If you’ve seen shots of Reagan walking along cupping his ear and shaking his head, that’s Sam’s voice he’s pretending to be unable to hear. But what he’s ignoring are questions the American people wanted answered.

ABC effectively took Sam off the air in 1999, after more than 30 years covering Capitol Hill, the White House, appearing on This Week with David Brinkely and co-hosting PrimeTime Live. His reward was to get the opportunity to launch the first regularly scheduled news program on the Internet in 1999–back when ABC thought “appointment viewing’ was going to be a winner online, says ABC News Washington bureau chief Robin Sproull. “Sam has never met a platform he didn’t like,” Sproull said. “If there’s a platform to deliver news, Sam wants to be on it.”

Sam now hosts a daily half-hour show, Politics Live, on the ABC News Now digital channel, which few people can see or bother to watch. But he goes at it with the same gusto he always brought to covering politics and he remains a mentor to young ABC staff.

Get a job

You’ve heard it before. A news director will give you just 30 seconds to make an impression with your resume tape. Turns out that may be a generous estimate. “My rule is ten seconds or less,” news director Neal Bennett of WVIR-TV told an audience at the RTNDA convention in Las Vegas.

If you have a deer in the headlights look, you’re out. If your first package is a feature, it’s out. That means you have no idea what we do at my television station. We produce hard news.

“The one thing every news director is looking for in a tape is a reason to take it out,” said Mark Kraham, news director at WHAG-TV in Hagerstown, Md. , who got a dozen tapes just last week and doesn’t even have an opening. “Make sure it will play, that the audio and video are good quality.” And be sure you follow instructions. Kraham asks for a tape and resume. He once got a tape that was still wrapped in plastic and had nothing on it. Ooops.

Neal Bennett, news director at WVIR-TV in Charlottesville, Va., says he doesn’t care if your tape’s production values aren’t great, “I’m looking for good stories, the type we do on our local newscast, stories about government or crime, that we cover every day. Don’t include something you did when you had an internship in a top 10 market.” If you want to anchor, Bennett says, don’t apply right out of school. “I won’t even watch your tape. Our anchors need experience.”

“I’m looking for an applicant who doesn’t just know how to do radio,” said Chris Carl, news director at radio station WDEL in Wilmington, Del.

My radio reporters are using video cameras to capture audio, we post video packages and text stories on the Web. I’m looking for good writers because I think good writers can work anywhere.

What if you’re looking for a producing job? Bennett wants to see one full newscast you actually produced and include scripts. Jerry Post executive news director at KXLY-TV in Spokane, Wash., also asks for a one page critique: “Tell me why you led with a story, why you chose to tease what you did, what mistakes you made so I know you are self-aware. “

One other piece of advice: Tailor your tape to the job you’re applying for. Don’t put an anchor segment on a producing tape, said Denise Dowling of the University of Montana, because they’ll know you’re not serious about producing. But Post said there’s an exception to that rule. If you want a reporting job and you can also do weather, put that on your tape. “I’m always looking for a back-up weather person. If you do it well, you’r tape wil go to the top of the pile.”

Where to apply? Cast a wide net, said Post.

You may be living in a place you’ve never even heard of. but It’s just for two years, and you’re going to have a blast.  You gotta get good someplace and that place might be Fargo and that’s okay.

And don’t discount radio as a place to start, Carl said. There aren’t as many jobs available but he sees far fewer applicants than his TV counterparts. “There are things you will learn doing radio, especially if you find a forward looking station like mine that does video on the Web.”

But if you’ve got “ins” use them, Bennett said. If you know that someone else from your school has worked at a station, have your professor write a letter. “In this business, it’s who you know,” said Post. That’s just one more good reason to make sure you get an internship and get the most out of it.

The new career track

For years, aspiring TV journalists have been told to expect to start in a small market where they’ll do it all–report, write, shoot and edit.  Then they could move up to bigger and bigger markets, where eventually they would only have to do one of those things.  That may not be true any more.

At the Radio-Television News Directors Association convention in Las Vegas today, news managers said they expect journalists to keep “doing it all” in the biggest markets.  “The new paradigm is that we’re all content gatherers,” said Adam Symson, vice president/interactive for the Scripps TV group.  Multimedia journalists who really can do it all for TV and online are “extremely valuable,” he said.  He advises students to produce not just a great tape but clips in AP style as well, and says his company is actively recruiting.

News director Marian Pittman of WSB-TV in Atlanta said reporters at her station are assigned “a 5, a 6 and a W”–a story for the Web site, which she called “our other channel.”  Lasvegasnow.com, the Web site of KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, has developed a new job category just for the Web called “community guide”–journalists who cover specific neighborhoods, shoot their own stories and blog for the site.

So it sounds like there are jobs to be had, but be advised–they still won’t pay much.  Pittman was especially blunt in describing the future.  Some salaries will be frozen, some will be cut drastically, she said, as the station moves to a “two-tier” newsroom, with only a few highly paid employees.

Getting online video right

The second annual Emerging Video Services study, conducted by Leichtman Research Group, Inc., includes some fascinating findings:

• Online video usage is still very weighted to young males, ages 18-34 and the growth in online video overall was primarily among both young men and women.
• Across all demographics, people still spend twice as much time watching television as they do online, and “half of those who consume online video say they do it less than 10 minutes at a time. comScore talks about the average session as 2.8 minutes.”

So what’s the takeaway? Here’s what Bruce Leichtman had to say in an interview with NATPE News:

…online video is really a medium unto itself, and consumers don’t see it as a replacement for traditional TV, but rather for what it can do uniquely as a new medium. So it’s important that companies not see online video as just a replication of TV.

All of this is worth thinking about from a multimedia journalism perspective - online video may offer a terrific opportunity for news organizations to reach out to younger demographics, but probably not with the same old content they can get on the nightly news.

In addition, it looks like we’re not there yet when it comes to producing long-form content for the Web. As Leichtman says, “TV is a good place to watch TV.”

Ten tips for writing TV news

People who think writing TV news is easy have probably never done it well. What’s easy (unfortunately) is finding examples of BAD news writing–”simplistic, cliché and shallow,” says Jessica Grillanda, who teaches at Cambrian College in Ontario, Canada. Getting it right takes a lot of skill, she says, because you have to synchronize the elements of sound and video into a cohesive story “that appeals to both the eyes and ears.”

She’s absolutely right. I often tell print journalists that their TV counterparts are a little like Ginger Rogers to their Fred Astaire–both were amazing dancers, but she had to do everything he did backwards and in high heels.  That takes a lot of concentration, coordination and confidence.

So how do you learn to write TV news well? It wouldn’t hurt to consult Grillanda’s 10 tips. Some of them are as basic as it gets, but they’re all useful reminders:

YOU CAN ONLY TALK FOR AS LONG AS YOU HAVE IMAGES It sounds simple, but a good television piece is planned well before you hit the record button on your camera. If it’s important to explain—“David Pearson is the science director of Science North in Sudbury. He is also a leading researcher in Ontario on climate change”—you need visuals to cover your words. Plan ahead and ensure you shoot not just your interview but sequences of Pearson studying weather charts or giving a talk on the subject.

IMAGES SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS Images can be deafening. If your visuals do not support your words, your audience will remember the visuals but not the news. If you are explaining how faulty wiring led to a blaze while showing video of the charcoal remains of a house, don’t expect your audience to pay attention to your well-researched details. If you say it, show it.

DON’T SAY WHAT THE PICTURES DO, SAY WHAT THEY DON’T  Nonetheless, don’t waste your time trying to say what the pictures already do. What insight does your audience gain by showing a quiet suburban neighbourhood and then saying, “This is a quiet suburban neighbourhood”? Give your viewers the information to understand why they are looking at those photos. “This is the first murder on record in Sleepytown.”

The rest of Grillanda’s tips are online here.

Job tips for students

“You’ve got to be determined, you’ve got to work hard and not for a lot of money.” Heard that before? This time the advice comes from WCBS-TV news director David Friend, according to the Hofstra Chronicle. It also helps to have a good education and some experience, Friend said. If you have an internship, he said, “Be smart, be informed, ask questions.”

I second that advice. Too many newsroom interns sit around waiting to be told what to do instead of anticipating what needs to be done or volunteering to do more than the bare minimum. Trust me, that doesn’t make an impression on anyone and in today’s job market you need to take advantage of every possible opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

Friend also values writing skills. “You have to paint pictures with your words. You can’t assume an audience will absorb all that stuff without explaining it,” he told the students. “I’m intrigued by great writers.” One way to become a better writer, he advised, is to “find a reporter on television and copy that person’s writing style.”

That’s a useful tip, too, but only up to a point. I encourage aspiring to transcribe stories by TV and radio reporters whose work they admire. (Online versions are a good starting point, but you won’t get the full picture unless you go back to the video and fill in the nat sound and sound bites.) Look closely at the use of language, at sentence structure, and at lead-ins to sound bites. Pay attention to opens and closes. Take the script apart to see what makes it work. Listen to the delivery. But don’t try to “copy” that person’s style exactly because it may not be “you.” Remember that broadcast news should be conversational. If you’re trying too hard to sound like someone else, you may not achieve that goal.

Is blogging journalism?

You might think that question has been resolved, but it keeps coming up. I ran across it again this week in a study of the BBC’s use of blogs by network veteran Alfred Hermida, who now teaches at the University of British Columbia. His research paper (available as a .pdf file) quotes a longtime BBC correspondent as saying just last year that blogs are “egotistical nonsense,” and “journalists shouldn’t have any time to blog - there are too many stories waiting to be told.”

Despite the internal disagreements, the BBC has made a conscious effort in the past two years to use blogs as a way of being more transparent and accountable to its audience, Hermida says. But there are still some interesting gaps in the network’s policies:

The BBC has blogging guidelines for the personal blogs of staff but these do not refer to BBC editors and correspondents who contribute to official journalism blogs. Instead there appears to be an implicit assumption that journalists will apply existing BBC editorial values across all output, including blogs.

That said, the BBC still allows only a handful of staff to blog on its site and despite the less formal tone, impartiality remains the watchword, according to technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones who writes for the BBC blog dot.life:

Which means bloggers have to tread a careful line – they can be engaging and judgmental, but must not take sides. So I can say Vista appears to be a bit of a turkey, or Leopard does not deliver, but can’t say that it means you should switch from Microsoft to Mac or vice versa.

One of the biggest gaps in the BBC’s use of blogs is the lack of engagement with the audience, Hermida says. BBC blogs get tons of comments, but the writers don’t often respond. That’s an opportunity missed, not just by the BBC but by many mainstream media blogs.

Team building for producers

TV newscast producers may not think of themselves as leaders or managers, but the good ones are both. Even in the smallest stations, producers are team leaders. They have to work with anchors, directors, graphics and assignment editors to put together the best possible newscast. They also have to manage their time and resources wisely. It’s never an easy job, and it can seem overwhelming when you’re new at it, especially if many of the others on the team are more experienced.

Executive producer Holly Edgell of KOMU-TV in Columbia, Missouri, says producers get the best out of others by giving their best. She developed this advice for her producers, who are also her students at the University of Missouri School of Journalism:

Stay cool! Most of your colleagues want to do a good job. Few people are trying to make your life miserable, so be as professional as you can.

Educate! The best way for people to learn and NOT make the same mistakes is to take the time to teach them the right way to do things. If you can’t do it before the newscast, take a moment or two afterwards.

Constructive criticism. Give lots of it! And give positive feedback as well. This will let your peers know you want to see them succeed and foster loyalty.

More of Holly’s tips on “positive producing” (and a suggestion for an easy way to remember them) are available here.

Solo journalism advice

Bob Cronkleton is a reporter for the Kansas City Star.  He recently answered a question about multimedia reporting which was posted on the Criminal Justice Journalists listserv.   It offers some valuable advice, right from the frontlines.

“When it comes to multimedia skills, I started by focusing on audio first and
branched out from there,” wrote Cronkleton.  In his post, he directs people to a narrated slideshow he recently created about the opening of fishing season on an area lake. Cronkleston says he still has a lot of room for improvement, but here’s what he’s learned so far:

For audio, I would suggest getting a decent external mic, a digital voice recorder and headphones. Headphones are important so that you can monitor what is being said and you don’t come back with a blank recording or unwanted noise. I’m also taking pictures with a point-and-shoot camera.

Realize that you can’t do everything at once. Concentrate on one thing at a time, whether it is videotaping the scene or interview, gathering audio, shooting pictures or reporting out what happened. You might miss something, but you can’t do everything at once.

Cronkleton also says he finds the following sites helpful when he’s looking for advice:

Mindy McAdams’ - Teaching Online Journalism
SPJ’s Technolo-j
News Videographer

All of the respones on the listserv seemed to have one thing in common — many people say the best way to learn multimedia is to just do it.