The Day After

Now that the dust has settled, it’s a lot easier to reflect on my first day on the Tuesday Production Team.  The fact that we were truly a team led to our success yesterday.  The newsroom is a whirlwind for essentially 10 straight hours and without constant communication with the other teammates it can become overwhelming quickly. 

Our first week of run-throughs we made Google documents to keep track of stories and videos and said we were going to utilize shared notes via the newsroom rundown program.  These turned out to be empty promises.  As a result our day at ATVN was stressful.  This week we decided to stay in constant contact so that each teammate was up-to-date with the status of the show.  We were going to flourish together or crash and burn together.  But organization of ideas and constant communication alone was not enough to ensure a great show.  Luckily we had many other great teammates like our multimedia journalists, the sports team and of course, our two volunteer reporters to keep the show afloat. 

Cassie, the lead producer, started the day off on the right foot by delegating a package to me and another to our third teammate, Christie.  This was extremely helpful.  Instead of having all of us scramble to make sure each package came through, dividing the work made it more manageable.  Focusing on only one reporter and one package allowed me to really delve into it and more importantly, keep tabs on it so that it would be finished in time.  That’s not to say I completely ignored the other packages.  We used this strategy to keep each other accountable for our work and to also take more ownership of the show. 

However, delegation of tasks to our various multimedia journalists was a little trickier.  One aspect of producing that I underestimated was the difficulty of managing a larger staff of journalists, especially when they seemingly all wanted my attention at the same time.  To keep track of all the MJ’s I would simply go across the room and consistently check up on them, making sure they stayed on task and completed stories in an acceptable amount of time.  This way I was able to make sure that all of resources in the newsroom were being put to work so that we could maximize our productivity.

I was encouraged by all the good work we did yesterday as a team.  Everyone in the newsroom came together, put his or her heart in the show and tried to put together the best newscast possible.  This was evident when the show finally aired.  That’s not to say we had a perfect day.  As a team, we definitely hit some snags along the way, but I think I can speak for everyone when I say I learned a lot.  I’m going to take many things away from this first broadcast and make sure that next week is even better.