The Most Important Decision You Make
When it comes to planning your newscast, no decision is more important than the one you make to determine what your lead news story will be. Put simply, it sets the tone for everything that is to follow. If your newscast begins with a story that’s boring, inconsequential or lacking in some significant way, your viewers will immediately be turned off.
Given its importance, it would be remiss to make the decision about what to make the lead story of your newscast without consulting your teammates. Usually, there are at least two or three stories vying to go at the top of the show. And sometimes the decision on what story to go with can simply come down to some constructive feedback you get from your fellow producers. Sometimes, though, the decision can be made for you by external factors. For example, if a key interview falls over on a breaking story and 6pm is fast approaching, you may be forced to rearrange your rundown and opt for your second choice. It's not ideal, but it happens.
As a viewer, when it comes to tuning in to the evening news, I expect to see something - as the name implies - new at the top of the newscast. I want to see fresh stories with fresh angles. There’s nothing worse than seeing the same story that has been told multiple times already. It shows a distinct lack of creativity and thought and immediately causes me to lose interest. At ATVN, we need to hold ourselves to those same high standards. When it comes to choosing our lead stories, we need to ensure that what we intend to deliver for our viewers is new, fresh and of interest.
As a 27-year-old, I’m older than most of my teammates here in the newsroom. But I don’t think of myself as so old that I don’t understand what is of interest to other university students. If anything, I think working as a print journalist at a newspaper in New Zealand in recent years has helped prepare me for producing work. While I worked primarily as a sports reporter, I certainly understood the criteria that our news editors considered when evaluating stories. They always looked for stories that were interesting, had wide-spread appeal, involved high-profile individuals or had the potential to impact large segments of the population. To me, it was a winning formula and it's also one that I try to use when I approach my producing shifts at ATVN.
