Writing a Tease: It's Harder Than it Looks.

Monday’s teases ranged from hard news to fun features.  This made deciding what order to put the teases in a little difficult.  As lead producer, it was my job to pick, order and write the preshow teases as well as the superteases before the first commercial break.  

The trick with teases is to give an enticing preview into the story without giving up all of the elements.  This requires not only reading over the wires and scripts for the stories, but also looking over all of the video in order to pick the best clip.  

The tease that was the hardest to write was the Ohio school shooting preshow A tease  because it was our lead story, we had a cold open for it, and included it in our welcome.  This meant that there were several spots in our top-of-the-show where we had to deliver new information about the story without obviously repeating ourselves.  Because of all of these elements, I chose to make the tease relatively vague and broad while still letting the viewer know a major aspect of the story.

The other teases that were hard for me to write were for the feature stories in the B-block.  Because they are lighthearted, it is ok to be a bit more creative with them and have some personality in the writing.  That being said, I am not the best at writing “witty” teases.

Because team Monday worked so well together, I had plenty of time to write my teases before we went on air.

Team Monday on three!!