It is News, But Does it Matter?
Living in Los Angeles, there are a million different things happening at any point in the day that could be considered news. That being said, it is important to filter out which stories are newsworthy and relevant to the newscast and which stories are not.
ATVN's audience is mostly USC students; they want to hear the latest in campus news and the surrounding areas. While our newscast is focuses mostly on hard news, we can not deny the fact that we live in the entertainment capitol of the world.
Our typical newscast will have USC news, political news about the upcoming presidential campaign, pressing international news, news about President Obama or Mayor Villaraigosa and the occasional celebrity piece should there be breaking news.
When deciding whether or not to put a story in the newscast, we have to make sure we have all of the elements. Even if a story is interesting or could be intriguing to our viewers, if we do not get key interviews or b-roll to cover it, it will bring our newscast down.
On Monday we were assigning packages to reporters and were deciding between two different stories. One of the stories was a hard news piece that with enough digging might have turned out ok and the other was a piece on an upcoming music festival that all of campus is talking about. Even though the music festival wasn't necessarily the biggest story of the day, our reporter got great interviews, had a ton of access, and put the piece together beautifully.
This was a decision where elements were more important than news content. Monday's morning meetings are a bit slow so having a choice is always a nice surprise.
