Hey! It could look good too.

I am a huge culprit of this. Every week, especially as the clock turns from the afternoon to the evening and the broadcast draws ever nearer, I stop focusing on if something is done well and more on if it is done. Period. Now to a certain point this makes sense. But that doesn't mean I can't take the few extra moments to make a tweak or two to a story that would maybe, just maybe, not make it seem "student-produced."

Yesterday, for example, we had a phone interview with Christian Kurth, the president of USG. It went well and we were set to use it in the broadcast. It was done. But wait a minute, Christian Kurth is right here, at USC, on campus. Why are we getting a phoner with him when an on-camera interview - even if he says the same things - would add that much more to our broadcast? We went out and got the on-camera interview. It cost one of our best MJs almost an hour. But it was more than worth it to have his face up there talking, as opposed to a graphic.

I see two places where the quality of ATVN could be greatly improved, and fairly simply. The first is in teases. I often instruct MJs who cut teases as to nothing more than what bin their footage is in. But teases are supposed to be the best video. It is not enough to just slap a few random clips together. It works, per se, but it could work better. "Find the most compelling video," I should tell them. "The images that make you not want to look away."

The second is minute details in the script. I feel a lot of scripts at ATVN are written in large generalizations. This is done in part to avoid factual errors, which is good. Better to have a boring -but -correct script than a compelling-but-wrong one. But by digging just a little deeper into a story, maybe on the third page of the wires than the first, you can add just that little bit into a story that grounds it in reality.