New and Newsworthy
The key to a successful newscast is strong stories and strong storytelling. Thursday was a heavy news day. We had way more going on than we could cover in a half hour show, so it was important for our producing team to make smart decisions about what to cover and how to cover the news.
When it came to covering the Presidential Debate, we needed to get creative. Since it happened the night before, we made our story all about reaction and social media numbers. We had to be sure our package had new, interesting information in it, and was not just a regurgitation of what happened during the debate.
LA's CicLAvia was another big story, but it hadn't happened yet. Stories like this are important to air to inform viewers about road closures and what to expect for a major local event. Making a story visual before it has happened can be a challenge, so we needed to get creative. We used b-roll of the streets in LA, maps of the street closures, and sound from the Mayor speaking about the event.
We ended up having a reporter package the high school pepper spray incident, which broke in the the early afternoon. The fun thing about news is no matter how much you plan, the minute a story breaks, you have to come up with a whole new game plan.
Things got hectic in the newsroom in the afternoon. With so much content swirling around, we had to cut stories from the newscast we originally planned would make air.
By 6 PM, I looked over the rundown in the studio. On it were stories that had been planned out since 7 in the morning and stories that broke less than an hour ago. But all these stories had something in common, they were new and newsworthy and that's why they made it to our air.
