Working With The Web
Going into my second week as web/graphics teammate, I was pretty nervous to see if I had improved or even learned something from the last time. I made sure to get a full nights rest, ate a good breakfast and consumed the news. When I got settled into the newsroom, I printed out numerous wires and had them ready for my team when they came in. However, today proved to be an even more interesting day than normal, because it was reemphasized to me just how important the web is to a broadcast. It's like a little lightbulb went off in my head.
In our circumstances at ATVN, the web is more immediate than our newscast. Sure, we always have the most up-to-date information in our rundown, but we can't just cut into normal programming and go on the air for breaking news like other channels can. We don't just have choppers that can fly all over the city to get great footage. But what we do have is our website, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Whenever we hear breaking news from the wires or from another station, we can immediately tweet it out, write a Facebook post or write a quick story for the website. We might not know all of the details just yet, but we can at least get the basics out and let the public know. Nowadays, audiences feed off quick information and always want to be the first to know. Working on the web, we can talk with the other producers and figure out what stuff we can take from the web to use in the broadcast. Furthermore, if we have already used certain footage or quotes on the web, we want to make sure we don't overuse it in the broadcast. For example, Hugo Chavez passed away today. Lucky for the web, we had already written a little story about the situation, so we were able to get the story up on the web pretty quickly. By doing this, we could work with the broadcast side to correlate what had already been said, new details we could add and various footage.
Another way the web can help the broadcast is when there are just too many stories to fit into one newscast. There have been numerous days at ATVN where there are many important stories, but there is no way we can do all of them. Working on the web is great, because we can use some of those stories for the website and increase the amount of stories we've touched. The more stories we can produce as a station, whether broadcast or web, the better we are as a team. While this may seem upsetting at first that we could not integrate everything into the rundown, in a way, it helps the web because we get more traffic. Everyone knows the web is taking over society and a good portion of people get their news from the web, whether it's Twitter, Facebook or the station's website. Through working with the other producers, we can decide, as a team, what could work on the web and create a lot of buzz for it. For example, we did a web story today on Oberlin College being reopened for classes today after being shut down for the KKK. Even though we thought students would care about this and it should go in our newscast, there was simply not enough room for it, due to the elections. Therefore, we were able to input a quick story about the scenario on the Web.
Through the intertwining relationship of the web and broadcast, we are able to release breaking news in a timely, but accurate fashion, while also covering numerous stories for our audience.
