What Goes First?
Of the following, which should have been the lead story for ATVN's Monday broadcast?
1. Coach Bill Self joined NCAA history with his 500th career victory with the Kansas Jayhalks men's basketball program. Allen Field House went wild in the overtime thriller, and Iowa State was sent cycloning all the way back to Ames.
2. Even though it's 24 hours later, Jennifer Lawrence is still loved by the world, still has an Oscar at age 22 and still thinks her standing ovation was out of pity from her trip.
3. The deadline is nearing for Republicans and Democrats to make an agreement to avoid looming government-wide spending cuts. President Obama urges Congress to come to a conclusion or else military resources could take a hit.
If you picked A, congratulations! That's what I would have picked! I can't wait to watch March Madness with you and complain when our brackets are destroyed by
If you picked B, you love the Oscars as much as every other local news station in Los Angeles.
If you picked C, you should probably take my job at ATVN because your rundown meeting with Stacy will probably go incredibly smoothly. You may even be promoted to Executive Producer. The possibilities are endless.
When it comes to picking a lead story, it's tough. There are a million opinions out there, but as a producer it is your job to pick the story that is going to make most people happy. You're not going to please everyone. But, it is important to evaluate what story best opens up your newscast. You must grab the viewers' attention, give insight into an important topic and most importantly, garner enough trust and interest from your audience to keep them around for the next 26 minutes.
For Team Monday, picking the lead story is a gradual process. No one comes out in the morning and says, 'I've found it! This is the lead story!' because we all know that picking the lead story for a 6 p.m. newscast at 8 a.m. is just silly. It will also absolutely, without a doubt get an eye roll from somebody in the room. So, we might as well just skip that process and save ourselves the time.
Throughout the day, we constantly gauge what seems to be the consistent hot topic of the day. For Monday, it seemed to all of us that these impending spending-cuts are a big deal. So much so that we dedicated two of our packages to it. With that, we realized that we had a pretty solid start to our A block. I think it's important that the lead story is broad enough to segue into multiple offshoots in your A block. If it doesn't have enough content to take up at least five minutes of your time, why is it a lead story?
An exception for this would be breaking news coming in three minutes before we go on air. I'm talking to you former Vice President of Student Affairs, Michael L. Jackson.
As a 21-year-old sports nut who loves entertainment, sure, I wish every newscast would start with a top ten dunks list followed by a tuxedo-bearing Eddie Redmayne singing a montage of Les Miserables. But realistically, I would love for every lead story we do to truly mean something to people. If that means honing in on the USC community by illuminating campus wide news, great. If that's keeping my fellow undergrads up to date on the most important happenings over in Washington D.C., I'm good with that, too. At the end of the day, I want my lead story to make you come back to ATVN week after week because we teach you something new each night. And if all else fails, I can at least promise you we'll have some great kickers, so stick around.
