"Vegas Shooter" for Vegas-Goers

When important stories break left and right two hours before air-time, selecting your lead doesn't necessarily come down to identifying the biggest story or the one you have the most elements for - it's also about weighing what's relevant to your viewers.

Team Thursday started the day with a reporter, high hopes for an LAUSD protest and a video producer who could see out of both eyes. That all changed by noon. We were left with zero reporters... an anchor package that fell through when the scheduled "protest" simply didn't happen... and a producer, yours truly, who had to cover her right eye to read the wires piling up on her desk.

During the morning meeting we had discussed possibly leading with a campus-based sequester story or the protest against LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia's proposal to cut adult education. Both were localized enough for us to do something uniquely "ATVN" with our coverage, and the link to education was perfect for our TrojanVision audience. The combination of relevance and newsworthiness had all the producers sold. We made calls, assigned the stories to multiple people and sent our anchors out as early as we could to gather the elements we would need.

Unfortunately, things tend to change when it comes to news - and things tend to change late in the day when you're producing an evening newscast. Fortunately, the stories in our rundown that fell through were quickly replaced by even bigger stories that broke in the afternoon.

We found ourselves completely reorganizing the top of the show around these new options:

• The arrest of a suspect in last week's Vegas Strip shooting that left three dead.
• An anti-Prop 8 brief filed by the Obama administration.
• Extended coverage of L.A.'s homeless count and homelessness situation.

Our lead producer, Theresa Pablos, chose to lead the newscast with the Vegas arrest. The unexpected twist? The suspect was actually arrested in North Hollywood, right here in L.A. We had no local reaction, no sound and no video aside from a post-shooting simulation of the incident, but as Theresa put it, "USC students go to Vegas; they'll care."

There were some raised eyebrows in the newsroom (probably because this meant more work for everybody), but I agreed with her logic. There was a fatal shooting - a fatal triple shooting - at the single most popular travel destination for USC students and a suspect had finally been arrested less than 15 miles from campus, hours before our show aired. Location, timing, ongoing developments, the nature of the crime... This story had it all - except for visuals.

Graphics producer Kayla Colin worked with the art department to create a full-screen map, which we paired with photos of the suspect, an incident simulation and a last-minute script. Our show certainly wasn't flawless, but considering we had no reporters, an out-of-town anchor, late-afternoon breaking news and several stories that didn't pan out, it all came together beautifully and flowed in a logical order.