Staying Calm is Key

I was pleasantly surprised with everyone’s first newscast.  We ran into a lot of problems throughout the day, but in the end the show looked pretty good.

The first problem came early in the morning when only one of our three reporters showed up.  We already had a ton of events we wanted to cover, so we had to sacrifice some of them by sending WSE’s to locations we wanted to send reporters.  Thankfully what we were able to cover was great.  We had a lot of really good sound and video in the show yesterday.  Our WSE’s were so helpful and really made the show happen.

I felt pretty good when Stacy and Serena came over for the rundown meeting and told me I was the calmest producer.  I still don’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it was helpful.  There’s a certain amount of stress that comes automatically when producing a live show.  I don’t think it helps to add to that by being stressed and yelling at people.  It’s part of the reason I’m trying to bring in food.  To me it’s a small token of appreciation for everyone who works so hard during the day.

When we got to the studio, we ended up having to float five or six stories throughout the show.  We also had very little time for banter.  At one point we panicked before the stock market story aired because we realized the graphic wasn’t right.  I floated the story right before it went to air.  It threw everyone off but everyone recovered VERY nicely.  I was really impressed and I know now to NEVER do that again.