Let's Go Live!
There are some days that are just made for great newscasts and Election Day is one of them. Evan and I were lucky enough to be producing on Tuesday when there were several key races in California and across the nation.
Election Day is one day of news that lends itself perfectly to live coverage because results are coming in and history is being made right before our eyes. We wanted to have our reporters telling these stories in real time so going live was our best option.
We had one of the best political minds in California, Dan Schnur, live on the set on Tuesday to discuss the implications of the elections we were covering. Schnur ran for Secretary of State in 2014 and is also Director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. He was probably one of the best people we could have gotten to give analysis on our show and I'm proud of our anchor, Anna Sterling, for booking such a stellar interview and asking intelligent questions. We could have interviewed Schnur on camera and edited him into the show as we would any other expert, but I think having him live in the studio was important for this day in particular. We were able to ask him questions that were updated to fit with the current information we had and it showed our viewers that we were serious about bringing them the latest information on the election.
Being on the West Coast, polls were closed and results were coming in from the East Coast during our newscast. To keep viewers updated with the latest information on several key governor and senate races across the country we had Marc Sallinger live in the newsroom talking about the results. Having him live allowed us to give the viewers the newest updates without scrambling to write in the prompter for our anchors to read. I think this made our newscast seem more professional.
It may have been nice to have another reporter do a live shot from a polling place in the early evening or from the on-campus watch party at Ground Zero. If our live shot technology had been working we might have included even more live coverage. Overall, I think we did well with what we had to work with and we certainly had some of the best live coverage of any show so far.
