Positive Producers

Producing in the control room is the best part of the day.  It's the time when you are able to watch all of your hard work actually turn into a reality.

I think Monday's best attribute in the control room is our ability to maintain positivity.  Whether we are talking in our anchors' ears or yelling aloud to our director that we are floating a story, we do it in a very uplifting manner.  We never yell angrily or get frustrated with the rest of our team.  Rather, we maintain a sense of control and comfort so as to allow the news cast to move on, no matter what changes or obstacles we run into.

However, one of our biggest issues on Monday is late packages.  Our reporters usually do not have their packages completed until 10 minutes before the show (or later!).  In order to make sure the packages are in fact coming through, we make around 4 or 5 calls to the news room to check up on the progress (I feel bad for our poor 5:00-6:00 p.m. assignment desk).  This reinforces our urgency to get the package and makes the reporter step up to get it done quicker.  Again, though, we never call with an angry or upset tone.  We always make sure we are polite and positive when urging our team to complete their tasks.

Finally, we are constantly in our anchors' ears.  Some of our anchors tend to read a little slowly.  We make sure we are either on a break or in the middle of a package when we tell them to speed up or not banter.  With this, we also add a little positive comment: "You're doing great!" or "Keep it up!"  The Monday anchors always like a little bit of extra encouragement.

All in all, the Monday news producers do a good job in the control room because we  maintain a positive environment.  No one likes to work with negative people.  As always, positivity is key to a great news cast!