Talking The Talk

You might be able to walk the walk and get a newscast together on time but when it comes down to it, it's all about talking the talk in order to make sure that everyone is on the same page. 

Good communication in the newsroom is absolutely essentially, something I have come to realize more and more over the course of the past few weeks. Many of us get so consumed by our role in the newsroom that we forget to talk to one another about what we are working on and what needs to be accomplished.

As the lead producer this week, I tried to remind myself to touch base with my two teammates every time a development was made on a story. When I was formatting my rundown, I would try talk to Alex, my video teammate this week, about what kind of video there was for the story and when I put in full screen graphics, I would try to communicate the information to Aaron, my graphics teammate. 

Though our lines of communication started out pretty good, by the middle/end of the day it became more difficult as we were dealing with a few breaking news stories in addition to having a few stories not pan out the way we had hoped. I found that we were still talking to one another but in a much more hurried way. When you have so much going on at once, it can be difficult to deal with tasks one at a time without getting overwhelmed. However, I found that when I would take the time to stop and talk to one person at a time - as opposed to trying to get all my scattered thoughts out at once - I was much more successful in getting my ideas across.

I've found that over-communicating is always best and the more we communicate with each other, the better our newscast looks. Videos match our scripts better, OTS graphics match our stories better and the whole show becomes much more cohesive.