Deciding the Lead Story

The lead story is always the toughest one to choose. It’s the story that makes your viewers want to watch your newscast. Therefore, I want to be able to hook my viewer with my lead story, and as a viewer I want to see news stories that are both interesting and relevant to me. That’s what I want to deliver to my audience. When I am producing I think to myself what would I want to watch, and I look at those specific aspects. As a producer, I decide on a lead story by considering which one is the most important story for the day, as well as the story that has the most relevance to my audience. I also factor in the stories that have the newest information because there are many stories that have been developing over time, and you have to start with the most recent event. I believe that as a 20-year-old student producer, I have an advantage in the newsroom because I able to bring a fresh perspective to the show. I am able to look at stories with a more open-ended view on how a story could possibly or possibly not be a lead without shutting it out completely. I feel that those aspects are really helpful in a newsroom, and may even be hard to come by without a young producer.