Moving Forward
I believe that my team has some pretty good chemistry each week we prepare for our newscasts. We have a solid understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and now how each person can contribute. Because of this, there isn’t a glaring issue that we have collectively as a unit.
If I had to point one thing, I would say that time is our biggest issue. Our newscasts are on Thursdays, so two of our team members are forced to attend class each week as opposed to working on the show. It wasn’t until this week when I noticed how big a difference it makes having that extra three hours to prepare.
As for myself, I take pride in communicating with my teammates. That is my way of making sure that things are flowing smoothly. We love to encourage one another. Words of encouragement, or just general suggestions can be the difference between good and bad chemistry in a group.
After experiencing being lead producer, I noticed that I didn’t have as much knowledge as I should have regarding specific elements for stories in the rundown. As a producer I have to make it a priority to know every aspect of each story we are featuring in our newscast. To accomplish this I seek to keep track of all the information on paper. I attempted to keep track of all the information by memory and I ended up looking like a fool. I must be better at keeping track. That is my main goal moving forward.
As for my team, if we continue to work together and rely on each other, we will be just fine moving forward.
Hey Ryan, I was just checking out several of your blogs and I noticed many of you guys, while producing, seem to have same issue when it comes to knowing about your stories.
If you guys can create an assignments folder, it would solve a lot of your problems. That folder would allow you to have all the info you need about stories going into the broadcast in one location.
You can use excel to create it. One column has reporter name,another column has story name and a description in that cell. It would help lessen the stress on you the producer, because you don't have to run all over the place looking for the reporter assigned to the story to see what they're doing and it also allows the reporter to concentrate on getting the story done in time for the broadcast.
Hope this helps.