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Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism University of Southern California
Producers

Collective Preparation and Communicative Teamwork

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Let me just say, producing a live newscast is no joke. And after the fiasco of Week 1’s newscast, for which we had no idea what we were doing, I was horrified for what chaos this week could bring.

Producing at ATVN requires leading a team of more than 30 or 40 journalists, creating an entire rundown from scratch, keeping an ear out for breaking news, and doing a thousand other things at the same time – all the while maintaining one’s sanity and not scaring away the poor MJs. Furthermore, because Thursday’s producers also have to attend class in the morning, our team has more obstacles to overcome than the other week’s producers. 

With that being said, Thursday’s newscast was beautiful. The A-block was flawless, the B-block was gorgeous, and the C-block was just sexy. The reason was simple: Team Thursday’s collective preparation and communicative teamwork. 

Collective Preparation

Our producing team met earlier in the week to review everything that went wrong during run-through week. We addressed the need to motivate our MJs, since some of them would spend enormous amounts of time relaxing, lazing, or on Facebook. 

We also addressed how each producer could improve at his or her job: namely, the CNN/graphics producer would run the CNN requests to the student worker as soon as they were available, instead of waiting until late and overwhelming him with everything at once. The lead producer would create a “Producer Notepad” and jot down details of every story that was assigned to each MJ while the video producer was in class. And I, the video producer, would implement a detailed “MJ Checklist” for MJs to use throughout the day to (1) ensure a fluid transition of work from student to student, and to (2) ensure that no one forgot CGs, runs, outcues and TRTs. 

These simple adjustments changed everything. Suddenly I was aware of what everyone was doing at every given moment. I was able to assign tasks to MJs swiftly and confidently. I truly felt in control of my job. 

Communicative Teamwork 

With all of these things in place, Ryan, Alyssa and I made an excellent team this week. We communicated throughout class (sorry Stacy) via Facebook message, and I was even able to help Alyssa by securing an interview for a story while completing a class exercise.  I constantly gave our MJs deadlines to complete each task and continually checked up on them, so that by 3:30, we were in very good shape and had a good number of things online. 

The result of our collective pre-planning was a beautiful, fluid, informational, and almost flawless newscast. 

After all of the hurdles we had to overcome, I have to say, TEAM THURSDAY IS IMPENETRABLE. 

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