What Makes Us Valuable

Being at a school in such a big city like Los Angeles can have its ups and downs. We get hands on experience with some of the best in the nation with amazing internships and TV station tours. However this also means that Los Angeles is saturated with content and the struggle is how do you stand out in such a large market and how do we devise a niche in the market for our content to thrive. 

So how do we make our newscast stand out?

Being a student-run newscast, I think that we play this into our strength. We have the student aspect and hold the campus viewpoint unlike the much larger stations such as ABC7. We are able to deliver the content that students specifically want to know about and lead with a USC story that probably wouldn’t be covered by a larger station.

You can never fail with a USC story or with a topic that keeps popping up onto your newsfeed on Facebook or Twitter. If students are talking about it, they will more than likely watch it as well; and wouldn’t we want them to tune in to ATVN instead of ABC7? I would.

This Monday, for the most the newscast we were planning to lead with the death of Shain Gandee, star of MTV’s “Buckwild.” Maybe it’s because I am secretly a reality TV show junkee or I just have a pre-teens taste in shows but I still love MTV. Although I don’t watch “Buckwild” on a weekly basis, I have to admit that I have seen it. So for the beginning of the day, we had high hopes for this story, thinking that students really would care.

It turns out however that almost no one watches the show. We sent an MJ out twice, at two different times during the day to get some MOSs and I think out of everyone interviewed only one person had watched the show. Obviously not a lead story. Although we would of liked to lead with it, we have to keep our audience in mind and think about what the whole opinion of the student body would want to watch. Most of the time however, what we are interested in is generally what the rest of the campus is interested in, making picking out stories pretty easy.

With our target audience essentially being us, we get to cater the newscast to what we think is important because our views are probably the same as the rest of the student population. Although we didn’t end up leading with Shain Gandee’s death, we still left him in our newscast.

With “Buckwild” not as our lead, we then had to decide what would be late in the day.

If we were to lead with a foreign topic such as the controversy in North Korea first, although very important and included in our newscast, I'm not sure that it would be the first thing of interest to students on campus. 

We choose to lead with baseball's opening day. This is where we are able to see the troubles of being a student run newscast without credentials. Apparently we can't even get past the front gates of the ballpark without being a top news station in L.A. However we did not let this stop us! We went anyways and were actually able to get some really good footage. The key, act like you know what you are doing and only leave is someone asks you to.

Just like any news station, the hardest part is to keep the audience tuned after the A block, since that is where most of the important, top new stories are. We have to hook the audience and keep their attention throughout the full half-hour. 

Making sure we have elements that students care about and that we care about throughout the show is key to keeping the audiences’ attention. I like to think what stories would I be interested in and do we have any of those say in the C block. If I’m not likely to care and tune in, other people probably aren’t either. So it is important to make sure we do have these elements.

I think we were able to accomplish that with a few April Fools jokes and banter.