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Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism University of Southern California
Producers

Fountains of Ideas

We've now put on live shows for two weeks, and still, our newscast feels lacking to me. We have pretty good stories, and we generally have a good sense of what we want to cover. However, I think where we are falling behind is in coming up with ideas for how to present the stories we choose. 

For instance, take yesterday. Yesterday was the day before the government shutdown. It was a huge story. Changes were going to be taking place in all facets of life across the United States. There was loads to report on. However, at the morning meeting yesterday, Katie and I did not come up with a strong enough idea of where we wanted the story to go. We had a few mediocre ideas, like talking to National Parks and Monuments about how they would be affected by the shutdown, and trying to find federal workers that were going to be laid off as a result of the cutbacks. By 5pm, we hadn't glued down any place where we could go to find federal workers, so we had no interviews from anyone directly affected. All we had was a phoner from the National Park Association with no video. We couldn't turn that into a package.

In the future, we need to make sure that we not only start out the day with plenty of ideas for stories, but also with strong ideas for what footage we want to have in our rundown. What's a great place to turn to find federal workers? Which government official would be a great person to talk to about this? Too much is never a problem. 

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