Keep It Fresh
Starting with 16 days of coverage of the government shutdown and moving onto coverage of the Affordable Care Act, it has been a semester of ongoing coverage. Bring in the LAX Shooting and Typhoon Haiyan and you have a general understanding of many Annenberg TV News stories this semester.
These are major stories that have been constant in everyday news, but as a producer it is always key to keep in mind a few questions for ongoing coverage:
1) Do our viewers still care? Okay, so maybe they are tired of the same stories, which is why we have to ask our next question.
2) What is new?
As new information is released, we focus on bringing that story to our viewers. When including an ongoing story in our newscast, we aim to include only relevant and current information as to not be too repetitive in telling a story.
Let’s take a look at some of the major ongoing stories included in our most recent newscast and how the new information served as coverage for an older story.
Typhoon Haiyan
Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines over a week and a half ago. After many days of describing the impact of the storm and reporting on the damage, we need to incorporate different and new angles. We often do this through reporting on a local story that connects to the overarching story or simply summarizing the latest released information of the day. On Tuesday, Councilman Mitch O’Farrell held a moment of silence at the Los Angeles City Council meeting on behalf of the residents of his district whose families were impacted by the typhoon. One of our MJs attended the event and we incorporated the resulting sound and video into a VSV that referenced the overarching impact of the typhoon and also included the latest CNN video.
LAX Shooting
We also had more coverage on the LAX Shooting. While we did not originally intend to include coverage of the LAX Shooting in our newscast due to a lack of new information, we instantly changed our minds as soon as we saw the new advisory. The suspected gunman, Paul Ciancia, was released from the hospital and taken into custody. The archive video we included provided perspective to the story and bridged the connection between the current event and the past event.
