How A Newscast Is Born

Morning meetings are crucial in a newsroom. It’s one of the few times during the day when you can sit down with your team to pitch, plan, and assign stories. The 45-minute meeting involves outlining, talking about different story pitches, and what the “make it” or “break it” elements will be.

However, as the day goes by, the stories that we pitched and planned at 8:15 begin to change. Not everything that we said we wanted to incorporate in our newscast becomes possible. Sometimes we are not able to get interviews, statements, or b-roll, and so we begin to come up with solutions. We might have our assignment desk students reach out to other experts, we might try to find video on CNN, or sometimes, we might even send reporters out last minute. It’s important to always have a plan B, because so many things can go wrong in the blink of an eye.

Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that the elements that help to make a story successful by the time it airs, is the amount of planning and researching that is done before reporters and MJs are sent out into the field. If these students go out knowing what their story is about, who they have to interview, and what sort of b-roll they have to get, then the easier that it will be for them to strategize how they want to go about their shift. A lot of the time, the producers and I find ourselves scrambling to write stories or get videos in last minute, because we didn’t fully communicate to students what it was that we wanted from them. Therefore, I know that if I come into the newsroom every morning with ideas of what I want from each of the stories I pitch (experts, b-roll, interviews), then I will be able to better communicate with others about what my team and I envision for the newscast.