All For One, and One For All
In the past, when a producer began to think of news for their televised broadcast, he or she had to be concerned with elements for TV or radio. Today, producers must also consider how the same story can be displayed on the web and social media. After a little while of getting used to it, I can now see the benefits of these joint efforts and why media is pushing in this direction.
With late breaking stories, our viewers want to get every update as soon as we have it. Being a news station that operates Monday through Thursday, and only airing at 6:00 PM, this can be a challenge. ATVN.org is what closes the gap. Through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, we can rapidly send out links to our website with the latest updates. Viewers only have to look on their feeds to see news stories they are interested in, and follow the link back to our website. To get the viewers interested, we have to carefully choose what elements we want on social media and what goes on the website.
It is important with social media to have an engaging visual element accompanied by a teaser line telling what the story is about. It is also important not to give everything away because the ultimate goal is to have the audience follow the link back to our main website. On the website might be an interview (that we shot) and text to give the story more background. After the story airs on the nightly broadcast, it will also be put online to round out our coverage.
Being a Thursday producer, it is a little easier to keep the website updated and running since we have a web producer that works all day long. However, we do still have to keep communication running between us so they know what video and other visual elements we have, and what we consider to be more timely than other stories.
It is simple to get caught up with the televised show and forget all about how web is doing, but it is important to keep the web team included as the story updates and unfolds. The web is predominantly how viewers are going to receive our stories (both for the text and to watch the broadcast online), which is why it is important to not think of the web as a separate entity but as if we are one.
