Sequester Cuts and Porn Stars: What's in a Lead Story?
This Wednesday was a big news day. The impending sequester cuts in Washington loomed just two days away and the pope gave his final public speech before retirement. Locally, homeowners protested against Wells Fargo's foreclosure policies, an elementary school launched a new program to tackle childhood obesity and top mayors from across the country gathered downtown to discuss fixing the American education system.
Then, late in the afternoon, we faced breaking news when a news anchor from Santa Barbara was reported missing.
Yet, somehow, we led the newscast with a story about porn star James Deen visiting Pasadena City College.
How did that happen you may ask?
Well, it all started out in the morning meeting. I pitched a story about how certain federally-funded USC programs (e.g. Upward Bound and McNair Scholars) could be impacted by the budget cuts slated to take effect this Friday. After the meeting, the lead producer this week chose the "USC Sequester" as our lead story, because it included three important elements:
- It's a hard news story, with potential for a human angle.
- It impacts USC students directly.
- It could be tied into the bigger picture of the sequester's impact across the country, including great soundbites from congressional leaders made available through our online video library.
We assigned the story to a reporter and sent her off to find students in the programs and set up interviews with the Office of Budget and Planning and the Financial Aid office.
We also assigned the James Deen "porn star visiting a college campus" story to a reporter. Deen was scheduled to speak to a class at his alma mater, and in the morning, we had heard news of a possible protest of his appearance on a college campus. Despite it's impact on a local college campus, for a variety of reasons, we weren't so interested and definitely didn't anticipate leading the newscast with this story.
A third reporter worked on the story about Hawaiian Gardens, the smallest city in L.A. County, fighting a 33 percent childhood obesity rate with a new class for parents of young children about healthy eating and exercise. We also sent multimedia journalists (MJ's) out to the education summit and homeowners' protest.
As the day progressed, each of our reporters and MJ's worked diligently. As video producer, I ordered and managed videos for the 15 or so other stories in the newcast. The day progressed smoothly and every person on the team had their job under control. We felt good.
Then, around 2:00 p.m., our plans were side-swiped when the lead story fell through. By no fault of the reporter, we were unable to gather all of the elements needed for a robust, informative full package about the impact of the budget cuts on USC programs. The USC offices were difficult to get in touch with, refused to give on-camera interviews AND could not provide enough concrete facts or statistics. We had great interviews with students, but without the meaty information to support how exactly specific programs would be affected, we really couldn't make it happen.
Thus, relatively late in the day, we bumped down the USC Sequester story and had to regroup. The lead producer and executive producer worked together and decided to bump the James Deen story up to the top of the show, with the reasoning of it being an attention-grabbing story that would appeal to college students.
With all due respect to our lead producer and the reporter on this story, in retrospect, I wish we would have led with any other of our big news stories of the day. Yes, it's true. College kids and 20-something's are easily attracted by buzz words like sex and porn, but are those things more important? Realistically, James Deen and his rift with Pasadena City College impacted a smaller number of people in comparison to the other story topics, such as obesity, education and foreclosure. These topics are inarguably harder news with a greater influence on more people's lives.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, so I still give our news team a lot of credit for pulling off a show full of informative, compelling and diverse stories. Our sports and weather blocks were also very strong, which helps to carry the entire show, not just the top of the newscast.
At the end of the day, I'm very proud of our work. From this show, I learned not to be discouraged when the newscast doesn't go according to plan and to prepare more thoroughly with a smart and well-thought out back-up lead story about which we can feel just as confident as we did our first choice.
