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“I doubt I’ll ever buy a live truck again,” says Jeff Houston, news director for WTVA in Tupelo, Miss.

Houston’s station just recently aired its first live shot using a TVUPack. The system uses multiple wireless modems to put out live or video feeds of higher quality than what you can do with a typical smartphone or through Skype.

ABC News used the TVUPack to broadcast a live shot from a moving train, which opens up all kinds of possibilities for literally taking viewers along for the ride on stories.

This and other new technologies such as LiveCast and LiveU are already changing the news business, according to journalism professor Mary Rogus at The Ohio University.

“Feeding the demand for live has diminished the meaning of ‘broadcast quality,’” Rogus says.

Whether you think this is good or bad for the business, Rogus feels viewers are much more accepting now of lower-quality live shots and video segments.

TV stations like the low cost.  According to Rogus, the TV station she worked with this summer paid LiveU $2500 per month for 40 hrs. of cell time per unit.

Houston says stations are adopting this new, cheaper approach to live shots like “gangbusters.”  In addition to being much cheaper than a microwave truck, the backpack live requires fewer people resources, too.

“One person can do a self-contained live shot,” Houston says.

Attention reporters — get ready to add setting up and producing your own live shots to your already long “to do” list!

Filed under: 10. Delivering the News, 12. Getting Ready for the Real World | No Comments »

If you’ve ever wondered if you have what it takes to succeed in a local news environment, you’re about to read some useful advice.  Lillian Askins is a reporter for WAAY-TV in Huntsville, Ala.  Here she shares a great step-by-step guide to help student journalists test out their real-time skills.

Askins says these are tips you can “practice now, so you feel more confident on your first days of work.”

Step 1.

After you have made it through the gauntlet of checking out a camera, start a timer on your phone. Try to shoot all your interviews and b-roll in 45 minutes max, then immediately go to the lab and upload all your footage.

Step 2.

After your footage is on your computer, listen to your interviews.  Pull your favorite sound down to your timeline.

These clips of your best sound should range between 5-12 seconds. (No 20+seconds SOTS……ever.)  If you have a fabulous LONG sot- break it up. Then type out your sound bites. I color code different people in a Word doc, just to help pull the story together faster.

Step 3.

After you have typed out all your sound, you have the bones of your story down on paper. The hard part is almost over. Now all you have to do is connect everything together with your track (voice-over).

Start by writing an anchor intro FIRST. Then weave your sound bites together with simple sentences that help advance the story. And don’t forget nat sound.

(I usually like to start with an establishing intro sentence— a little nat pop—another sentence- then a great sot. You will develop your own style over time.)

Step 4.

Print your script and track your story.

Girls: Put away your cute little baby voice when you track.
Boys: Don’t let the Southern frat star pop out.

You will NEVER get a job if your voice sounds like you are just a 21-year-old college kid. Believe me. That is the reason so many people do not get hired.

Save your sound on a thumb drive and get back to your computer before someone else tries to get on it! RUN!!! Don’t lose your momentum!

Step 5.

Now all the hard logistical parts are over!  Stop and start your clock again. You now have 45 minutes to edit your story together.

Look at your script and simply lay down all your sound. Then you will know the total run time. If it is over 1:30- trim it down… cut something… please. You may bore everyone to tears if your story is over 1:30- AND it will only make you spend more time in the freezing cold editing lab.

Watch your timer. Make FAST decisions. Don’t waste time watching parts you’ve completed or are proud of over and over. Keep moving.  Try as hard as you can to finish as fast as you can without making errors.

Step 6.

YOU’RE DONE! Check the clock. Write down (or remember) the time and next time beat your total time by 10 minutes.

“Here’s an extra tip,” says Askins.  ”When writing your script, don’t bother putting it in all capital letters. This will save you time on your Web story.”

Of course, there will be days when you get the opportunity to take your time to truly craft a good story, but more often than not, local news reporters are under the gun and the ability to put together a story quickly will make you a real asset to your newsroom.

Filed under: 05. Writing the Story | No Comments »

NBC’s Bob Dotson says he sent out 525 resumes when he was first looking for a job.

“I got three responses and two of them were no,” says Dotson.

In the decades that followed, Dotson has produced thousands of stories and won dozens of awards.  He’s also learned quite a few things about storytelling.

“Start every story as if no cares,” says Dotson.  “Then structure the story to make them care.”

At the Broadcast Education Association Convention in Las Vegas, he built on that concept and shared his four elements of great stories.

1.  Start with a scene setter — Dotson says you have to tell people where you are — where the story begins.

2.  Include foreshadowing — Make sure your audience knows something is going to happen in the story.

3.  Develop characters — Introduce us to and build characters throughout the story.  TV news often does this through illustrating conflict.

4.  Provide a resolution — Take us someplace in the story; think about where you will end the piece.

“If you know where to get off, you know how to get there,” says Dotson.

And when it comes to ending stories, Dotson says, don’t rely on sound bites.  He wants to hear a line of narration instead.

“You become a surrogate for your audience,” Dotson says.  “Just react to [the sound bite] if you don’t think you can top it.

Dotson’s American Story airs on NBC’s Today Show and his pieces are linked on the segment’s Facebook page.

Filed under: 05. Writing the Story | No Comments »

Who says journalism ethics is all seriousness and no light? Not the folks at Columbia University’s SPJ chapter, who somehow managed to turn the Society of Professional Journalists ethics code into a song. The title: “You’ve got a great big responsibility.” My favorite lyric:

Sometimes you won’t be popular
Some folks will get annoyed
But if you seek the truth and write it,
you’ll always be employed!

Words to live by. Enjoy!

Filed under: 11. Multimedia Ethics | No Comments »

Television news promotes itself better than any other form of journalism.  TV stations routinely set aside valuable airtime to advertise stories set to appear on upcoming newscasts.  Now, though, the most effective promotions may be airing on cellphones.
 

“I believe the value of a tease on mobile is much more valuable than a video tease during an afternoon show,” says Rich Murphy,  senior Web producer for myfoxdc.com, the website for WTTG-TV in Washington, D.C.  ”Maybe more valuable than a tease during prime. I think it has more of a chance of being paid attention to on mobile than the white noise within a program’s commercials.”

Murphy points out that, during the day, few people are sitting at home watching television, but plenty are checking their smartphones.

News promotions may also be a little easier to produce now, thanks to mobile newsgathering.  Where once a promotion producer had to beg for the information and video needed to tease a good story, now sending information back to the newsroom is routine for journalists at stations like WTTG.

“Is it becoming common practice for crews to email us photos and short summaries during the day.  We use it to update myfoxdc and keep our viewers updated on developing news,” says Murphy.

Of course, social media play a role in promoting content and the story updates end up on Facebook and Twitter, as well.

For the website itself, search engine optimization (SEO) remains a critically important part of driving traffic, and your headlines are at the heart of an SEO strategy.

“Rule of thumb is to make sure your headline has the 5 words people would use to Google the story. Cute, tricky headlines do not accomplish that,” says Murphy.  ”Also putting ‘photos’ or ’video’ in the headlines is a good thing for when someone may Google ‘Oscars, fashion, photos.’”

Still, Murphy says mobile is the big focus right now.

“Mobile is the number one growth area. For many stations more people are accessing content from smart phones than computers. Mobile penetration is growing much faster that PCs.”

Filed under: 08. Producing for the Web, 09. Producing for TV & Multiple Platforms | No Comments »

Imagine sending a letter to a writer you admire and getting a personal reply packed with advice. Joan Lancaster didn’t have to imagine. In 1956, she became one of thousands of children who sent fan mail to C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and actually heard back.

Lewis’s charming letter encourages the aspiring young writer not to worry too much about grammar. “There are no right or wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithmetic,” he writes. “Good English is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.”

He then adds a five-point list of what really matters:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Simple and spot on. Take them to heart and your writing will improve overnight. I promise.

Filed under: 05. Writing the Story | No Comments »

For many years now, on-air journalists have been urged to do active stand-ups. In the best examples, the reporter serves as a kind of tour guide for the audience.

Here’s the advice we’ve offered in Advancing the Story on how to do them well:

• Use the scene, don’t just stand with it behind you.
• Show the audience something they might have otherwise missed.
• Demonstrate how something works.
• Be sure that whatever is coming out of your mouth directly relates to what you are doing  with your hands, feet and eyes.

But nearly everyone who does these active stand-ups shares a word of warning — don’t over do it! Check out the stand-up in this story sent to us by Ole Miss journalism professor Nancy Dupont.

Reporter Dave Summers from WKYC-TV in Cleveland demonstrates how an 82-year-old woman ran down a purse snatcher, complete with the sound of his pounding feet on the pavement and out-of-breath delivery.

Take a look and then tell us what you think? On the mark or over the top?

Speaking strictly for myself, I like it.   It’s a memorable moment and it drives the point home — this is one tough lady!

Filed under: 10. Delivering the News | 1 Comment »

This won’t come as a huge surprise to anyone working in local TV news, but there’s more of it than ever and more people are watching.”To quote Mark Twain, ‘Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,’” says Hearst Television’s vice president for news, Brian Bracco, in the 2012 State of the News Media report, issued today by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

After years of losing both audience and revenue, local stations have some reasons to celebrate. Viewership for both morning and late newscasts on network affiliates was up, on average, for the first time in five years. Audience growth was astronomical at 4:30 a.m. as the number of stations airing news that early doubled for the second year in a row. Quite a few stations pushed their start times even earlier, to 4 a.m., and said it’s paying off.

[WXIN-Indianapolis] News director Lee Rosenthal…credits the early start with improving ratings for the rest of the station’s newscasts, including doubling viewership for the 4:30 a.m. half-hour compared to the year before. “We’re producing more news and that’s added to our credibility and exposure,” he said. “The earlier we’ve gone on, the more we’ve gained off of it.”

A number of stations even had success adding news at 4 p.m. to replace Oprah. And independent stations gained viewers in every time slot except midday.

Digital audience

Local TV stations aren’t just growing audience for their on-air offerings but also for their online and social media products. In most of the biggest markets in the country, newspaper websites still outdraw local television sites. Greensboro, N.C., (DMA #46) is a rare exception where all three TV sites do better than the local paper. But change could be on the way.

In Albuquerque, N.M., where the local paper put up a paywall in 2001, KOAT now reaches twice as many adults online as the newspaper. Hofstra University’s Bob Papper, who surveys stations annually for RTDNA, says that’s a sign of things to come.

Newspaper paywalls are going to make that increasingly common, and TV stations are poised to be the biggest beneficiaries of those paywalls.

Financial outlook

Local TV makes the vast majority of its money from broadcast advertising, and in 2011, stations made less. The decline was predictable for a non-election year and the forecast for 2012 is substantially brighter, with spending on both candidate and issue ads expected to set a new record.

Other sources of revenue for local stations are growing year after year: retransmission fees and online and mobile advertising. According to one study,television stations enjoyed the highest growth rate in online advertising of any medium. All of these revenue sources are still relatively small, however.

Worrisome signs

So is everything coming up roses for local TV? Not entirely. The one-time “newscast of record” in the early evening keeps losing viewers, on average, although the rate of decline has slowed. Across the board, the largest audience gains were in time slots with the smallest viewership. And a troubling trend appears to be continuing: share is outperforming ratings in early evening and late time slots. In other words, stations are drawing a larger share of a smaller audience, because fewer people are watching television at all when the news is on.

The long-term outlook isn’t entirely upbeat, either. As the economy improves, overall viewership could decline. “People in recessionary times watch more television,” said Jerry Gumbert, chief executive of the consulting firm AR&D. “We’ve seen that over 40 years.”

[Full disclosure: I'm the lead author of the local TV chapter in the 2012 State of the News Media Report.]

 Sourced from: NewsLab

Filed under: 12. Getting Ready for the Real World | Comments Off

Geo-based social apps have been used in news gathering for a few years now.  For example Foursquare’s “mayors” have been tapped for expertise on a particular location when it’s touched by breaking news.  Gowalla “trips” created by the Austin American-Statesman got some buzz as an example of how a news organization could use these services to provide virtual tours of of local landmarks or other consumer-oriented content.

Now, there’s Highlight.  Touted by USA Today as the most talked-about app at the South by Southwest (SWSX) conference, the app seems to take location-based social media a step further.

Simply put, the iPhone app lets you know when you’re near someone with even the remotest social-media connection to you, and you get plenty of notifications to remind you.

Thinking about  news gathering, it seems possible that this app could make it easier for reporters to find known sources in the chaos of a major breaking news story.  If you’re connected to a local teacher on  Facebook, the app might alert you to the fact that he is just a few feet away when you arrive on the scene of the school lockdown.

Of course, this once again raises the issue of whether journalists should be connected to sources on social media, but it may be getting to the point that you can’t afford not to figure out how to interact with news makers in the social media space.

Filed under: 03. Multimedia Newsgathering, 11. Multimedia Ethics | No Comments »

Remember the Flip cam?  Those smaller cameras put news gathering capabilities in the hands of anyone with a desire to do it. To maximize the quality of the video, a list of best practices in video news gathering was developed.

Now that smartphones with video capability are everywhere, it’s worth talking again about techniques that can help the journalists who use them get the highest quality video possible.

1. Keep it steady.  With any small camera, you have to work especially hard to avoid shaky cam.  Look for natural tripods, such as a car hood or a door frame — anything  that you can use to brace the camera.  If nothing is available, you want to hold the camera with both hands and keep your elbows in close to your side.

2. Zoom with your feet.  A digital zoom is pretty worthless — it’s best to just get closer to your subject.

3. Know your mic.  Figure out where the microphone is located and play around a bit to determine how to record the best sound. Generally, you will need to move in close to the source of the sound or interview.  If you’re willing to invest a little cash, you can buy external mic kits for smartphones that will improve the audio quality.

4.  Look for the light.  If you have the option, try to shoot video in good light.  Low light situations are tough for  smartphones and other small cameras.

5. Set it high.  If your smartphone allows you to change  the camera’s resolution, stick with the highest setting possible.

Though the video linked below was not designed specifically for journalists, it offers solid advice in how to shoot better video with a smartphone.  It also features a few gadgets that can give you more options in the field.

Filed under: 03. Multimedia Newsgathering, 09. Producing for TV & Multiple Platforms | 6 Comments »