Month: April 2009

New skillset for online reporters

No doubt about it. You need to be able to work fast and juggle multiple deadlines if you’re going to succeed in online journalism. But you also have to be adept at marketing, which used to be a dirty word…

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Killing local TV news

Is this a trend? A station in northeast Pennsylvania pulled the plug on its local newscasts this month and gave the entire news staff only a few hours notice that they were all being fired. WYOU-TV’s newscasts were produced by…

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Why stand-ups matter

Stand-ups should never be an afterthought, says award-winning photojournalist Darren Durlach of WBFF-TV in Baltimore. He makes a point of talking with reporters on the way to the story to plan the day’s stand-up. Many photojournalists dislike shooting stand-ups, but…

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Smart strategies for using VJs

TV newsrooms that are replacing reporter-photographer teams with solo video journalists might benefit from the experience of stations that have always had them.  News8 Austin, the cable news channel in  Texas, has used VJs ever since it launched 10 years…

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Award-winning investigations

Three local TV stations have won prestigious Peabody Awards for the kind of in-depth reporting many stations no longer seem to value.  In an era of budget cuts and layoffs, WWL in New Orleans, KMGH in Denver and KLAS in…

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Visual storytelling secrets

Okay, there’s really only one secret. Award-winning photojournalist John Gross of KSTP-TV in Minneapolis says it’s pretty basic, and once you know it, you just have to make sure you get it every time. Gross believes the closing shot is…

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