Strong writing essential for all storytelling

While she hates to hear someone utter the phrase ‘print is dead,’ Lacey Russell, a CNN video production assistant, knows it’s a digital world.

“I don’t like when people say ‘print is dead,’ because good writing will never die,” she said. “It will just move to the internet.”

Russell creates news videos for CNN.com. “This includes politics, entertainment videos, and videos about a cute animal at the zoo,” she said. “If it’s in the news, I’m probably making it, or someone on my team is.”

Russell’s team also shoots documentary shorts without an anchor or reporter track, her favorite part of the job. “My typical day, I come in, and I’ll usually have an assignment waiting on me,” she said. “They’re TV packages, but instead of a reporter, it’s text. My job is to write the script for it. I have to do independent reporting. I’ll find elements to put in the video. We’re very visually focused.”

Russell, a recent University of Mississippi graduate, majored in broadcast journalism with a double minor in English and cinema. She was named editor of The Daily Mississippian, the campus newspaper, her junior year of college, and she freelanced for The New York Times.

Russell began her professional broadcast journalism career at WTVA in Tupelo, Mississippi as a multimedia journalist. She applied and was accepted for a CNN internship.

“I got the internship, worked, and became official after I was offered a job as production assistant,” she said.

Russell says her biggest concern as a journalist is accuracy. “You don’t ever want to publish something with your name attached to it if it’s wrong,” she said. “Once you click publish, it’s out to the masses.”

Russell said informing the public is the most important part of her work. “I like telling people things that they may not already know about,” she said.

She also enjoys working on big video projects and monitoring social media to see how well they are received through shares and views.

Russell encourages anyone aspiring to be a journalist to focus on the basics. “Learn how to tell a story, and then tell it however you want to,” she said. “If you build a strong foundation for your writing, you can have a successful career in journalism.”

Story contributed by Maggie Houin, a journalism student in the University of Mississippi’s Meek School of Journalism & New Media.

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