There’s a lot more to reporting than going out on assignment and asking questions. To tell really good stories, you need an inquisitive mind and a willingness to take risks–two characteristics Boyd Huppert of KARE-TV in Minneapolis has in abundance.
“The assignment is not the story,” Huppert says. “Our job as the storytellers is to go out and find the story.”
Take this assignment: A little boy from Kenya who came to the US for eye surgery meets the Rotarians who paid for his trip.
Huppert and photojournalist Jonathan Malat are sent to do that story for the 4 p.m. newscast and they’re in a hurry to get it done. They meet the boy where he’s staying and the first thing the kid does is grab Malat’s microphone. Does he take it back? He does not. Malat gives the boy his headphones and, for 20 minutes, shoots video of the kid as he interviews his host, talks to the camera, and does what any five-year-old would do.
Some of that clowning around made it into the TV story. Remarks by the Rotary president did not, even though Malat shot them. “I used a quote in my web script,” Huppert said, “which was a good place for it.”
Why do it this way? “We have to let people get to know the people in our stories,” Huppert told journalists at the 2018 Texas Association of Broadcasters conference. Letting the little boy be himself on camera helped viewers feel they’d met him. And for Huppert, there was another bonus. “The time we put in on the front is time I got back at the end of the day because I knew how to write the story.”
For Huppert, finding the story is almost a game. The search begins at the assignment meeting and continues in the car, as he and the photojournalist he’s working with discuss what they might find when they get to the location.
As the shoot unfolds, Huppert is constantly looking for a focus for the story, trying to figure out what it’s really about. “Focus helps me decide how to structure the story, where it’s going to start, how it’s going to end.”
Huppert finds a lot of stories by just talking to people. “Be observant, be curious, talk to everybody,” he advises. He actually found a potential story on his way to the conference from the Houston airport. “My Uber driver was a retired CEO of a health care company.”
One more tip: Spend time with your mom. When Huppert took his mom out recently, she happened to mention that her friend Carol’s sister-in-law had just found out she was switched at birth. Needless to say, Huppert put that story on TV.
