Continue reading ‘Improving your reporter stand-ups’ »]]> Few things get ridiculed more than the cheesy TV reporter stand-up, but the fact is, stand-ups can play an important role in storytelling.

Professor Dana Rosengard has been teaching young journalists how to create better stand-ups for years.  Here are his “Top 5 Reasons for Doing a Standup.”

1.  To tell a part of story for which you don’t have video.  These often come at the end of the reporter package and focus on what’s next in the story.  “Most standups are closers,” says Rosengard.  “If it didn’t happen yet, you can’t show it.”

2.  To tell a part of story for which you do not have audio. “When someone won’t talk to you, you can say, ‘We tried to get a comment’ in your standup,” Rosengard says.

3.  To transition the story.  These are often called stand-up bridges, they take you from one location to another or from one issue to another within a story.

4.  To show presence.  Stand-ups can add credibility to your reporting because the audience is able to see that you were on the scene of whatever story you are covering.

5.  To establish yourself.  Part of what makes a TV reporter effective is using the power of the medium to gain access to information and interviews.  If people recognize your face, that will be easier.

And let’s add one more reason to the mix:   No. 6 should be practice makes perfect. Or at least practice makes you more comfortable on camera, so when you’re just starting out, you should shoot a stand-up for every story.  You might not use every one you shoot, but the more you do, the better you’ll be when a stand-up is critical to the story.

To get your creative juices flowing, TV consultant Bob Kaplitz produced this compilation of stand-ups from San Diego reporter  Joe Little that help illustrate a number of different ways to deliver information to the audience directly on camera.

Continue reading ‘How to put together a TV news package’ »]]> One of the strongest broadcast journalism programs in the country is located at the University of Montana, and Professor Denise Dowling is one of the best instructors in the school.

She gets students started on video storytelling by following a simple formula.

“Begin and end every story with natural sound,” says Dowling, “include a nat pop in or out of every sound bite.”

Did you get that?

• Begin and end every story with natural sound.  Natural sounds are those that occur naturally within your shooting environment.  This works best in stories that are rich with natural sound, i.e. a kid’s soccer game or a house fire with firefighters working hard at the scene.  However, at times, even traffic noise or people talking can be used as a natural sound break.  The trick is to be sure that you gather good natural sounds when you’re in the field, so you have them to use in editing.
• Include a natural sound break or “pop” before or after sound bites.  Of course, the natural sound has to be relevant to what the interview is discussing.  Natural sound for it’s own sake is seldom compelling.

Dowling has also created a mantra to guide her students when they’re out shooting video.

“Wide, medium, tight, super tight, action, reaction,” says Dowling.  “The goal is to capture the moment.”

When people are new to video storytelling, they often do a great job of getting lots of wide and medium shots, but it’s the close-ups and extreme close-ups that draw the audience in.  A good rule of thumb is that 50 percent of the video you shoot should be made up of tight and super tight shots.

The reaction shots can be used to tell the audience what the story means.  For example, the face of a man shaking his head in disgust after the city council passes a new ordinance is likely to be a useful shot for telling part of that story.

To reinforce these concepts, Dowling asks students to produce packages that focus on something locally produced; the best of their “Made in Montana” pieces air on the local PBS affiliate.

Of course, folks who’ve been producing packages for years will probably frown at the idea of using a formula to tell stories, but for those who are just starting out, you could do much worse than following this path for your first TV packages.

Continue reading ‘How to create the best reporter reel for 2013’ »]]> It’s May and you know what that means… thousands of college journalism grads descend on news directors across the nation, all vying for hundreds of reporter jobs.  Yes, that’s right — thousands of graduates, hundreds of jobs — even if you’re not particularly good at math, you know that adds up to the fact that your resume reel has to stand out.

Most reporters will start off a reporter reel with a montage of stand-ups, but you can definitely overdo that approach.

“I would keep them to 40-45 seconds,” says Bob Noonan, news director at WPMI, Mobile/Pensacola.

Broadcast journalist Stephen Quinn is graduating from college in June.  He opens his resume reel with stand-ups and anchoring.

Keith Esparros of KNBC in Los Angles says some reporters might do better without the traditional round robin of stand-ups at all.

“I realize I’m a bit of a rogue on this; I’ve looked at a few thousand in my day,” says Esparros. “If you are particularly good at stand-ups – you look good and sound good, you’re working your stand-up, you’re taking me somewhere – then it’s OK to do four or five; however, it can work against you if they’re not very good.”

Job seekers must also figure out how many reporter packages to include.

“There’s no magic number,” says Esparros. “Keep it to less than five minutes, three packages at the most.”

For Noonan, it’s also important to see how the reporter will look in a live situation, even if that means including a “look live” for the reel.

“What I really like on a live shot is if the package and the live shot sound the same,” says Noonan.  He wants a reporter to sound as natural when narrating pre-recorded packages as he or she does live.

Both men say it’s fine to include a little bit of anchoring from a news desk, but it shouldn’t make up the bulk of your presentation.

So how do you get your reel and resume in front of a news director?

“I think URLs are best,” said Esparrso. “It’s not a bad idea to also send a DVD since I get about 400-500 emails a day. Sending a resume on a piece of paper and a physical reel is good reminder, but put the URL on the paper too.”

Continue reading ‘The shame of starting salaries in TV news’ »]]>

Some issues just won’t go away. More than a decade ago, I wrote a column for American Journalism Review in which I posited that some of the best and brightest J-school grads probably weren’t going to work at local TV stations because the salaries were so low. Last week, I got a call from a journalism prof asking me if I thought things had changed. Sure, I said, some things have, but not the bottom line.

My case in point in the original column was a new college graduate named Jennifer. She had earned her degree in broadcast journalism from a large state university in the Midwest. She was bright, personable and her résumé boasted an impressive series of internships and summer jobs in newsrooms.

So where was she working? In public relations. Not because she couldn’t get a job in news, she said, but because she couldn’t afford to. Her PR position paid almost twice as much as she was offered by one newsroom.

Back then, a lot of news directors told me their job applicants left a lot to be desired. Their writing skills were weak, they had little or no knowledge of government or history. They appeared to think they were entitled to work the day shift, and by the way, they wanted their weekends off.

That was before the recession hit, of course. With jobs scarce in every field, my guess is that highly qualified graduates were more than willing to “settle” for local TV jobs, if they could get them. And after several years of slashing payroll, stations did start hiring again as the recovery took hold, particularly for entry level jobs.

But if employment was up sharply, salaries were not.

The median starting pay in television news was about $25,500 in 2011. According to the annual survey of journalism and mass communication graduates by the University of Georgia, that’s the lowest full-time salary paid in any journalism field. And it’s been that way for a very long time.

The bottom line is that new hires in TV newsrooms today make considerably less in terms of purchasing power than I did when I started in this business 40 years ago. My first television job paid $6,000 a year. Plug the numbers into a cost-of-living calculator and that turns out to be the equivalent of $33,412 in 2013 dollars, almost 24 percent more than today’s starting average. That’s grim.

Broadcast news has never been the business you’d choose if you’re trying to get rich. But as the economy improves and entry-level salaries in TV news stays flat, I suspect we’ll see many of the most qualified graduates once again taking jobs in some related, better-paying field.

Bob Papper, who conducts a separate salary survey for RTDNA, once said that broadcast news is rapidly becoming “one of the lowest-paying jobs a college graduate can find.” With student loan debt hitting $1 trillion, only those whose parents can subsidize them may be able to afford to work in news. And that’s just sad.

Originally published at NewsLab

Paying peanuts image via Shutterstock

Continue reading ‘A video camera that turns back time’ »]]> Missed it! It’s an awful feeling. You’ve been waiting and waiting for a specific shot for a story and when it finally happens, you hit record just a wee bit too late. Maybe you’ve captured some of what you need, but it’s going to be hard to edit. If only you could turn back time.

But wait, maybe you can. CBC videojournalist Phonse Jessome shared this tip on his blog. His new Sony XDCAM has a cache mode that records continually but only saves the last few seconds of video before the record button is pushed. The number of seconds is variable up to 15; Jessome has his set at six.

Here’s an example of how it works. Jessome needed a shot of a motorcycle in traffic. Rather than roll on everything that passed by, he waits.

In this case when the bike rolls into the frame I hit record. The camera then adds video to the past six seconds it has already saved. So when I get back to the station I have the option of backing the shot up to the point where the bike enters the picture just before I actually hit record.

Why not leave the camera in cache mode all the time? “It burns more power and battery life is critical out here,” Jessome says. But in some situations, “cache is a game changer.”

Maybe you’ve known about and used this trick for ages, but I hadn’t seen it before. And I wanted to give Jessome a shout-out anyway for documenting what he does in the field and sharing what he learns along the way. He’s a daily news reporter based in Nova Scotia who shoots his own stuff and files for radio and the website, too, so it’s not like he has a ton of “spare time.”

Jessome’s From the Field Live blog has tips on everything from coping with changing light conditions to shooting when the wind chill is minus 20.

When you shoot in that kind of cold the tendency is to rush the shots to get back in the truck. In a word, don’t. You still need the same volume of quality material in an edit suite.

Jessome’s been sharing stories from the road since last November as part of his network’s effort to enhance its web presence. Worth the effort? From my perspective, absolutely.

Originally published at NewsLab

Continue reading ‘When and where to break exclusive news’ »]]> You’re working on an exclusive story for tonight and the Web and social media team wants a piece of it, hours before air. Should you share? If you thought that question had been laid to rest years ago, think again. In some newsrooms, the answer still is, “It depends.”

Brandon Mercer, news director at KTXL in Sacramento, has developed a checklist to help his newsroom figure out what to break when and where. Among the key questions is the type of story and its relative value to the TV or online audience.

“If it’s newsworthy, you have to post it,” Mercer says. “If it’s got viral potential, you want to post it.  If it has ratings potential only, you don’t post it.”

So breaking news that everyone’s going to have eventually gets posted immediately, without question. A feature with amazing video that could get picked up everywhere gets posted, too. But an exclusive interview that’s likely to be of interest only to the local audience would be promoted online and in social media without disclosing details, and the full story would be held for air.

It gets tricky, though, when a story is of more than one type, or as Mercer puts it, when the Venn diagrams intersect. Those stories require a conversation and the TV and online EPs have to make the decision together. If they can’t, the news director steps in.

Most stories that are posted online are fed to all social media platforms at the same time. But in some cases, one platform might take priority over another. Here’s KTXL’s approach to different types of stories:

• Breaking news: Twitter, then website
• Complex stories of huge community interest: Website, then Twitter
• Photos: Facebook, then website
• Raw video: Online video player
• Discussions and newsmakers: Google+ hangouts

Want an example of online video that went viral? 

Yep. Bird poop. CNN loved it. “If we’re first to get it into the video player, we become the ‘primary source’ and the major newspapers, networks, and affiliates will begin embedding our video player,” Mercer says.  ”If we’re late on video?  Even our newspaper partners will embed our competitors’ video.”

Originally published at NewsLab

Computer remote image via Shutterstock

Continue reading ‘Would you make a good newscast producer?’ »]]> Brit Stack was like many journalism students; she was learning about reporting and shooting, editing and writing and keeping her eye out for reporting jobs.  But Brit was also smart enough to grab an opportunity, so when she got a chance to take a 6-week producing internship in Jackson, Miss., she jumped at it.

“It was great,” said Stack with a laugh.  “You get to know everything that’s going on without leaving the building.”

Immediately following her internship, Stack was offered a producing job at KALB-TV in Alexandria, La.  Within months, she was promoted to executive producer.

“Being in a small, rural market makes it hard to generate stories,” Stack said.  “Our reporters have to email the news managers by 8 p.m. each night with stories they want to do the next day.”

Stack and news director Keith Weiss then evaluate what the reporters have sent and contribute their own stories into the mix.

In addition to the long days, Stack says producers need other key skills.

“You need to be well organized, love to write and be able to handle multiple projects at once.”

She says it’s not unusual for her to be listening to scanners, checking email and putting together two shows at once, all while she’s supervising reporters out on their stories.

So, how do you prepare to do the job of producer?

“An internship is absolutely vital.  In many journalism schools there aren’t classes that focus on producing, so an internship will help you learn a newsroom’s systems and get you writing every day.”

In fact, Stack says even without an internship, you can improve your ability to produce newscasts by writing every day – even if it’s not news writing.

“You’ll just get to know language better,” Stack said.

Of course, every job has its headaches and Stack says sharing responsibility for hiring people is stressful.

“Evaluating job candidates is probably my least favorite part of the job,” said Stack. “One job posting was up for just three days and we got more than 15 applicants.”

The best thing about the job was easy for Stack to articulate.

‘I love writing, being able to write and be in charge.  As a producer you get to help shape a newscast and you are putting your vision on the air.”

Continue reading ‘The great J-school debate, revisited’ »]]>

What exactly is the value of a journalism degree? Are J-schools really preparing students for the media jobs of the future? The questions aren’t new, but they’ve come up again in connection with the selection of a new dean for Columbia’s prestigious graduate school of journalism.

If you haven’t read it, Michael Wolff’s take in USA Today is about as blunt as it gets. He chastises the school for hiring Steve Coll as dean, calling him “another New Yorker writer, one who…has never tweeted in his life.” As Wolff sees it, Columbia is utterly out of touch with today’s news business and its needs.

The disgrace is not just that the school takes students’ or their parents’ money to train them for a livelihood that it reasonably can predict will not exist. But it is also an intellectual failure: The information marketplace is going through a historic transformation, involving form, distribution, business basis and cognitive effect, and yet Columbia has just hired a practitioner to lead it with little or no career experience in any of these epochal changes.

Not entirely true, writes David Carr in the New York Times, who gives Columbia credit for “aggressive moves into new forms of journalistic expression.”  But he too slams journalism education in general as a con game. “Having seen many journalism programs up close, I can say that most are escalators to nowhere,” Carr says.

Harsh, right? But not the whole story. Just ask the recruiters who show up every year at Columbia’s J-school and others looking for new hires. According to Crain’s NY Business digital skills gained from reputable schools may be the edge that journalists need to compete in a shrinking job market.”

So maybe the J-schools are doing something right. If so, why would Columbia’s new dean say he’s thinking about adding a year to the school’s one-year master’s program? The school currently has a second year program focused on specific topics, but it’s optional. The core MS program at Columbia costs close to $85,000, as it is, including tuition, fees and living expenses. Even if you accept that the one-year program is worth that kind of money, I have to wonder what would make a two-year masters worth twice as much. Weigh in, please.

Keyboard image via Shutterstock

Continue reading ‘Creating stronger multimedia stories’ »]]> MediaStorm has built a business by not doing perishable stories, according to founder Brian Storm.

Storm, who made a name for himself as the first director of multimedia at MSNBC.com, spoke to a group of journalists about his strategies for producing powerful visual narratives that have a long shelf life.

“I’m looking for people to make a human connection with the piece before I introduce an issue,” Storm said.

He used a portion of “Driftless: Stories from Iowa” to illustrate his points.  The segment “Harry & Helen” deals with Alzheimer’s, America’s food supply and other deep issues, but it begins by telling the audience a love story.

To grab and hold the audience’s attention, Storm says he and the other storytellers he works with diligently log and transcribe every piece of video and every image.

“We transcribe emotion, make note of body language,” Storm said.  “You have to have a reason for every edit; everything has to contribute.”

Storm is a big fan of combining still photos with audio and video.  He says still photos let the audience stare at a person or study a scene without embarrassment, but video can also offer another special feature.

“You should be shooting for visual sequence.” said Storm.  “Ninety seconds becomes 12 seconds in a video sequence; it allows you to compress time.  Sequences are the key to good video.”

Storm also likes to use sound to telegraph the visuals.  He says you want to hear the sound of the flag flapping in the breeze before you see it.  Also in the toolbox is full screen text.

“Text allows  you to internalize meaning; it’s a powerful tool, but don’t overdo it.”

For Storm this is an exciting time for journalists.  He says multimedia is about using and respecting all media to tell better stories.

“You know what’s going to save journalism? Great storytelling.”

Continue reading ‘YouTube Video fair game in TV newscasts?’ »]]> Syracuse University professor Hub Brown put forth a good question today when he asked a group of broadcast journalism educators what they do about YouTube video in student stories.

We’ve been having a discussion here at Newhouse about the use of online video by students in skills courses—the copyright implications, the limits of “fair use,” and what policies we should enforce going forward. Like many of you I’m sure, we have been getting cases of students wanting to use video they find online (especially in the user-generated world of YouTube), often instead of going out and shooting it themselves. Sometimes they will try to credit YouTube (which is all kinds of wrong); rarely do they go to the person who shot the video and get his/her permission to use it. We’ve been rejecting those cases.

So, is that just old-fashioned thinking or solid, ethical journalism?  At WTVA in Tupelo, Miss., Assistant News Director Craig Ford says using YouTube video is relatively rare.

“I can tell you that as a rule we don’t use YouTube video unless we get permission from the owner.  Could we claim ‘fair use?’  Possibly.  However, getting permission takes us out of the gray area and puts us on solid legal footing, at least in my mind,” Ford wrote in an email.

Cynthia Joyce studies social media and teaches journalism and the University of Mississippi.  The former senior producer/editor for MSNBC. com says it’s hard to know what’s legal, much less what’s ethical.

“Do the TV stations who regularly use YouTube content mind when their footage winds up in the hands of amateurs online — or on late-night comedy shows, for that matter? Or does that just help boost their brand?” asks Joyce in an email.

At KALB-TV in Alexandria, La., News Director Keith Weiss has no problem using YouTube video as long as they’re alerting the viewers.

“Any YouTube video we use is clearly identified visually as well as in our copy,” wrote Weiss in an email.

Virginia Commonwealth University’s Dr. Tim Bajkiewicz says it’s important to teach students how to appropriately use content from the public.

“For our TV news video production classes the instructor has a general rule of no or, given newsworthy reasons, no more than about 10 percent of the entire video may be from other sources. A “From” or “Courtesy” credit is required, depending on if they didn’t get permission or did, respectively. And YouTube credit should include the username, e.g., YouTube/mediacabbage,” Bajkiewicz wrote.

Bajkiewicz says for the school’s on-air newscast, video from YouTube or other sources can only be used if the students couldn’t have shot it themselves, e.g., a fight that broke out.

Joyce says when she was in the newsroom and decisions were being made regarding whether or not to show a YouTube video, it was a very fuzzy process, not one guided by precedent or principle.

“The excuse frequently used is that the news is just reporting what’s “already out there” — but it sets a precedent whereby the more popular something is, the less ownership or authorship matters.”