A Complete Guide to Television, Field, and Digital Producing

Sally Ann Cruikshank, Christine C. Eschenfelder, Keonte Coleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367480387
• eBook ISBN: 9781000434453
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

This book provides an extensive overview of producing in the ever-changing field of journalism for all types of newsrooms.

Featuring interviews with renowned journalism professionals, A Complete Guide to Television, Field, and Digital Producing offers an in-depth look at the broadcast, field, and digital producing practices of newsrooms today. The book is divided into three parts: television news producing, field producing, and digital producing. Each part provides a clear explanation of the producing role before going into more detail on important skills such as developing stories, writing copy, creating graphics, producing live on location, audience engagement, and using social media. Each chapter includes a variety of supplemental material, including discussion questions, keyword definitions, classroom activities, and graded assignments, including rubrics. Written with a combined 64 years of journalism and journalism education experience, the book will prepare students to produce whatever their job requires.

Taking an integrated approach to journalism education, this is a vital text for journalism and media students studying digital media, broadcast journalism, social media, and reporting.

Part One

Television news producing

1 Day in the life of a news producer

Keonte Coleman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003037729-2

News producers perform multiple tasks for a newscast such as creating the rundown, writing or overseeing the scripts, copy editing all the content for accuracy, and making decisions during the newscast to ensure the newscast ends at the scheduled time. If that definition didn’t scare you away, you are in the right place to learn about a key role in broadcast and digital journalism. If it did scare you, you’re also in the right place! This textbook should help ease your fears by giving you the tools to produce your own newscast. The newscast is the overall broadcast created by journalists to convey the news of the day to their given audience. The newscast contains news content produced by the newsroom and, in some instances, commercial content created by the business/creative marketing teams.

Newscast dayparts and broadcast times

You could work various shifts depending on the daypart of your newscast(s). A daypart is a reference to how broadcasters divide up the hours in a day to help categorize and define the viewing audience. You’re probably familiar with some daypart names (morning, midday, evening, and late evening/night) because many stations use those terms when branding their newscasts. A television station can broadcast multiple newscasts during a daypart, with each newscast normally filling a time slot of 30 minutes to an hour. Newscasts can start on the hour, the half-hour, and even the quarter-hour. Newscasts can also be broadcast via websites and social media platforms. The air times and durations on those platforms can vary widely.

Table 1.1 Newscast Dayparts and Times Can Vary by Markets

Daypart	Newscast Broadcast Times	Typical Newscast Times^a
Morning	4 AM–9 AM	4 AM, 5 AM, 6 AM
Midday	10 AM–1 PM	11 AM, 12 PM, 1 PM
Evening	4 PM–7 PM	4 PM, 5 PM, 6 PM
Late evening/night	9 PM–12 AM	9 PM, 10 PM, 11 PM

^a Newscasts can begin at the half-hour mark (e.g., 5:30 PM) and at the quarter-hour mark (e.g., 11:15 PM).

News shifts

Broadcast stations are open all day and night even when they don’t produce 24-hour news programming. It takes a lot of time and coordination to gather news and place it in a newscast, so producers are always in the station working various shifts. A news shift is the official time employees spend working on a newscast. Morning show producers might begin their shifts before midnight for a newscast that airs as early as 4 AM. Evening producers start their workdays around 9 AM for a newscast that could begin at 4 PM. Nightside producers arrive at the station during the early afternoon hours to produce the late evening newscasts. News shifts generally end about 30 minutes after the newscast ends. You might not have the same sleep schedule as other producers, but your duties in the newsroom will be similar in many ways.

Become a newshound off-the-clock

As a news producer, you should strive to be well-rounded and informed about the world around you, especially the communities in your designated market area (DMA). A DMA is the coverage area that television and radio broadcasters reach with their broadcast signals. You should learn as much as possible about your DMA to get a better understanding of the kinds of stories that will resonate with your audience. It is crucial to cultivate news consumption habits that allow you to learn firsthand information about the diversity in your community and stay abreast of regional, national, and international news that can affect your DMA. You will learn more about creating newscasts for your entire viewing audience in Chapter 13: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Matters: Creating a Complete Story for Your Audience.

Explore your local community

Get involved with the local community as soon as you settle into a new media market. You can learn about the market by conducting research online and following various social media accounts, but you should also make it a practice to physically visit the main tourist attractions, shop in different areas, visit established and new communities, attend civic gatherings, and participate in events hosted by various organizations. These actions allow you to gain your own perspective on the community that you will be serving. You will also begin to cultivate your own sources that could help you in the future when you are trying to cover a news story. Driving around the area during the work week and on the weekends will give you a better perspective on the time it takes for your news crew to navigate the DMA for their news assignments.

Expand your news consumption

Your DMA cares about more than just the news happening in its communities, so it is important that you consume local, regional, national, and international news from many sources. You should begin your workday already aware of the major news that has happened in the world since your last shift. This requires carving out some of your personal time away from work to read and watch news from numerous media outlets including your competition. You’ll want to make sure that you didn’t miss any important news in your market. It is normal to have preferences toward news genres (e.g., business, entertainment, politics, or sports), which can make you focus too much on some genres or too little on others. However, you must be well-rounded with your news consumption habits because your audience has diverse interests.

Quick Tip: Watch Others for Producing Ideas

You can watch broadcast news for the information, but you should also be paying attention to the way other news outlets present information to their audiences. This can help you build a repertoire of ideas to use in your newscasts.

Figure out what you don’t know

Once you arrive at the newsroom you should be on a fact-finding mission to learn what news crews have done since your last newscast. This information will help you start shaping your rundown before your newsroom meeting. Producers should check their emails, communication system messages, voicemails, and the most recent newscast rundowns as an initial step. This allows you to gain a sense of what is happening in the newsroom without bothering others with questions that you can find answers to on your own.

Once you’ve taken notes on what you have learned you can now take your questions to some of the newsroom leaders (assignment manager, other producers, executive producers, assistant news directors, or news directors). Once you have spoken to the newsroom leaders, you should then try to get a sense of the latest that is happening with your newsgathering team (anchors, meteorologists, reporters, sports directors, and videographers). After finishing this process, you should have enough time to check the news wires to find potential items for your news rundown.

Hold news meetings and create the rundown

News crews gather together near the beginning of their shift to conduct an editorial meeting. The newsroom leadership team usually leads these meetings to present and discuss the best news stories for each newscast. This official meeting sets the tone and direction for what the news team will work on for the day. The producer also conducts one-on-one meetings with different members of the news crew to address updates and issues that will affect the newscast.

Figure 1.1 Middle TN News is a student-run newscast at Middle Tennessee State University. The news team is meeting for the last time before their Vote 2020 election night coverage while adhering to COVID-19 safety restrictions.

One of the biggest duties you’ll face as a producer is creating, completing, and communicating the news rundown. A news rundown is a spreadsheet-style document that explains the news content that will appear in a newscast and other pertinent information about the content (e.g., the order of the content, duration of content, style of content, and those responsible for creating the content). The importance of this document can’t be overstated because everyone working on the newscast will use it to figure out what is expected of them.

Many newsrooms use software to create their rundowns. The software allows your scripts to seamlessly connect to your rundown. If you don’t have access to rundown software, you can create a chart like the one in Table 1.2 using a word processing document or spreadsheet software. You’ll need to write your scripts in a word processing document that can be easily shared with the rest of your news team via shareable folders or other online document software. Be sure to coordinate the rundown page numbers and story names to the script page numbers and story names to keep everything organized. You’ll find more details about the news meeting and rundowns in upcoming chapters.

Table 1.2 News Rundowns Are Spreadsheets, So They Can Be Created Within a Word Processing Document or Spreadsheet Software System

				News Rundown Template
	Page	Story Slug	Segment	Anc	Start Time: 6:00:00 PM		End Time: 6:16:00 PM		Total Run Time: 00:16:00
				Shot	Writer	Est. Duration	Actu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Television news producing
• Part Two Field producing
• Part Three Digital producing
• Resources
• Glossary
• Index