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 [...]
Consumer reporter Jackie Callaway of WFTS in Tampa calls her beat a beast. She’s expected to produce two or three quick turns a week and a “deeper dive” every other week, while working long-term on investigative stories. But after heading the station’s “Taking Action” franchise for a decade, Callaway says she’s learned how to tame [...]
Of course you have video on your website. Doesn’t everyone? But what is it, exactly? Putting TV clips on the Web is a no-brainer, says NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller, but it’s not a game changer. What is? No one really knows yet, but there’s lots of experimentation underway. Schiller told the Beet-TV [...]
All of us have “bad voice” days when we don’t sound as good as we’d like. I’m having one of those days today, in fact, thanks to a rotten cold. But most days, my voice performs pretty well. The same can’t be said for a lot of younger broadcast journalists, apparently. Voice coach Ann Utterback [...]
Can you be a good TV photojournalist and a lousy storyteller? Absolutely. Fabulous images alone won’t tell a great story. Award-winning videographer Nathan Thompson thinks of each story as a puzzle with five main pieces. If any one of them is missing, he says, the story won’t hang together. Thompson shared his keys to efficient [...]
Do you write more than you read? One way to become a better writer is to read more. Here’s how the Portuguese author Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, once described his writing routine: “I write two pages. And then I read and read and read.” Writers read to see how others do [...]
We’re starting the New Year here at NewsLab by looking back at the year before–just as we did at this time a year ago. In 2012, our readers not only wanted practical tips, they also gravitated toward posts about the state of the news business. Here are our top ten most viewed posts, in case [...]
Organized chaos. That’s how Lee Zurik of WVUE in New Orleans describes his work days. And no wonder. He anchors two prime time newscasts every night and also serves as the station’s chief investigative reporter. How does he manage to keep producing award-winning work? We asked Zurik to share his strategies for finding and keeping [...]
Words have power and the most powerful word in a sentence should come last. I could have written: Words have power and the last word should be the most powerful one in a sentence. But that would have put the emphasis on “sentence” when I wanted to stress “last.” See the difference? Sometimes, this kind [...]
Video journalist Anne Herbst firmly believes in preparation. She does research on stories before leaving the newsroom. She shows up to assignments early so she can meet people and figure out in advance who might be a strong character. And she writes fast–an essential skill when you’re working by yourself and you have to do [...]
Darren Durlach left television almost two years ago to try something new. He’d won two consecutive NPPA TV Photographer of the Year awards and, unbeknownst to him, was on the verge of winning a third. He’s now senior multimedia producer at the Boston Globe, where he shoots and edits stories both alone and in collaboration [...]
How would you define a memorable TV news story? For reporter Boyd Huppert, it’s a story that connects with viewers, that goes beyond the facts to touch people in some way. To achieve that goal, Huppert looks for a character and a concept that will tie his story together. And when he writes the script, [...]
From part-time, overnight camera operator in market 83 to best TV news photographer in the country in just six years: How did Nathan Thompson do it? Natural talent? Not at all, Thompson told NPPA’s News Photographer magazine. Instead, he credits hard work and a deliberate, methodical approach to learning on the job. When he started [...]
One way to keep viewers engaged in a story from beginning to end is to write it as seamlessly as possible. What that means, in my mind, is making sure that every line connects to the next, whether it’s all narration or a mix of narration, sound bites and nat sound pops. And one technique [...]
He was a ground breaker who became a CBS News icon; a game show host and pitchman who became such a hard-nosed journalist that his name made up half of “the four most dreaded words in the English language: ‘Mike Wallace is here.’” His death at 93 after a long illness occasioned a flood of [...]
It’s not a first, but it’s exceedingly rare. This year’s IRE Medal, the highest award for investigative reporting by Investigative Reporters and Editors, went to two broadcast outlets: KRTK and KQED. Only once before in the 18-year history of the medals has broadcast recorded a sweep, when Lee Zurik of WWL was the only winner [...]
by Holly Edgell When I graduated from Michigan State University in 1990 with a bachelor’s in newspaper journalism, I had a vague sense that I might like to dabble in broadcasting as well. I’d done a radio internship and really liked it. I was not overly excited about newspapers. The message from professors, career counselors and recruiters was uniform: [...]
If blogging is just writing, why is it so hard to do well? Maybe because it’s not just writing, or at least it shouldn’t be. Journalists who ought to know the basics seem to struggle with blogging as much as anyone else. They aren’t sure what to write about or how to make it interesting. [...]
Some things rarely change. TV news writing is one of them, unfortunately. More than a decade ago, I noticed something about both network and local newscasts that drove me nuts and wrote a column about it. This morning, I got a message from Rick Tillery, an anchor in Medford, Oregon. “It appears this needs to [...]
Television’s need for pictures can be a two-edged sword. Great pictures can make a story memorable, because viewers remember what they see longer than what they hear. But a lack of pictures can turn an important story into a throw-away anchor reader, giving it less time on air and leaving little impact. So TV’s bias [...]