Here’s my slightly edited rundown of favorites from her list:

1. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
2. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___. And ever since that day, ______.
3. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
4. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
5. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
6. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
7. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
8. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
9. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
10. Give [Let] your characters [express] opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
11. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
12. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
13. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
14. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie [story] you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
15. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

More wisdom from the Pixar family comes from Andrew Stanton, who wrote the three Toy Story movies, Wall-E and Finding Nemo. “Storytelling is joke telling,” he says. “It’s knowing your punch line.” And the greatest story commandment, according to Stanton: Make me care. I couldn’t agree more.

Beware: some language in the video is NSFW.

Thanks to Aerogramme Writers’ Studio, a new blog from Australia, for sharing the links!

Now it’s the evening of day two. The stage lighting is theatrical–lots of colored gels and spotlights–and the house lights are mostly off.  As the crowd applauds one of the acts, you ask the photographer to get reaction shots.

“Just use some from yesterday,” he says. “The lighting was better.”

Well, yes, it was. But seriously? At first I thought the photographer was joking, but he didn’t just suggest this shortcut once. The second time I asked for more cutaways he repeated that he’d shot reactions the day before, and besides, he added, “Who would notice?”

Where to begin the list of all the ways in which this is just plain wrong?

Who would notice? I would, for one. But the audiences for the two events were different. And if just one other person noticed someone else in a cutaway where he or she was sitting at the evening session, all bets would be off on our credibility. If we were willing to cut corners for something so trivial, who’s to say we hadn’t cheated in other ways, or simply made something up?

Besides, even if I was the only one who knew the shots weren’t made at the same event, doing what the photographer suggested would deliberately mislead the audience about what actually happened. The NPPA Code of Ethics could not be more clear: “Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.”

In case you’re wondering, the photographer in question has years of experience and has worked for network news programs. He has a great eye and shoots terrific stuff. I guess this just goes to show you that even a gifted photojournalist can have a blind spot.

Got ethics image via Shutterstock

Just after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, investigators urged anyone who’d been near the finish line to share photos or video they’d taken around the time of the explosions. But the very same day, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security put out a warning that “discreet use of cameras or video recorders” could signal the planning of a terrorist act.

Here we go again. When officials need help identifying or finding suspects, anyone with a camera can be their friend. But otherwise, just about anyone can be seen as a suspect themselves.

There have been too many incidents already of photojournalists being arrested for doing their jobs, not to mention the cases of citizens who have been detained and had their cameras confiscated after videotaping police action. But fighting back can pay off. 

Gemma Atkinson was handcuffed and threatened with arrest in 2009 for taking cellphone video of police in London when they stopped and frisked her boyfriend. She sued and won. Now, she’s used the money from the settlement to produce this animated video:

A useful reminder that it’s important to know your rights.

Photographer image via Shutterstock

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.

Paying peanuts image via Shutterstock

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.

Unlike other first responders, most journalists haven’t been trained on how to stay safe. Many newsrooms do provide training for journalists who may be sent into hazardous situations like war zones, but disaster can strike anywhere at any time. Before it hits the community you cover, please check these tips and develop your own safety plan.

Be prepared. Disaster scenes are chaotic and stressful. When news breaks, if you don’t have it with you there’s no chance you’ll get it in time. Make sure you have a well-stocked run bag with you at all times, including a basic first aid kit.

Be aware.  Reporter Laura Krantz was covering the finish of the Boston Marathon but missed the bombings because she had gone to charge her cellphone. When she returned, police were trying to clear the area. It didn’t occur to her that there could be more explosions. “I thought they just wanted the reporters to go away,” Krantz says. “You just go into reporter mode. You don’t really think about yourself.” You should. 

Protect yourself. Flak jackets provide some protection in dangerous situations.  Wear them, if available, but don’t let them make you feel invulnerable.  Gas masks or protective suits are not designed to let a person stay at a hazardous scene.  Experts say they are mostly useful for getting away alive. Because gases are heavier than air, avoid low-lying areas when covering a chemical spill or attack. Stay upwind.

Avoid becoming a target.  If covering riots or violence, don’t go in with a marked news vehicle and keep TV lights off.  Don’t interfere with law enforcement or rescue efforts. Display your credentials.

Pay attention.  Journalists should be aware of their surroundings and stay as portable as possible, so they can move quickly, if necessary.  Be alert for unusual sounds, such as loud pops, and for unexpected sights—does someone appear to be in the wrong place or doing something unusual?  If reporters hear gas or vapor escaping, they are probably too close to a scene. If they can smell a pungent odor, they may have been exposed to a chemical hazard and may be contaminated; they should leave immediately. The U.S. National Academies has concise fact sheets on biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological threats that reporters may want to print out and carry with them.

Limit exposure. Do not smoke at a disaster scene. Gas lines may crack and downed power lines may still carry current during natural disasters. Avoid eating or drinking at the scene if there is any chance of chemical or biological hazards; these can contaminate food and drink.

Stay in touch.  Journalists in the field should make sure at least one person, usually a supervising editor, knows where they are at all times, who they are meeting with, and when they are expected to return.  That person should have a list of your emergency contacts and should know what to do if the journalist does not check in as expected.

Take a break. Long-running stories can be exhausting. Phillip Williams of the Australian Broadcasting Company says he wore himself out covering the Madrid bombings in 2000. “It is in both the organisation’s and your own interest to rest,” he says. “If you don’t, something will give. Don’t stay out late, don’t overwork … get to bed.”

For more tips on safety, consult the Committee to Protect Journalists’ guide to reporting on dangerous situations, Journalists at Risk and the International News Safety Institute. If you have lessons learned from your own experience covering a crisis, please add them in the comments. And stay safe!

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.”

Computer remote image via Shutterstock

I want to tell you a little bit about working in local news.

It’s messy and complicated. It’s filled with drudgery. It’s overnights for years without recognition. It’s reporters who start in small markets with pay so low they take a second job, usually as a waiter or waitress. Pilots describe their job as “Hours of boredom with moments of terror.” There’s not a lot of terror in news.

Until Monday.

My friends in local news work their ass off to tell stories that affect people’s lives. They are lumped in with “the media,” so often used these days as an insult. But “the media” is people. Normal people (mostly). People at work the same way you work. Working in news is just like working in any company.

Except when you get something wrong.

I do not for a moment defend the inaccurate reporting that went on Wednesday. That was terrible journalism. That was rumor mongering. That was the absence of the rule to have at least two sources. The oft-quoted saying in journalism is “If your mother says she loves you, get a second source.” News let us down Wednesday.

But, for the most part, that was the national news. What inaccuracies were reported locally were sourced, as in “According to the AP…” That’s not an excuse. That’s how it works. And how it doesn’t. My friend Cory Bergman at BreakingNews.com had a perfect tweet midday Wednesday as the networks were pulling back from the report that a bomber was arrested. Cory’s site was not reporting any such arrest. And Cory tweeted “And that’s why Breaking News is still waiting.”

Props, Cor.

Local journalism can be silly. We’ve all seen those “WILL THIS THING KILL YOUR CHILDREN? TUNE IN AT 11!” teases.

But it can also rise to the occasion. On 9/11, NECN was on the air for 60 hours straight. Tom Melville, the assistant news director, anchored overnight. Everyone pitched in. NECN News Director (and now GM at WBUR – an example of excellence in reporting) Charlie Kravetz gave cool-headed direction and insisted upon accuracy. We held off until we knew.

On Monday, as the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, I am quite certain the instinct would have been to run like hell. But the journalists stayed. People like Steve Silva of Boston.com, who was there simply shooting what he hoped were inspiring stories. As soon as the explosion hit, Steve ran to get more footage. That’s not sensationalism. That’s journalism. And, though he’ll shrug it off, that’s bravery.

My friends in local news tried to make sense of the chaos. Mike Nikitas at NECN anchored calmly and accurately. Kathy Curran of WCVB, there to report on the race, put on her local news hat and stood within yards of the explosion, reporting. Producers and assignment editors in every newsroom – unheralded though they are – scrambled to keep things organized and on the air. The national anchors dropped in later. But the local newsies were there from the first second.

I worked in local news from 1992 – 2006, and continued to work with stations as a consultant right up to last month. Twenty years of experience. I can tell you what I know for sure: the people who bring you the local news are, well, wicked awesome.

Take the fact that so many local newscasts look and sound alike. Not just a lot alike. Exactly alike. TBS late-show host Conan O’Brien has been having a field day lately making fun of TV stations for the sameness of their news programs by stringing video clips together. There’s nothing inherently funny about an anchor introducing a story about a new software program by asking, “Could this be the end of e-mail overload?” But it’s hilarious to watch 28 straight-faced anchors in row deliver the identical line.

How does this happen? Let’s start with the syndicated stories TV networks pump out to their affiliates, a service they’ve provided for decades. One of my first jobs in television many years ago was to log the video offerings from ABC on the cutely named DEF or “daily electronic feed.” What’s different now is that so many more stations both receive and use the stories from such feeds.

The big four broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, have around 200 affiliates each, but they’re pikers compared to CNN’s Newsource, which goes out to more than 800 stations across the country. That wide distribution practically guarantees a story will get decent play. The Newsource story about e-mail aired on at least 225 stations, according to Matthew Koll, chairman of the software company that was featured.

Like the networks, CNN makes it easy for local stations to run these stories by providing scripted introductions for local anchors to read. And read them they do, even when they don’t make much sense.

“The final days of a campaign can get a little salty,” parroted one anchor after another in November, whatever that was supposed to mean. The line provided by Newsource set up a story about election-themed drinks and food, and it earned a dozen local anchors a starring role in another Conan montage.

The widespread availability of these stories only partly explains why they’re so often used. Back in the day, fluffy features from the networks usually made air only when a local story ran late or fell through. Today, syndicated fodder is a necessity rather than a fallback, given the huge amount of news time stations now have to fill.

The average TV station produces about five-and-a-half hours of news each weekday, according to the most recent Hofstra/RTDNA survey of news directors. That’s an increase of almost an hour since 2008. Even as the economy tanked that year and stations cut their payrolls, they added more news time. While staffing has recovered, salaries have not. Average pay at local TV stations increased just 2 percent in 2011, failing to even keep up with inflation. “That’s likely the result of stations adding people who are mostly entry level–or at least paid at a noticeably lower rate than existing staff,” says Hofstra University’s Bob Papper.

Small wonder, then, that many stations literally rip and read the scripts that accompany the network feeds. Who has the time or experience to rewrite anchor introductions, much less produce original stories to fill all those newscasts?

Apparently, no one has time to proofread in some TV newsrooms either, so the graphics that make air can be real howlers. “Fire destroyed by home,” reported a Las Vegas station in a breaking news banner. An anchor in South Bend, Indiana, described the results of a national education survey next to a graphic that read, “School two easy for kids.” And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one station warned viewers in a full-screen graphic in December to be careful driving on “snot and ice.”

Admittedly, it’s easy to poke fun at these sorts of flubs. And if you look in the right places, you can still find local stations producing great journalism. WVUE in New Orleans (Dirty Deeds and Hiding Behind the Badge), KLAS in Las Vegas (Desert Underwater, below) and WXYZ in Detroit (Wayne County Confidential) won prestigious duPont-Columbia awards this year for reports on significant issues ranging from government corruption to the housing crisis. KTRK in Houston earned the highest honor awarded by Investigative Reporters and Editors for exposing wrongdoing by local law enforcement officials (Constable Corruption).

But most television newsrooms aren’t doing in-depth reports or serious investigations on anything close to a regular basis. They can’t, as long as managers keep adding news time and expect the existing staff to fill it, while also feeding the Web and social media.

“Everyone is trying to do more with less,” says Micah Johnson, president of the talent agency MediaStars that represents TV news employees in contract negotiations. “I think it’s having a detrimental effect on the product.”

If the people who run some television stations were cooks, they could rightly be charged with watering the soup. And as long as stations keep following that recipe, local TV news will be an easy target for cheap fun.

Originally published by American Journalism Review

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