Saturday, February 19, 2005

Reporting is easy, TV is hard!

Two weeks in, and I feel like a cub reporter. A clueless newbie, as it were.

Oh, I've had lots of stories on the air, beating the paper on lots of things. But I've yet to touch a camera, much less shoot or edit any video. That's coming, I know.

But I was so spoiled, even in my newspaper/wire service days, much less on the Web, with its infinite "news hole." TV (like radio) is where The Clock Rules, a minute is an eternity to just watch someone sit and talk. Fresh, live action! Snappy pace!

I'd forgotten how difficult it is to write so tightly. It's not about leaving things out, it's about getting the very most important, key elements in, and letting your video fill in the blanks in ways that a static image or printed words can never do.

And as we get more copy on their Website, it's also clear that you can't just slap broadcast copy on the Web and figure it'll work. It won't. Broadcast copy is meant to be read aloud, and to be heard. That's a whole different thing. It's not just cut and paste.

Wish me luck!;-)

3 comments:

Jake said...

"Wish me luck!;-)"

Good luck. It's only going to get better, and hopefully the web site will be up to par at some point so if you guys do break something, I can actually link to a permanent link.

Anonymous said...

Why is the web site so slow and choppy?

Shannon said...

As I learned in J School when the Web was just getting big (1997), TV stations DO NOT want to put their big stories up on the Web before they air on live TV.

I was a sub-contractor for WOWT.com while I worked for Cox Interactive Media. I trained their news staff on how to post stories to the Web. Anyway, they were really big on not putting anything up until after the news because TV is all about the advertisers and who wants to take ppl away from watching the news when they have paid air time.