How Google Docs Saved Our Nightly Newscast
Lessons from overcoming obstacles and learning creativity in the face of failure.
Editor’s Note: Last week a hard drive failure in our College’s server cluster caused a series of cascading technical problems, including significant instability in our television editorial content management system which governs the creation, production and execution of our live nightly news. We asked Andrew Briz, a sophomore at the College of Journalism and Communications, to share how he and others in the newsroom worked to make sure the show went on.
When braving an expedition there’s a faint fear that stays in the back of the minds of all those involved. What happens if your maps, logs, compass, or climbing gear break? Worse yet — what if it all breaks?
On a regular workday, those planning TV newscasts have similar tools at their disposal. Each day, the producer will create a new rundown: a list of what stories will be covered and how much time each story will get. She also looks at past rundowns to make sure stories aren’t repeated and the stories that need updates are properly taken care of.
Once the show starts, this same rundown lets the producer keep the show on track, because once the bottom of the hour hits, she’s cut off the air. The danger of having all these important tasks come from one program becomes amazingly apparent when you write about it objectively, but no one ever thought ENPS, our rundown program, would fail.
We were wrong.
That’s exactly what happened to us today at the WUFT newsroom. Due to technical issues, all computers were shut out of ENPS. Our rundown, the software that charts our course and keeps us on track, was unresponsive. The logs of all our previous shows were no longer available — leaving us blind to where we came from. And what keeps us moving forward, our timing mechanism, was unavailable.
You have two options when everything goes wrong. You can give up and wait to be rescued, or you can innovate and keep moving forward.
What We Did Right
One thing we quickly noticed when our rundown software broke was its similarity to a spreadsheet software like Excel. It was divided into rows and columns, which were easily merged, and it was connected across the newsroom so that each reporter could type his/her scripts. After a quick survey of what was available to us, we began work on our own spreadsheet. We used Google’s Sheets program so that everyone in the newsroom could still have access to it. We divided the rows and columns in ways that were similar to ENPS, and wrote scripts into one of the columns. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it worked.
As the day went on, we added more features to our spreadsheet. We discovered the formula “(CountA(Split(Cell, “ “)))*0.3” allowed us to measure the average time-length of a story given the word count. We added column after column to fit individual needs that arose such as signifying approval from news managers, and at the end of the day we came out smarter because of, not despite, our difficulties.
I won’t argue that a Google Doc strung together in a few hours is better than professional-caliber, time tested software, but it can give us new ideas to improve our workflow. With the spreadsheet created, we had a map again, and while we recreated what we already knew, a new feature was added inadvertently.
With the Google spreadsheet, anchors could open the rundown and scripts on tablets since they were accessible through Google Drive. Forget the obvious environmental implications of this breakthrough (anyone who’s seen the waist high paper bins in the newsroom can attest to those), it provided a way for anchors to see the changes producers are making to the rundown in real time, during the newscast.
The Source of Creativity
“If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.” -Ed Catmull, Founder of Pixar
Sometimes we need an all-out systems failure. We often become too reliant and familiar with what works that we never stop to ask if it could be better. Being forced into uncomfortable situations forces us to think about new creative ways to get out of them, and often times along the way we discover new things we didn’t even know were missing.
We could have given up today. We could have sat back, waited to be saved, and aired backup content on our channel. Instead, we pushed through and invented new systems. Even if our show wasn’t great by comparison, and our flagrant technical difficulties made most of our audience change the channel immediately, we proved the value of trekking on. I’m glad everything broke today. It forced us to reset. It allowed us to consider new ways to do something, even if the old ways were “better.”
Tomorrow, we’ll go back to ENPS. But by next year, or maybe even next month, we’ll have created something new — something even greater.
UF student Andrew Briz is a news producer in the Innovation News Center at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. He led the effort in creating the Google Spreadsheet used when ENPS crashed.
