Blog Log 5: Rotations
Alright, well this is my first blog post since we’ve made the switch off of the content team and on to the rotation team, and I have to say, rotations does seem slightly easier, but it is still a completely different monster all together. I’ve had the chance to anchor three times and produce one newscast, and I’ll talk about each experience individually, because they are very, VERY different. Not in a bad way though. In all fairness, I don’t miss the content team at all. Yes, I did get a lot done, and I am proud of some of the things I created, but man was it just non-stop. I get that doing something to that caliber in the real world would obviously be a lot more difficult and even more time consuming, but I’m just glad to have a break right now.
Anchoring.
Now this was the easiest part of the class so far, mostly because I had done plenty of similar work in front of the camera before, not just on the content team, but a lot of work in a couple of different productions on LUTV, but there are still some parts that I want to talk about. The day as an anchor usually starts out in a much slower pace. When I was on the content team, I would get into the newsroom and get started right away with anything I have. When I was anchoring, all I had to do after the newscast review is wait for the producer to find out the stories they want to run that day, and then I got to choose which stories I would rather write. Writing the stories is the hardest part of anchoring in my opinion, mostly because I’m not used to writing in broadcast style for TV. Just about everything I learned in high school and most of my time in college to that point was writing and reading for radio, so that’s just how I’m used to writing copy. Luckily enough, Kathy is able to point me in the right direction when it comes to writing in the proper broadcast style. I still have three more shifts at anchor after this, I should hopefully improve some by the end of those. Speaking of places that need improving…
Producing.
Now I’ve only produced one newscast, but I can already tell it’s going to be the hardest of the three rotations, simply because of how all-encompassing it is. There is so much you have to pay attention to as a producer, and little things can mess the whole system up. We do have a producer checklist in order for you to go through the day and make sure you aren’t missing anything, and I did use it, but it seems like some things will just slip through the cracks, and if they do, you have to make sure you catch them as they’re falling. A couple of things like that happened during the newscast, and one such example was terrifying as it played out. The sports anchor had built the proper graphic for their reads, but hadn’t properly saved the picture to accompany the graphic, and the control room had not noticed until the beginning of their read. Luckily enough the graphic was two stories ahead, so I had just enough time to rush into the story, find the graphic, and properly save the picture for it only a few seconds before the control room had to take it live, I was really relieved that it worked out. Something I’m going to try and do more of the next couple of times I’m producing is make it more of a collaborative effort, as I felt that I was spending a lot of my time doing things that some of the anchors or content team could, or should be doing. Producing was a lot of effort, and I’m not entirely looking forward to the next two tries I’ll have at it, but I will say, when you get through the whole thing and see your overall accomplishment, it’s actually pretty cool, even though your only credit for doing all that work is the three second lower third featuring your name at the end of the newscast.
