TV News TheoryMore news = Slow Day

Some of my favorite days at work are when the $h!t'$ hitting the fan and we're balls to the wall all day long with seldom a moment to stop and think about it. I live for those day, though I don't want them everyday either. But it's certainly a change of pace when there is big breaking news and we have to go after the nuts and bolts, the people involved and all sidebars you could ever watch.

That was the case today with the arrest of the terror suspects in London and the resulting new restrictions at airports.

The problem with these busy days is when you end up on the crew with a bottom tier, B-block sidebar story that has to be short and is usually repeating information from the lead stories.

Such was my luck of the draw today. Though I was with one of our newest, chipper, young and intrepid new reporters we were given the consumer angle assignment to find out what people should do now if they are planning to travel.(in case they aren't reasonably able to form their own opinion after watching the first hour and 10 minutes of coverage.)

So we did the travel agent bit.

The travel agent office was sort of busy, the phones were ringing a fair amount, so I got a bunch of phone calls, a quick interview, but no lucky standup moment that makes these types of stories magical. Phooey. We figured we'd try again at the airport. At the airport, interviewed 3 people headed for their planes, got a few b-roll shots, but again nothing magical so we went to lunch with our other 3 crews we had at the airport turning different angles on the terror story.

With all that A-Block smotherage(a Lenslinger term I believe)the producers wanted our stroyt short and sweet and so my colleauge massaged our digital footage into a script and we turned a B-Block package, with a total run time of 30 seconds.

It went something like this... Soundbyte, track, nat break, track, nat break, track, soundbyte. I spent about 10 mintutes putting it together.

Watch it HERE!


All in a hard days work.