Feedback November 2002 (Vol 43 No 4)

Television News Directors Foundation Excellence in Education project, each teacherwas assigned to a station for a four-week fellowship. These experienced educators werebowled over by how much the profession had changed since they left the newsroom,and some of them had been gone less than a decade. For several, the biggest lessonlearned was that they need to push their students harder to prepare them for the everloomingdeadlines and intense demands of today’s newsrooms.Peter Ensel of Plattsbsurg State University was at WNYT in Albany. He returned tothe classroom with a new plan. “Give students less time to work on assignments,” hewrote in his fellowship summary. “Often students complain about what they perceiveas unrealistic deadlines. I realize I need to be even stricter. I will now make the studentsdo packages in one day.” And that’s not all. “Besides writing and editing a package,they will have to turn in a V/O and VO/SOT form of the same story.”Camilla Grant of The State University of West Georgia says she’ll now require herstudents to produce reports for more than one medium, having seen how her hoststation, KMOL-TV in San Antonio, insisted that reporters routinely write for thestation’s website. Dutch Hoggatt of Harding University also came back prepared to bemore demanding. “The major thing I want to emphasize with my students is the speedat which stories need to be written and reported.” Working with the professionals hemet during his fellowship at the now-defunct CONUS Communications inMinneapolis, Hoggatt developed a list of exercises for his classes. Among them:• Give students the basic facts on a breaking story. Give them no more than 10minutes to write a factual, current story based on the information they haveat that moment.• Give students the basic facts of a story. Give them no more than ten-minutes toprepare for a “live” standup.• Give students raw video of a press conference. Give them an hour to write andedit a VO/SOT.• Give students two hours to shoot five minutes of raw video and give them onehourto edit a 60-second video-only story.• Give students a number of copy editing assignments that require them to use theAP Broadcast Stylebook for grammar, punctuation, spelling, word usage, ethics,legal issues, etc.• Give students raw video, sound bites, and basic facts and have them write andproduce a package and anchor lead-in.Hoggart’s suggestions are right on target. To some degree, they mirror the suggestionsNewsLab has compiled to help managers screen potential new hires. But theNewsLab list goes farther, because just teaching young journalists to work faster willonly improve the quantity of what they produce, not the quality.Students also need to practice exercising good news judgment and grappling withdifficult decisions on deadline, like whether to air graphic video or whether to leadwith a late-breaking, highly visual story of little or no significance. They need to beable to spot the holes in a story, and know where to look and what questions to ask tofill them. They should learn history, geography and how to go about getting to know acommunity. Sean Kennedy, news director at KTAL-TV in Shreveport, LA, says one ofBEA—Educating tomorrow’s electronic media professionals 3