DOING STORIES
BEFORE GOING OUT
Be clear on what the story is. Talk with your show producer to find out what he or she is looking for based on the information they have. Many, if not most, times the story at the scene is different from the one you and the producer thought it would be when you got it but it is essential to understand what the producer is expecting.
Then think! Why should anyone care about this? Why should I care? What’s the point? What do people need to know about this topic? Every story you do should pass the "Who Cares Test." Start figuring out how you will make people care about your story. Begin by making yourself care. And always remember: THIS IS TELEVISION. In television the story isn’t just the story, the story is the story of the pictures and sounds you can get on tape. That’s your task when you leave to go shoot a story.
ON THE WAY
Talk with your photographer. (If you’re shooting your own story, have this conversation with yourself and see my page on working as a one man band.) Tell him or her as much as you know about the story. Communication with your photographer is a crucial element in making a good story. If your photographer doesn’t know what the story is and what kind of video to shoot, you can bet your back teeth he won’t shoot it. It’s also a matter of common courtesy and common sense. Your photographer is your partner and if you treat him like he’s just someone doing grunt work for you, that’s how he’s going to act. And it’s your story that will suffer. This is also where caring about your story starts to come in. If you’re bent on doing a great story, your photographer will often rise to the occasion, especially if you treat him like he plays a vital part of making it a great story (which he does!).
Talk over what kind of video might be available, what kind of video you think you’ll need for your story. Start thinking about who you’re going to try to talk to as well as what you’re going to ask. You’d be surprised how many obvious questions are never answered in a package simply because they were never even asked in an interview. Don’t worry yet what your story will look like. At this point you need to get into "gathering mode."
AT THE SCENE
Look! Listen! Your eyes and ears should be constantly scanning what’s around you for ideas.
Beyond knowing how to gather facts, I think a reporter's most valuable trait is the ability to notice things. Good ones see what's extraordinary in ordinary things. They never think that they have seen it all, even if they've seen more than most people ever will.
Certainly you can figure out some of the video you’ll need before you ever get there. If you’re doing a story on a basketball player, you’ll need shots of him playing basketball. Duh! But look around, there may be specific things you notice that can make a routine story unique. Once on a story about a high school basketball player we walked into the gym to the sight of sunlight streaming in from the huge windows in one of the walls. My photographer immediately started moaning about the uneven lighting. I wanted to jump for joy. We’d hit a video jackpot. Silhouettes! Shadows! What great shots these would make! My photographer only saw them as problems. It was like playing tug-of-war with a mule as I vainly tried to get him to see what good fortune we had and to get him to shoot the shots that were crying to be shot. What look like obstacles are often opportunities. All you have to do is open your eyes and see them.
DOING INTERVIEWS
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| Listen! Let the other guy do the talking. |
Ask your question. Then shut up. I don't know how often I've seen reporters ask a useful question ("Why did you do this?") then panic when the interviewee hesitates. Desperate to end the silence, the reporter begins offering possible answers ("Was it because of A or B or C?").
Suddenly a potentially great question has turned into multiple choice. Even if the best answer is "none of the above," the interviewee often latches onto the easiest choice and goes with that.
Let the pause be your friend. Let the person think of his own answer, even if it takes a few seconds. If the pause feels awkward I'll say, "Take your time," but that's all. I don't offer to answer the question for him.
If you think you know what the answer is, ask as if you have no idea. You might not know. Even if you do, you want the interviewee to tell you what he knows, or thinks. Or thinks he knows. If your information is different, you can confront him with it in a follow up question.
The less you say, the more the person you're talking to will say.
THE STANDUP
This is almost always the toughest part of any shoot for me because I have to write part of the story right there on the spot. To do a standup, you have to have some idea what will come before and after it in your story. That means you have to have a basic idea how your story will be structured. But the standup also is device you use to hammer home the essence of your story. That should help narrow things down.
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| Show me something in your standup. |
Chances are there is something that somebody you interviewed said that can spark an idea of what to say and if you’ve kept your eyes open, you should have seen some way to illustrate the point you want to make in a more creative way than just standing in the center of the frame holding a stick mike. The standup is also a good place to talk about something that you have to mention but don’t have video of. Remember also that just because you shoot a standup doesn’t mean you have to use it. You don’t use every shot of B-roll or every soundbite you have, do you? You might even shoot two standups if time allows with the idea that you’ll use the one that works better in your package.
Gosh, all this work and we’re just half way finished! But if you’ve done good interviews and gotten good video, your story will almost write itself.
SCREENING TAPES
OK, now you’re back at the station and you have to turn all that raw video into 90 seconds of video dynamite. The obvious first step, time permitting, is to screen your tapes. Spend as much time doing this as you can; I know that under deadlines this is sometimes a luxury you can’t afford but watch every frame possible. Sometimes the best bites and greatest shots are deep into the tape. It will be worth your time to find them. Photographers will appreciate it, too. One once told me he worked harder shooting my packages than he did other reporters’ because he knew if he shot something well, I would use it. Photographers hate seeing packages which they know only used video from the first five minutes of the tape. If you do that, eventually photographers will only shoot five minutes of tape for your stories.
I like to make detailed shot sheets for B-roll and interviews. If I have the time, I will note ANY shot that I might be able to use – even ones the photographer didn’t intend to shoot. I’ve used video of everything from a photographer flipping his zoom lens on to video of the ground a photographer was covering as he hustled to get in place for his next shot. If you develop a reputation as a reporter who will use the good shots you get, you’ll get a lot more of them. I also make a point of asking the photographer if there are any shots I should take special care to look for when I’m logging tapes.
WRITING
I wish I could give you a formula. There are conventions to writing television news stories and we'll go through them. There are techniques I use and common mistakes I avoid that I'll share too. But even if I show you scripts of my stories, dissect and explain them for you, there is still a large part of the process that is simply a function of my personality that you couldn't write down and follow like steps in a recipe. You wouldn't want to, anyway.
Basics. You have probably heard some of this before so I won't belabor it. K.I.S.S. -- Keep It Simple Suzie. OK, that last "S" can stand for a lot of things, some of them unprintable in a family publication. Don't take the aphoristic acronym to mean that people watching are simple or stupid. It's just that they have one chance to hear what you say and understand it. If you use a phrase like "aphoristic acronym" in your story, it might be hard to grasp on the first pass and they don't get a second.
How do you keep it simple? Write short sentences with subjects and action verbs. You should already know the difference between active and passive voice. If you don't, get hold of an English textbook and go over it again.
Avoid "news-speak" and other jargon. Beware of writing things because you think they're what a news story should sound like. Using tired phrases doesn't make you sound more like a professional broadcaster, they make you sound like a cheap copycat. Saying things such as "details are sketchy," "more information as it becomes available," or "a parent's worst nightmare" are things I would never write unless I were writing a parody for a sketch comedy show.
Avoid clichés. Don’t liken an unpleasant experience to having a root canal. Have you ever had a root canal? I haven’t. The only reason I know it’s painful is because reporters use that analogy so often. Now my fear of facing root canal surgery isn’t pain, it’s tedium. "There’s some good news and bad news in this week’s..." The good news about this tired plot device is that I won’t detail the bad news that should follow if you’re lazy or unoriginal enough to use that line.
Keep in mind what the story's about. It can be easy to veer away from what the point of the story is supposed to be. Write out the main points of your story and refer to it as you write. If you do your job correctly, you will gather much more information that you can fit into the 70 to 90 seconds you get to tell your story. Prioritize. Pick the most important parts and stress them.
Make me care. Your story must answer the 5 Ws. It has to answer another one too: Why should a viewer care about it?
Set the hook. Grab my attention at the outset. More than dramatic video, you need dramatic sound to open your piece. I might have gotten up to go to the refrigerator when the anchor started introducing your story. Compelling video by itself does nothing to bring me back if I’ve turned away from the screen. I need to hear something to distract me from that cold pizza I was fetching.
Find characters. You’re not writing a movie, I know. But all good stories, fiction or not, have characters. Viewers will care about your story if it gives them someone to care about, even if it’s for only 90 seconds.
How do you do that?
Reporters often tell stories about a complicated issue by framing them with smaller story of someone affected by it. “Janie Mason breathes from an oxygen bottle. She hasn’t been to the second floor of her house in three years. The steps might as well be Mount Everest,” a story might start. Then it will get to the lung disease that she says she got from working in a plant with flaking asbestos insulation that the owner knew about and did nothing to fix. Then it will broaden to explain that 14 people, or their survivors, are suing the plant owner claiming he put profit over safety. It might go even more generally into the issue of worker safety or factories’ liability in cases like this before going back to Janie Mason to end.
Journalism textbooks call this the “inverted pyramid” style of storytelling. By whatever name, it draws you into the story by giving you a character to care about.
No matter the subject, explore the emotions behind the actions.
Don't over-hype. I saw coverage of hostage situation recently. The guy had killed three people, pistol-whipped and carjacked a reporter to escape then later killed a federal agent while stealing his car to continue his getaway. The next day police arrested him at an apartment building where he had taken one of the residents hostage and holed himself up inside her apartment. She tried to engage the killer in coversation even as he tied her up, not knowing what he planned to do to her but certainly aware of the grisly possiblities.
What should have been a dramatic story of a woman trapped with a desperate murderer that made me sympathize with her terror lost a lot of its steam precisely because the reporter felt compelled to keep telling me how terrifying it was.
Have you ever read a good suspense novel? John Grisham takes you on heart-pounding emotional rides in his books that grab you by the shirt and refuse to let you go. Does he have to keep telling you to stay on the edge of your seat? No. He spins a story with vivid descriptions that work your imagination until you're having palpitations.
Spare me empty platitudes trying to manipulate my emotions. Instead dig up details that will take me into the heart of the story. That will make me feel something.
Write all day. The writing process begins the moment you get your story assignment. Every phone call, every Nexis or Google search, every interview and everything you shoot all contribute to what you're going to type when you sit down at the newsroom computer later that day. Keep that in mind while you do them.
You decide a lot of how you write a story while you're shooting it. You can't write about answers to questions you failed to ask. You can't show something that you didn't shoot.
I write a story as soon as the words come to me. That can be when I'm at the station researching. It can be in the car on the way somewhere. It can be waiting at a scene to do interviews. I look, I listen, I think and I write.
Much of it never airs.
What "writing on spec," as I think of it, does for me is to get me thinking about a story and what I need to tell it. Countless times I've found myself writing a story after we shot it and realized that I should have asked a question that I failed to think of during the interview. Writing ahead leads me to such questions. It also forces me to think about what kind of video we're going to need to show as I tell.
I'm also trying to come up with opening lines or other key observations I have time to polish. If one or two of them hold up, it can save me valuable minutes later when I'm writing on deadline and don't have time to work the words around in my head long enough to get the exact phrase I want.
But I must beware! To do this I have to be ruthlessly willing to toss out what might be a brilliant turn of phrase because it either turns out not to fit the story or not to fit into the time I have to tell it. Most times the story is different than I thought it would be, even if I've been able to lay some groundwork through research or phone interviews before I go out to shoot it. I know the great danger of falling in love with a line or a theme so much that it blinds me from the reality of what I'm supposed to describe. I remind myself constantly to make my story fit the facts and not vice versa.
Establish the premise. The premise is the framework from which you'll build your story. One of my favorite ways to do this is to imagine what people's pre-conceived notions about your something and play off it.
A show that airs on a statewide sports network in Florida once hired me to pull a feature story out of the girls high school weightlifing state championship meet. What comes to mind when you think of girl weightlifters? You know the stereotype. Giant she-men who might look more at home on a sumo wrestling mat than in a prom dress.
In truth, a few of them did. But many looked like perfectly regular high school girls -- wearing makeup, ribbons in their hair and nail polish -- only stronger.
Making that observation gave me the premise for the story.
Write to video. What people in the business call writing to your video I call writing the same story that you shot.
People will hear your words with pictures in sight. Write them with pictures in mind. It sounds too simple to mention but happens too rarely not to. Too many reporters forget about their video when they write their stories. They’ll just write their audio track and then wallpaper it with whatever video they have handy.
In television, the story is not the story, it’s the story you can get video and sound of. That doesn’t mean it’s OK not to tell your story properly because it’s for television, it means you have to work to make sure you get the video and sound you need to tell it.
Your words have to match the video or they'll compete with each other for a viewer's attention. Rather than make the effort, someone watching might vote with his remote to try something less frustrating.
Listing. This is a technique I use to quicken a package’s pace. At one point in the story I’ll list several things in a row and quickly cut to a shot of each thing as I mention it. "Dressing warmly for winter means boots, hats and gloves." Boom. Boom. Boom. A shot of boots. A shot of a hat. A shot of gloves. This sounds terribly elementary because all you’re doing is writing to your video but it can create a striking effect in your package.
Write conversationally. This is another of the well known but routinely ignored rules of writing. Tell me the story in your package like you would tell it to me in person, minus the F-word, of course. A reporter I like and have great respect for once described a captured fugitive as having been "returned to Rhode Island soil." Would you ever, in a thousand years, say that to someone in conversation? If you would, make it a point not to have a conversation with me. I sometimes even use – gasp! – passive voice if it sounds more natural than its active alternative. Yes, I know that broadcast writing textbooks tell you always to write short declarative sentences using active verbs but do you always talk that way? Again, if you do, please talk to someone else. Active voice, as its name suggests, does convey action and you should use it whenever possible but not at the expense of making your package sound awkward or contrived.
Speak conversationally. My stories – as well as my anchoring – vastly improved when I stopped trying to sound like an announcer and started trying to sound like me.
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| Being demonstrative on camera helps me look natural. |
Use short soundbites. Sounds weird but I'm going to start a section on writing for TV by referring you to a newspaper. Look at the articles. How long are most of the quotations in the story? A sentence or less. Sometimes just a few words.
Pick an article. Take a pen and cross out everything inside quotation marks. Read the story again and you should notice something. The story still makes sense. It still gives you all the facts. The lesson applies to television storytelling too.
Soundbites don't tell your story. They add credibility and emotion to the story you are telling. If a story were an Italian dinner, your words would be the pasta and meatballs; soundbites would be the marinara sauce. Soundbites give it flavor but your copy provides most of the meal's nutrition.
Minus the analogy: Even when telling a story through someone else’s eyes, tell most of it through your mouth. Your words should give me the information of the story. Their words should express its emotion. There are exceptions but as Sinatra once sang (I think), "too few to mention."
Three seconds is plenty if that’s all it takes for someone to finish his or her thought. Any bite longer than eight seconds makes me nervous and any one longer than twelve seconds better be the best bite I’ve seen all week or it won’t make my package.
Use the minimum length you need for the person to make his point. Most people express a complete thought in a few seconds, then stop. And start again with either a new thought or a regurgitation of the one they just gave you. Cut the soundbite off when the person stops. Many people whose stories I see let it run through the pause and the re-statement. That kills the momentum of their story.
I will limit people to one word if that's all it takes to answer the question. When I worked at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, we got word that a construction crew in Petersburg, Kentucky digging a foundation for a house had unearthed human bones. In my story I set the scene then mentioned that people had gathered, curious. Cut to soundbite:
John McQ: "You're not concerned there's a murderer loose in your neighborhood?"
Neighbor #1: "Not in the least."
Neighbor #2: "No."
Not counting my question, that's five words from two people. The story goes on to explain that locals knew that they lived on an old American Indian burial ground and they were sure that's where the bones had come from. Later forensics proved them right.
Sometimes you can use context to shorten soundbites. In a story I did for WFLA-TV in Tampa about an aspring NBA player playing in a low level minor league, I wrote a set-up to comments about they guy's ability to make it to the NBA. Cut to soundbite:
Coach: "He has the skills to play in the league."
Teammate: "Ain't no question in my mind."
In that context, there was no question in a viewer's mind what the teammate was talking about. I could have let him keep going but the simple phrase packs much more power by itself.
And here’s one of my pet peeves (but don’t tell my cat or she’ll get jealous that I have another pet): a reporter will put a long tedious bite into his package and then slap a little wallpaper video on it thinking that he’s solved the problem. What he’s done is compound the problem! He’s taken something already boring and then distracted you to boot! Oh, the humanity! Don’t commit this video Hindenburg. Don’t take the time and trouble to write to your video then ruin your package by using unrelated video to cover soundbites. However, it can create a quite positive effect if someone in a bite rattles off a list of things (remember the listing technique?) and you can even manage to write your soundbites to video.
Have something to say. Good reporters do more than assemble words into sentences. They have someting to tell you. By that I do not mean that they slant a story with opinion; I mean that they infuse it with perspective. A wellspring of ideas has to have a source. Without reaching for melodrama, that source is your soul. What's inside you, the sum of your experiences, is what you draw on whenever you sit down to write a story.
A good news story answers the 5 Ws -- the Who What When Where and Why -- of the story. That's great. But a truly memorable story gives you more. It puts the facts into a perspective to which anyone watching can relate. More than giving you details about the humans involved, it shares insight into humanity. That doesn't mean every story reveals the meaning of life. But they should all tell you something about how life works.
How do you do this? If you want to be interesting, be interested. People who know a lot about the world around them are curious about it. They have lots of conversations but talk much less than they listen. They read for fun.
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©1997-2005 John McQuiston