Communication is vital to maintaining a successful newsroom. Every individual on the team plays an essential role in the success of a show, so when one person is not on the team's page it can create an extremely chaotic environment. As an ATVN producer, clear communication throughout the entire team is undoubtedly the trickiest part of day of air. This multi-faceted job requires you to make sure the ship is running smoothly and in-sync from all angles: our fellow producers, reporters, directors, multimedia journalists, anchors and art director.
How is it that master communicators oftentimes cannot communicate with one another?
It was a typical Thursday afternoon in the Annenberg media center, or more appropriately— the newsroom. Our reporters were out, the rundown was well on its way, graphics were in progress and our 2 p.m. multimedia journalists were just arriving, eager to get to work. While I was approving videos in the edit bay, our fabulous executive producer, Tommy, checked the rundown to see what our multimedia journalist, Sam, could help us with upon his arrival. Earlier in the day, my lead producer, Sofia, and I decided that a custom graphic would be best for visualizing the Oscar's best picture nominees. Thinking the "blank ANCG," graphic shell was a fluke, Tommy replaced it with an "ANCG list" (a full-screen list) shell and assigned Sam to complete the graphic. At 4 p.m. when I checked in with our art director, Lizzy, to see how things were going, she seemed confused as to why we changed out her custom graphic with a pre-set graphic list. I was confused. Did Sofia change her mind? What happened? I knew there was some broken link within this miscommunication and, as this was the week's theme, I was on a mission to figure out what happened. I tracked it back to the issue— we simply didn't inform Tommy that the majority of the show's graphics were going to be specially created by our talented Lizzy, as opposed to using the templates. You don't want people to feel undervalued or that their hard work is useless. I went up to Sam in an effort to not blind-side him, explained what had happened, and told him his graphic would not appear in the actual show.
Facilitating communication within our team, between team members, is also extremely important. Claudia, our live shot reporter, was outside of the Dolby Theatre reporting on street closures related to the Oscars. She then tossed to Tanvi's story which opened with similar details to what Claudia had just said on air. Looking back on that, I wish I would have facilitated communication between our two reporters so that they could have decided who was going to say what information, as to not get repetitive. With only thirteen minutes of content, it's important that we use every second of the show, to provide fresh information. Similarly, our morning multimedia journalist, Cameron, spent his shift choosing the most powerful #metoo tweets for Allegra's story. Once Allegra looked at her script, just one hour before air, she realized that the tweet he selected did not work well at all with how she framed her story. In that situation I should have suggested Cameron speak to Allegra about her story angle, to ensure the tweet he selected would work for her piece.
While we did have some hiccups in communication this week, it was an extremely valuable learning experience. Having the theme of communication front and center this week enabled me to consciously analyze where exactly things went wrong so that I can now optimize our team's communication during the remaining seven weeks.