In the closing weeks of the spring semester, you can see students around campus using all sorts of techniques to keep stress at bay as they complete their projects and hurdle towards graduation. My personal approach is to simply spend some free time with a good book. Lately, I've been reading a very entertaining and illuminating history of existentialism. Now I suspect your first impulse is to stop reading in the fear that I will pack this blog with indecipherable academic gibberish, but that's not my goal. In fact, the existentialist tradition was born out of a dissatisfaction with academia and its endless debates about the nature of reality. Sometimes, said the existentialists, reality hits you on the head.
Existentialism began with a guy named Edmund Husserl, who developed an idea called "epoche." The basic idea behind epoche was simple. While philosophers across the ages were getting mired in arcane debates about what is real and what exists, why don't we simply pay attention to our experience of the world around us? Why not bracket off the whole network of questions about the world, just for a moment, and simply take in our conscious and lived experience?
Everyone who left their dorms and apartments and came to campus on Wednesday had a similar experience: the intermittent downpours and dreary cloud cover of an uncommonly rainy day in Los Angeles. As someone who has lived in the city my whole life, I've noticed that people often act strangely when it rains here. Some people get super excited because they finally get to wear their coats and jackets and scarves. Some people freak out because everything seems grey and bleak. Out-of-towners sometimes scoff when they see Angelenos complaining about rain; it lets them recount their war stories of braving blizzards and tornadoes and all sorts of crazy weather that happens somewhere else. In short, rain brings character to a community that's usually basking in endless sunshine.
As I made my way to the media center and our morning meeting, I had the same experience. In most meetings, we talk about our stories for the day and often conclude that there doesn't seem to be a clear lead story. We often weigh different criteria, like the needs and interests of the audience or the potential strength of our visual elements. We compare the immediacy of campus news that impacts students directly with national stories that speak to larger sociopolitical issues. However, Mother Nature made this week's discussion easy. After all, this isn't Seattle or the Gulf Coast or London. People don't expect rain, and they experience it together in the city, so it becomes a great lead story. Although the media center may not have the appearance of a philosophical space (especially when one of our many TVs is incidentally showing Jerry Springer in the afternoon), we happened to flex our existentialist muscles and apply a little "epoche" to our newscast.
On most days, though, it's not so simple. One of the main dilemmas I often think about when determining leads is what I call the "descriptive vs. prescriptive" issue. On one hand, we want to meet our audience where they are and determine to the best of our ability what they already care about. On the other, we want to be mindful of the responsibility our platform confers upon us and give the audience information on what they should care about. Sometimes these things align in one event, as with the rain. Other times, however, they can be different news items. The key, then, is to decide which path to take.
As a lead producer, you have more direct influence on what order the segments go and what becomes the lead story. As a teammate, it's important to offer your feedback and keep in mind how the show will play out visually. I was the latter for Wednesday's broadcast. Although we were pretty clear on the content of the lead, I had to meet with the lead producer and executive producer to clarify the specific shape it was going to take and what visuals would be needed.
The lead is so important because it's essentially a first impression. In life, we try to make good first impressions on people we meet because it makes a big impact on how they view us. The same holds true for the newscast. That first story sets the tone for the viewer. At the same time, the lead is a statement of our values. When we lead with a specific story, we're telling the viewer, "this is what we value the most." That's a big responsibility.