I find that much of my producing work comes back to my own experience at USC, especially during this unusual semester. In my role as a producer for Annenberg TV News, I have the unique opportunity to produce content for a group that I happen to be a part of, meaning that most of the time, I’m my own best target audience.
There is no doubt that Zoom fatigue is a universal struggle among college students. Now that my work, classes and social life all take place online, it’s hard to find breaks during the day to get away from the screen, which is why I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with the idea of a “ten minute break” during long lectures.
To be clear, taking breaks in the middle of lectures, especially online, has been great for my well-being. I’ve come to look forward to them as an opportunity for me to step away from my computer. However, most of the time I just spend them catching up on homework or checking social media, which means no time away from the screen. This personal experience, along with feedback that I’ve heard from my peers, led to the brand new wellness segment in our Tuesday show.
This segment, originally titled “One Minute Break,” was inspired by my need to stay active and away from my computer during breaks in lecture and in between classes. When brainstorming segment ideas, I knew that I wanted not only to feature members of the USC community, but also give students information they could walk away with and use.
I couldn’t be more happy with our final product in last Tuesday’s show. We renamed our segment “BRB,” text lingo for “be right back,” a much catchier name that wouldn’t be constrained to the “one minute” in the original title. One of our two anchors, Ella Katz, interviewed Maya Ramde, a USC student and Corepower yoga instructor, about the benefits of doing yoga.
While I love the idea of a segment that both promotes wellness and shows students something they can incorporate into their lives, my favorite part about the finished product actually had nothing to do with the topic. While I was developing the structure of this segment with Ella and my executive producer, Alex Song, I knew that I wanted to bring back the conversational feel of our live newscasts in the studio. We decided to have Ella introduce Maya while they were side by side on screen and conduct an interview in a conversational style. Afterwards, Maya would demonstrate some yoga poses while Ella followed along, and Ella would end the segment on her yoga mat with Maya on camera.
I thought Ella did a brilliant job executing and editing this segment. She was able to hit the right balance of a scripted introduction and questions without it feeling too stiff, and it was a nice contrast to the rest of our show. I had the biggest smile on my face when I watched the segment for the first time — it was so refreshing to see one of our anchors do something out of the ordinary and really show her personality.
While I love how this segment turned out, there is room for improvement now that we know the format works. In the final product this week, we had to add more cuts than I would have liked. When Ella showed me the first cut, the segment was four minutes long. With a 15-minute show where most stories are about a minute long, four minutes feels much longer than it sounds. Maya demonstrated three poses, and with some ingenuity, Ella was able to find places to cut that would tighten the segment without disturbing the flow.
In an ideal world, I would want to minimize cuts in this segment to really tap into that live feeling. People we interview often don’t understand how fast our newscasts move, and it is up to the interviewer to make sure that our guest understands what we’re looking for. Going into this next week, I think using the information we know now and prepping the guest prior to recording will be paramount.
Next Tuesday, Elliot Law from Mindful USC will be joining us to talk about mindfulness. In the meantime, I’ll be taking some inspiration from Ella and Maya and practicing some yoga. We’ll “BRB” next week.