When I tell people that I spend ten hours on Zoom every Tuesday, my day-of-air, I’m often met with incredulity. Going into this semester, I had my doubts too. However, now that I’ve finished my eighth show, the day goes by in a blink of an eye.
One of my favorite parts of working in the Media Center before the pandemic was the adrenaline rush that came with putting together a live show. Anyone who walked into the newsroom on a weekday could feel the not-so-quiet hum of energy in every corner. I would have never expected this energy to carry over into online production — but it does.
Even though I’ve gotten the hang of producing over Zoom all day (the key is to remember to stretch every couple of hours and to not feel pressured to keep your camera on all the time), we’ve hit many bumps in the road during the semester.
The very first problem we had was communicating with our multimedia journalists (MJs) during their shift. When we have an anchor or reporter working on a story for an entire day, I tend to give them space, only checking in a few times over the course of the day. Since my executive producer Alex Song and I approve every piece of video that goes into the show, we can easily keep track of their progress.
With MJs it becomes a little trickier. We have four hour shifts starting at 8 a.m., 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. For the MJs on the morning shift, they usually won’t be able to finish a story by the end of their four hours, so it’s important that we plan well and pass their story on to someone else. This means that communication is paramount: in order for me to plan out the day efficiently, I need to know how stories are progressing. Early in the semester, we had many instances of being unable to reach MJs through Slack, our primary way of communication. At one point, Alex had to call an MJ to get a hold of them. Luckily, this was an easy fix. After a couple gentle reminders, students have been very responsive on Slack during their shift and sometimes even after.
Of course, the obvious challenge of working from home is well… home. In the Media Center, we are lucky to have an equipment room and plenty of computers. However, working from home means that people only has their own equipment to work with. Early on in the semester, one of our anchors, Ella Katz, had problems with her Wi-Fi. When she recorded with our other anchor, Zoe Ginsberg, Ella’s video would lag. I have to commend them for not giving up even when Wi-Fi made it challenging to record — although it took them a couple more tries, they were able to minimize lag and still turn in a polished video.
Beyond that, we’ve had a whole host of problems that wouldn’t normally come up in the Media Center: slow Wi-Fi, old computers, missing software, the list goes on. As much as I wish I could send everyone on my team brand new equipment, these challenges can be overcome. It’s all a matter of understanding your priorities and keeping track of any limitations your team has. With the example of Ella and Zoe, even though it would take them longer to record I was willing to wait if it meant that we had the two of them talking together at the end of the show. When it comes to members of our team not having the right equipment to edit video quickly, it all comes down to playing to people’s strengths and assigning tasks that you know that their technology can handle. For example, I’ll assign writing tasks to MJs who don’t have editing software.
However, with any type of production comes its own problems, if we were working in the Media Center I am certain we would have challenges to overcome there. Zoom production isn’t all bad; being on the Zoom call all day means that I get to listen in on every meeting, even if I’m working on something else. To anyone out there nervous about remote production, I’d say don’t knock it until you’ve tried it — there are surprising perks to be found in any form of production, even over Zoom.