It's Monday, 4 a.m., and you're in the newsroom scanning the AP for newscast stories.
Option #1: Budget woes in a city 45 minutes outside your listening area. Not "the sky is falling, we're declaring bankruptcy" kind of budget woes, but "the federal government still hasn't paid us some disaster relief money and we're feeling the pinch" kind of budget woes. (story based on article from yesterday's newspaper)
Option #2: Local police department has been training for five months to do a better job handling deaths of infants and toddlers. In the last few years nearly half of all infant deaths in city remain unsolved (this is 5 deaths, btw). (story based on article from yesterday's newspaper)
Option #3: Man from your state (but not your listening area) shot to death by police in a neighboring state after he ran from them during a check of suspicious activity at a hotel.
Option #4: Soldier from your state, but several hours outside your listening area, was laid to rest Saturday after dying in non-combat related accident in Afghanistan.
Sound familiar? What's the phrase - "make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?" But really, how much can you do with this?
It's the Monday Morning Dilemma. Thin wires. Crime, two day old stories, abbreviated versions of in-depth stories that already ran in the newspaper. What's a morning host/producer to do?
Answer: Wednesday is the New Monday.
It's an idea that's not exactly new, but gets a brilliant makeover from former NPR/Marketplace/KUOW editor Cathy Duchamp. Cathy suggests that each Wednesday you assign someone from your newsroom to produce a newscast story for the following Monday morning. It should be a meaty issue, sound-rich, engaging... all that stuff.
But wait! I don't have a crystal ball! How am I supposed to know on Wednesday what will be news five days later?
Simple:
1. Look at the agenda of local governing bodies (state legislature, city council, county commission, school board. You get the idea). Is there an issue you can preview? The beauty of this is that you'll have time to find the "real people" affected by a potential policy change.
2. If you're signed up for press release services like Newswise and Profnet you can access hundreds of press releases, many of them ahead of time on an embargoed basis.
3. Take the "Story Idea Challenge"
Do you have a weekend reporter? If not, what do you do to make sure Monday morning news is engaging and relevant?
Photo Credit: Evil Erin/Flickr
At WVXU in Cincinnati we try to plan ahead preapring stories for MOnday the week before. We're always on the look out for stories that are either evergreen enough to hold for the next week, or events that are happening starting the following week. You always have to be preparing for those slow Monday mornings.
ReplyDeleteMaryanne,
DeleteHow many reporters in your newsroom? Do you each produce a Monday morning story or do you rotate that duty?
We don't do stories at KNPR, we just produce our two-hour talk program State of Nevada. But, we have this challenge every week. How do we fill two hours of programming on Monday without getting into old news? We start doing this by Thursday the week before. We look at what might be coming up (i.e. city council meeting or state legislature decision.) We also look for big picture topics. Maybe there's a new twist on the housing issue (we can milk that for another few years)? One example of that is [banks are auctioning off houses at the courthouse but can they really do that if they can't prove they hold the mortgage? One guy here in Las Vegas continuously shows up at the courthouse steps to challenge his house being auctioned and he's kept it. We can do a story about him or a story (segment) about who really owns our mortgages then that goes on to how we can challenge the banks if they don't hold our mortgage...etc...Sometimes we have open ended conversations, very general discussions about the issues that matter to people (i.e. how do neighborhood watch groups work? Considering the news on the Trayvon shooting. Gas prices going up, is that hurting tourism - especially good one for a town like Vegas.) Monday's are tricky but usually easy to pull off from the previous week.
ReplyDelete