It was pretty good, but it was kind of annoying to work in production, the more technical side of news production, and feel like I was more of an investigative newshound than my colleagues who were actual journalists with degrees to back it. At least twice in my five years of working there I brought stories to the newsroom that were breaking stories, and they wouldn’t cover one because it was “outside of our coverage area” (still photos of said story were top story on wired.com for a week after), and another because “they hadn’t seen it on the AP newswire yet” even though they had all the evidence in front of them from court documents (a month later, after someone else broke the story and it came down on AP newswire, we finally ran it). Local newsies literally don’t know how to break a story anymore, they only know how to read the AP Newswire and wait to be told what to report.
Other than that I loved the technical side of it. I started as a studio cameraman, and then got trained to edit and run chyron during broadcast (a chyron is what produces the text that pops up under talking heads’ names like the news anchors, the reporters, and people we interview), and then trained to be a technical director. When I went through my second layoff, I was supposed to be trained to direct.
Things I miss: The size and shape of a TV studio. The gaggle of weirdos who work in places like these. The constant backtalk over headset where the production crew would crack jokes at the expense of the news crew behind the scenes. Making graphics for news stories. Being able to tell myself that browsing the news on reddit all day in 2007 was important to my job even though that was a lie. Live shots, especially for big events where half the news team would be on site for a good portion of the day, the county fair was always fun. The hum of all the electronics in the production control room. The walls of monitors. The specialized SGI workstations that the weather team used. The hours, working the afternoon, then a two hour lunch break before the late shows because otherwise we’d be being paid for ten hour shifts with not much to do for two hours. I was young back then, so I liked getting off late in the evening, going out with friends after, and being able to sleep in because work didn’t start again until the afternoon. I miss B-roll. I miss feeling like part of a community since it was in a smaller market/smaller city because of the sheer number of people you end up meeting. I miss being privy to the behind the scenes of the major news network our station was affiliated with, and seeing how much our media leapt to believe anything and everything our government told them without question in the wake of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror.
Anyway yeah, I miss it but after the second layoff it was clear local TV was dying and the stations I had started out at no longer existed, consolidated into nearby stations to save money and extend the broadcast area. So now news is hardly “local” anymore, when the news station you get at home is broadcast from a city that’s over 200 miles away. They usually have a little studio in a strip mall with one or two employees in the cities that used to have full news studios and a few times a week they do “cut-ins” for the local city to focus on a single news story from outside the city its broadcasting from to pretend like they’re still doing coverage for the whole area. I remember having arguments with managers about how we needed to be prioritizing the internet because we were losing ad-revenue to it so we needed to prioritize an internet-first or at least internet-equal approach. Netflix started streaming in 2007, it was a reasonable thing to be considering with the way the winds were blowing. Yet in 2009 you had the CEO of Disney-ABC proudly saying she would nail a TV to her college-bound daughter’s dorm room wall if she had to when her daughter told her she would just watch TV on her laptop. The industry refused to move forward until market forces pushed them to do so. Don’t even get me started on my thoughts on how few people access and use broadcast television and radio anymore and if they really want these services to survive they really need to push them online and give up more of the broadcast spectrum to either be saved to have some air waves that aren’t “noisy” even if we can’t hear it.
That sounds pretty cool. How was it?
It was pretty good, but it was kind of annoying to work in production, the more technical side of news production, and feel like I was more of an investigative newshound than my colleagues who were actual journalists with degrees to back it. At least twice in my five years of working there I brought stories to the newsroom that were breaking stories, and they wouldn’t cover one because it was “outside of our coverage area” (still photos of said story were top story on wired.com for a week after), and another because “they hadn’t seen it on the AP newswire yet” even though they had all the evidence in front of them from court documents (a month later, after someone else broke the story and it came down on AP newswire, we finally ran it). Local newsies literally don’t know how to break a story anymore, they only know how to read the AP Newswire and wait to be told what to report.
Other than that I loved the technical side of it. I started as a studio cameraman, and then got trained to edit and run chyron during broadcast (a chyron is what produces the text that pops up under talking heads’ names like the news anchors, the reporters, and people we interview), and then trained to be a technical director. When I went through my second layoff, I was supposed to be trained to direct.
Things I miss: The size and shape of a TV studio. The gaggle of weirdos who work in places like these. The constant backtalk over headset where the production crew would crack jokes at the expense of the news crew behind the scenes. Making graphics for news stories. Being able to tell myself that browsing the news on reddit all day in 2007 was important to my job even though that was a lie. Live shots, especially for big events where half the news team would be on site for a good portion of the day, the county fair was always fun. The hum of all the electronics in the production control room. The walls of monitors. The specialized SGI workstations that the weather team used. The hours, working the afternoon, then a two hour lunch break before the late shows because otherwise we’d be being paid for ten hour shifts with not much to do for two hours. I was young back then, so I liked getting off late in the evening, going out with friends after, and being able to sleep in because work didn’t start again until the afternoon. I miss B-roll. I miss feeling like part of a community since it was in a smaller market/smaller city because of the sheer number of people you end up meeting. I miss being privy to the behind the scenes of the major news network our station was affiliated with, and seeing how much our media leapt to believe anything and everything our government told them without question in the wake of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror.
Anyway yeah, I miss it but after the second layoff it was clear local TV was dying and the stations I had started out at no longer existed, consolidated into nearby stations to save money and extend the broadcast area. So now news is hardly “local” anymore, when the news station you get at home is broadcast from a city that’s over 200 miles away. They usually have a little studio in a strip mall with one or two employees in the cities that used to have full news studios and a few times a week they do “cut-ins” for the local city to focus on a single news story from outside the city its broadcasting from to pretend like they’re still doing coverage for the whole area. I remember having arguments with managers about how we needed to be prioritizing the internet because we were losing ad-revenue to it so we needed to prioritize an internet-first or at least internet-equal approach. Netflix started streaming in 2007, it was a reasonable thing to be considering with the way the winds were blowing. Yet in 2009 you had the CEO of Disney-ABC proudly saying she would nail a TV to her college-bound daughter’s dorm room wall if she had to when her daughter told her she would just watch TV on her laptop. The industry refused to move forward until market forces pushed them to do so. Don’t even get me started on my thoughts on how few people access and use broadcast television and radio anymore and if they really want these services to survive they really need to push them online and give up more of the broadcast spectrum to either be saved to have some air waves that aren’t “noisy” even if we can’t hear it.