NEWS DIRECTOR/ASSIGNMENT EDITOR
As the station OIC or operations head, you will have
to think of the news director/assignment editor as your
right-hand man. This petty officer will be the eyes and
ears of your station and the decisions he makes will
make or break the image of your detachment. The news
director/assignment editor of a nightly news program
will always make assignments that day for that night’s
news. This is necessary for him to avoid a strictly happy
talk format of canned ENC packages. However, the
news director must also plan ahead to develop those
stories that will require some research. The best way to
keep assignments in everyone’s mind and to enable such
planning as, gathering background material and think-
ing about shot sequences, is to have an assignment status
board. This may be a chalkboard or fancy plexiglass
arrangement that is lined off to show days of the week
reporters names and dates due for the story listed. This
will also give the news staff quick and easy access to
what is happening as well as when ENG shoots maybe
scheduled.
Assignment editors are made for the grind of finding
news. They must constantly think of how to till that
nightly news hole. Some good places to look for stories
are as follows:
. Beat calls. First and foremost, use the beat call
system to keep in touch with your audience and
news sources. Make a list of every important
office or influential person that could possibly
generate or inform you of news and call them
once every week. All successful newsrooms will
do beat calls to keep the channels of communi-
cations open between your newsroom and the
public. (One harried and successful civilian
journalist in North Dakota, of all places, made
over 400 beat calls to various news sources every
month. That is commitment!)
. Calendars with historical notations. A good
newscast will have one or two things in history
(Navy or otherwise) for each day of the year.
Sure, some of the events are downright strange,
such as the development of the Hula Hoop, but
think back to television reports civilian
professionals did on that day. You would have
thought the Hula Hoop was a religious icon.
. Print publications. Read the paper and weekly
news magazines. Localizing Navy Times stories
should be a weekly effort of any NBS
detachment. For example, the story about COLA
cuts in Navy Times will provide the background
for a story featuring a young sailor and his family
on your base to describe how the cuts will affect
his family. Put a human face to every story.
How much of a news hole is there to fill? For most
military stations, the news hole remains stable because
the commercials are all command information spots.
For a typical half-hour news show, a time sheet might
look like those displayed in figure 8-18. The exact
nightly format should be left open to the news director
and should remain as flexible as possible so as not to
bore the audience with the same, down to the second
format each night.
REPORTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
For the most part, reporters and photographers are
interchangeable at military stations. After some basic
training, there should be no reason why a PH3 cannot
write the script for a news package or why a JO3 cannot
shoot an evening basketball game for tomorrow night’s
sports.
BASIC VIDEO NEWS
Many news directors have found
because of its more in-depth training in
the PH rating,
visual imagery,
to be a better source of broadcast journalism stories than
many DINFOS trained journalists. For most
photographers there is no tendency to write the story and
then go out and find the pictures. They correctly assume,
by their nature, that it is the pictures that will tell the
story in television. Remember, train your reporters and
photographers to be photojournalists. That means they
must tell the story visually first and then add the natural
sound and sound bites to a script. You want neither
talking books nor picture radios. You want a visual story
with a beginning, middle and end that is backed up with
sound and words. Remember to tell all your reporters to
keep this in mind whenever they work in television
news. A good training technique for you to develop this
sense of visual story telling is to have each of your
sailors shoot a feature story that will have no script or
sound bites. This technique is used in just about every
university that teaches movie making or
photojournalism and is now becoming more accepted in
the best broadcast journalism schools in America.
Sequence Your Shots
Researchers have shown that when you look at an
object, you first see it in relation to its surroundings, then
as a single object and then various parts of the single
8-29
