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