Media Helping Media

10 newsgathering tips for producing great content

Published on Monday, 24 January 2011

Written by Nick Walshe

These tips are aimed at those involved in newsgathering, the red meat of TV journalism.

They are the reporters, planning editors, camera people, assignment editors and field producers, and of course the news executives who oversee them.

Their business is sourcing ideas, planning coverage, assigning teams, structuring packages, monitoring the Web, working in the field - and coming back alive and well.

Nick Walshe offers his 10 tips on running a good Input operation.

Note: In this piece newsgathering is defined as the TV news process which ends once the video is back at HQ, on air, on tape or on the server.

1. Investing in planning

The planners are often the forgotten heroes and heroines of the newsroom, elbowed aside in the rush for today's stories. That's a bad mistake - planners should be setting the agenda and their planned material should not be dropped without good reason. They should be encouraged to dream - of special reports, background investigations, time-consuming graphics and other projects requiring polish. They should be a strong core team, supported by other visiting newsroom staff.

Expect high standards of planners, create a strong core team and reinforce it with regular rotations

2. Managing editorial meetings

Balancing creativity with decisiveness is a difficult trick. Daily editorial meetings should be chaired by a senior figure, but all voices should be heard, not just those of the senior editors or the chronically verbose. The best ideas often come from the small voice at the back. Set a start time and begin punctually, irrespective of latecomers - they'll get the message. Also set an end time - half an hour should be plenty.

Chair the meeting firmly, but allow all voices to be heard (briefly), and always have a beginning and an end

3. Managerial oversight

To ensure that the planning team is following the right editorial strategy, managers must make their views known at an early stage in the creative process. News coverage should be discussed at least a week in advance, at a weekly editorial meeting, followed up by another meeting the day before transmission. Managers must attend these gatherings. There is nothing more dispiriting for journalists to see their hard work brushed aside at a late stage because managers have not been properly monitoring the stories being prepared.

A regular weekly, and a daily, editorial meeting in advance of events is indispensible, and managers must attend

4. Newsroom geography

Are you sitting comfortably? The simple geography of an input operation makes a big difference to its efficiency. The following should all be able to see each other, talk to each other and, most important, overhear conversations - assignments editor, web editor (or web input editor), on-shift show editor, technical/facilities bookers (dishes, feeds, studios etc) and ideally the show director. It's amazing how often they don't.

Check that all those who need to talk to each other can do so, and if they can't, think about moving the furniture

5. Breaking news

There is a simple set of rules for breaking news on TV - it goes like this. Once the story is out there, desks need to do the following:

• assign a reporter to monitor incoming information, and be ready to appear live
• chase witnesses on the phone
• seek video material from the scene
• monitor Twitter, You Tube and other sources
• deploy hardware and people
• and plan schedule changes, on-site anchoring and the like.

Has your news organization ever written down a plan, because the day it happens might be the day when you have an inexperienced team on duty.

Get together a breaking news plan, distribute it to everyone, and use it as a reference when things get heated

6. Monitoring the deluge

In a breaking story with a large public following - riots, demos, bombings - social media might be an hour ahead of the agencies. These sources simply have to be monitored, but those who do it regularly say that maybe one percent is useful, four percent informative, and the rest is rubbish. You must know which source to trust and which tags to follow, so you probably should have developed contacts in advance if you saw the story brewing. Oh, and you mustn't miss the video when it appears.

Define a role for a journalist to monitor social media, encouraging them to develop sources in hotspots in advance and, during breaking news, use them on air as well as relying on their knowledge

7. Deploying into trouble

If your company is putting your reporters and technicians in harm's way, are you prepared? Around the world journalists get hurt covering street disturbances, political rallies, organized crime, even before they start working in wars and major conflicts. Employers and journalists themselves need to take responsibility for safety, but sadly many don't. You can reduce risk dramatically - there is plenty of excellent training out there, and even for those on limited budgets training and good advice is available.

Every assignment editor and reporter should know and read the INSI (International News Safety Institute) site, freelancers can contact the Rory Peck Trust at or Reporters Sans Frontieres and there's good general travel advice on the UK Foreign Office site.

8. Organising the shoot

It's surprising how disorganised some field teams can be as they deploy out to even a regular daily story. Camera crews sometimes don't know what the story is, reporters haven't requested a graphic that needs ordering in advance, or a useful piece of extra equipment is left behind. The planning producer or reporter needs to think - do we need extra lights, a long lens, can we order the graphic, should we now be organizing a guest for tonight's show?

If disorganized shoots are a problem, design a simple form covering the main points and make sure that staff spend five minutes ticking the boxes before leaving the building

9. Lively lives

Despite our incredible ability to be live nowadays from just about anywhere, our lives offerings are often dull and a little bit lazy. Most live reports still feature the reporter clutching a microphone and standing outside a government building. That's sometimes appropriate, but with lightweight cameras and mixers on board SNG (satellite news gathering) vehicles, lives spots can be much more creative, with plenty of movement, better introduction of guests and the use of live techniques which are common elsewhere in television.

Get your best director to run courses with your news reporters and camera crews to practise lives, and make sure that the field team put as much efforts into preparing for lives as they would into compiling a packaged report

10. Packaging without words

Are the news packages on your show tightly crafted, with skillful editing, a minimal use of words, lots of natural sound and a simple narrative? Or are they often overwritten, with words that don't match the pictures, where the sound from the locations is smothered by the reporter's breathless pre-recorded track? There is a cure - encourage reporters to put packages together the old way, especially if they have the time to do so.

Put all the pictures down first, concentrate on editing the video in the best sequences, and only then fit the words to the picture, allowing relevant scripting and plenty of natural sound

Nick Walshe has worked in TV newsgathering for the past 22 years, as a reporter, field producer, planner and assignments editor. Most recently he was responsible for Al Jazeera English's global newsgathering operation and also helped to manage their 24 bureaux. He was trained by the BBC in London and spent 10 years with ITN before moving to the Middle East, where he now lives and works as a TV and Media Consultant. Nick offers a training course - The Business of Newsgathering - covering all the areas mentioned above, and can be contacted at njwalshe(at)gmail(dot)com

• < Prev
• Next >