News and current affairs
News programmes have the difficulty of very tight deadlines and stories that continue to change up to and during transmission. The main reference for most technical operators during a programme is a running order, although the director should always receive a full set of scripts.
Running order changes
If stories are not ready or live links not working there may be a change in the running order. When working off paper this means drawing arrows to show where stories have moved.
The director must clearly state any changes in running order. It is very easy for one person not to be aware of a change and you end up with the wrong graphic sitting behind the newsreader.
Once two or three stories have moved everyone’s running order becomes very messy. In busy programmes like this it is even more important that the director clearly says what story is running next in sufficient time for everyone to respond.
This is where an electronic newsroom system is a great help. As a director you sit with a running order on a screen in front of you. As any move happens you see it instantly updated in front of you.
Killing stories
Most news producers like to start programmes with too much material rather than not enough. If they are planning a live link they should have enough stories to fill the bulletin if the link doesn’t work. This means that some stories will have to be killed off during the programme. Again the director should very clearly say which stories have died.
Changing sources
Journalists will be editing right up to the start of, and sometimes during, the news bulletin. One way of getting these stories on air quicker is to have the edit suites available ‘on-line’. That simply means the vision mixer and sound supervisor can cut to the edit suite directly.
Warn your crew if that is likely to happen as they will often have to dial up the appropriate edit suite on a matrix.
Story numbering
This used to be always sequential, with extra stories (if they are running after story 3; for example) being numbered 3A, 3B etc. Many organisations are switching over to non-sequential systems, so the director would say ‘Story order now 3, 7, 9, 4’. Anyone with scripts will just move the stories to that order, without re-numbering them.
This is a paper running order as used by technical staff for a live evening news. The company decides ahead of transmission which VT machine will be used for each playout, If the tape isn’t quite ready in time, any of the edit suites can be selected on the vision mixer and rolled straight to air.
If it is known in advance that a tape will be late or rolled from somewhere else down an outside source line, it will be marked as ES or OS on the script.
The complexity of the opening sequence is not untypical for a news programme.