Newsroom Day is a class project designed to give students the experience of being in an actual newsroom. As of right now this project is instructed by Jeremy Copeland and is only offered to students registered in his Shoot for the Heart course. Each student has to pick their top three roles for newsroom day prior to the day from the list of roles provided. The reason for picking three is to ensure that everyone is offered a role. The roles are also assigned on a first come first serve basis so as soon as the list is sent out, it would be best to submit your top picks right away. 

Newsroom Day Roles:

Line-up Editor: 

In charge of the show. Your main responsibility will be to decide what stories will go in the newscast and what order they will run in. You will be in the control room when the show is going to “air”. You will be in charge of directing the editorial content of the newscast.

Assignment Editor/Producer

In charge of the news gathering teams in the field. You will assist the lineup editor and help with vetting all the scripts.

Anchors x2 (or 4 if there are a lot of people who want to try anchoring)  

These people will be available to write stories and assist the lineup editor. About 60 minutes before the show they should review the stories that they will be reading.

Reporters and producers (2-person teams) 

This is a good job to do if you want to get everything done before class. You would have to go out and put together a 90 second news story. The story should be edited and ready to air by the time class starts  If your story is ready and your intro is written then you have the option of skipping class altogether. 

Debrief for news story x2

You will cover a story with a live debrief. This means you will learn about a story and then do a live Q and A with one of the anchors. The whole thing should be about two-minutes long. You will NOT memorize a script. Rather you’ll just tell us about the story you’ve been following.

Communications interview

You would represent an organization and be interviewed by a news anchor talking about the work it does. You would prepare talking points.

Writers

Producer x2

This is a good job to do if you want to get everything done before class. Your job will be to cut-down feature news stories. You’ll take the script and the actual edited story from a feature story done for round one or two of the class. Then you’ll find ways to cut the story down to about 90 seconds. This is an exercise that will teach you how to find ways to shorten your stories, and it is very valuable if you want to work in comms where longer stories often have to be cut to 30 or 60 seconds to be used for social media. If your story is ready and your intro is written then you have the option of skipping class altogether.

Technical Roles during the show

You do not have to sign up for these, you will be assigned a technical role to do after you’ve completed your tasks for preparing the newscast.

Teleprompter:

Manually rolling the teleprompter from the computer. Controlling how fast the words move up and down the screen for the anchor to read off the monitor.

Switcher:

Switching between the cameras and playback sources that make up the show. Director says “Take Camera 1”, you press the button for Camera 1…”Take Camera 2”…you press the button for Camera 2 etc…

Audio:

Setting the audio levels for the microphones (similar to radio rooms). Turning microphones on and off, turning on audio for playback sources

Camera:

Remote controlling the cameras with the joystick. Framing up the shots and recalling the preset saved framings for different positions. Cameras are easy.

Playback:

Loading up the stories in the correct order based off the rundown and playing them back into the show. Director will say “Roll Avid” or “Roll Deck” and you press play…