For those not in the TV business let me give you a little insight into the world of television news. Four times a year companies like Nielson find out how many people are watching different shows. From there the sales staff can figure out how much to charge, the more people the more money. We in the business call these four month sweeps. You can tell when it is sweeps because there are always new episodes of your favorite shows. In news a lot of times you see those "You will die if you don't watch tonight's 11pm show!" or "Did you know you can contact 9 different forms of the plague from eating out? We'll tell you which restraints will kill you." You have all seen those stories.
The month of May is a HUGE sweeps month and we went all out and I somehow got tapped to do one of the series. The concept my three part series is that kids are giving out too much info on Facebook. So we set up a couple of accounts with two of our reporters and these accounts had actual photos of two people that are in their early 30s, so it's not like we tricked them. The reporters set out and invited a lot of kids and within three days had over 100 friends.
You can watch the videos to find out what happened, I'm just happy they are over. In a normally I will churn out one story and for the most part move on to another the next day. Not on this bad boy, we worked for over a week on it. We interview three kids and their parents and the Attorney General of North Carolina. I cracked out my light kit ever time and I think most of the lighting is really good. You can hopefully tell I put some work into it. Then we spent one whole day in a studio with a jib camera so we could get some great flying shots. Then I spent 5 days editing. I never take that long to edit, but when lawyers are involved it takes a lot longer. I would finish one piece, send it off and then legal could have problems with it so we would fight over what needed to be changed and then I would most likely change everything.
By the end I was numb, I blame these stories for a lack of posting this month. I think they are two pretty good stories and hopefully someone gets something out of it. I hope I get out of doing a sweeps story in July.
3 comments:
Good Job, those were interesting stories and I can appreciate the amount of work you put in them.
i thought the stories seriously came out great! excellent job by you and laura and serg! A plus!
Of course I see places where I could have done better. I just need to let that go, I'm too close to it.
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