Researching in Television News

Ray Carter

Lately most of my time has been spent researching the station's ultimate Sweeps Product: Cover Story. A lot of the stories range from the First Vacuum Cleaner Museum to an interview with Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White. My internship Advisor Ava wants most of the interns to get familiar with the different television markets, and how they do news differently from each other. It’s interesting to see how they play off each other, while they try to maintain their differences.  My Assignment Editor, Darrin, says the station wants to stand out from the rest of the competition. It’s interesting to see that Channel 4 does a lot of Hard Crime stories with very little sports. Channels 2 and 11 do a lot of investigative and personality driven news reports. When looking for “Cover Stories”, the news staff looks to nine points or categories of Advocacy. Some of these include Education, Emotion, and User-Centered Design.  Cover Stories can also be investigative, but they have recently been Features. The station did do an interesting investigation on Busch Employees taking yachts on a work related project. Most investigations aren’t usually Cover Stories.  Investigations are with the “I-TEAM” reporter Leisa Zigman and several Special Projects Producers.

Ava points us to search  the top 100 television markets which are divided by their viewing size. Some markets are surprisingly smaller than others; Las Vegas being number 42, is one of them. One market, Grand Rapids surpasses Vegas at 39. It’s interesting to view the different cities, and how the different stations look.  A lot of the stations tend to stick with two or three feature consumer related brands, for example, CBS 2: Special Report or 11Alive: Center for Investigative Action. The most common name is always “I-TEAM”, but some stations do get creative like It’s Time on Your Dime and Shame, Shame, Shame. Some stories are good, while others seem to be used for filler. One Investigative reporter with WSB-TV did a report on a woman breaking into a house and living their rent free. She claimed it was her right; the banks didn’t take it too well. Recently a lot of stations do stories related to the economy with housing and credit topics. One of the better investigations I researched, CBS Nashville, did an expose on corrupt cops profiting from drug stops. The judges were also in on it too.

I think looking up Cover Stories is a good way to see how different people write. It’s a good way for stations to bring hardhitting news for their viewing audience. The station wants to make the viewer happy with these different feature brands.  Ava wants us to learn the different techniques in Television Journalism, and how they can be useful in writing.