Producing...

I got to be producer for team D this week and I got first hand experience trying to find good stories on a slow news day. The local elections dominated news coverage all week, but we didn't mention anything about them on our newscast. Instead, I chose to lead the rundown with the Green Hotel announcement by Destiny USA and the reaction it got. I tried to follow up the story with something tying into the "green" trend taking over CNY, and Annie was nice enough to lend us her sound. Noel and Amy did a great job on their wraps and I put them together at the end of the A-block because both stories delt with a Christmas theme. As anchor, Jon did a great job getting a foner and he got to go over the script a couple dozen times because he was done so early. It paid off in the booth because he absolutely killed it! He forgot to mention the current conditions during the weather, but he had a great delivery with few mistakes. Timing really wasn't a big problem because Noel and Amy kept me up to date on the lengths of their wraps. We had good communication through out the day and that made my job really easy.
A couple stories we didn't get to include: the writers strike and Spitzer on the mortgage lending industry. The writers strike has been a national story for a couple weeks now and there hasn't really been an update. Eight prime-time TV shows such as 24, the Office, and Saturday Night Live have halted production and some stars are refusing to cross picket lines. For Spitzers story, he said lenders and the federal government should consider a mortgage-backed securities fund to stabilize the turbulent market.