Day 5 was an early one. I was scheduled to arrive at SEVEN in the  morning! It was a little rough at first, but totally worth it. When I arrived I met John Lindsey, a news director at WNCN. He gave me a quick tour of the building before we started doing anything else. After the tour I sat with John in the control room as he explained how they do the cut ins. Cut ins are, well, when the station cuts into the national programming to do local new and/or news. These happen at specific times in the program which are broadcasted to the local stations. The director of the cut ins will code the program they use before they begin. The director, the sound editor, and the camera operator all work together to produce the cut ins. I sat with John during the first cut in. Funny enough as he was trying to code the show he coded the wrong one so he pretty much winged it. It was a bit sloppy but it seemed to turn out okay. For the next cut in I sat with the sound editor. He control the levels of all the different sound inputs, such as microphones, any music, and sound from videos. He makes sure that nothing is too loud or too soft and that all the needed pieces can or cannot be heard at a given time. While they weren’t doing cut ins myself and an intern got to mess around with the sound board and coding the show a little bit. For the next cut it I sat with the camera operator in the studio. She controls where the cameras are facing and makes sure that they are in the right places at the right times. Earlier in the morning she also sets up all the camera angles for most of the day. She is the one who cues the reporters or meteorologists as well. She makes sure they know how much time is left in the spot which is fed to her by the director in the control room. She was a very funny woman who was almost always singing into the coms. For the last cut in I sat with the director in the control room again, only this time it was the intern who was doing the directing. She did a very good job, everything went according to plan.

Once I had spent about two hours in the control room/studio, I sat in on a news meeting. The reporters that were there along with the producers of the news shows that day were discussing what stories they had or expected to get that day. After the meeting was over I sat with the producer of the 12 o’clock show. He was setting out what was going to go when and picking out clips from footage for the editor to edit together for the packages he needed. I asked him a lot of random questions about things I saw int he room. I asked him about things such as the analytics system they use, it’s the same as the N&O, in what circumstances do they like using live shots vs. pre-recorded shots, what he does on a standard day,  and others.

After that I sat with an editor for a while. He was the one who was working with the producer of the 12 o’clock to edit all the packages he needed together. The editor had a tv in his edit bay that I ended up watching a bit, then suddenly the feed went down. For some reason, I never found out why, the channel began to experience technical difficulties. When the station first sort of came back online I was told that it was showing their old logos and color schemes. They were recently partnered with CBS locally and so they changed their look. The editor told me that the corporates probably wouldn’t be fans of the fact that 1)  The station went down, and 2) That they were showing older logos. After about 15-20 minutes the station came back on.

Then just before 12 I went back to the control room to observe the 12 o’clock news from behind the scenes. Coolest part was I got a mini job. I was tasked with pressing play on a live streamed view of the beach just before it was supposed to be shown live, so that we wouldn’t run into ad problems after the original feed broke down. The show itself was pretty standard, but really cool getting the back stage look at what goes down.