Newscast #3 - Jensen Mills - Fall 2019

Focusing on the script this week was so much easier than the previous two weeks! I can’t believe we’re already halfway through the semester. Writing the script this week didn’t take me eight hours (yay!), so I’m definitely excited to see that I’m improving. I can tell that writing my anchor intros are becoming easier as well. I didn’t have to stop and think for a while about how to tie the stories into one another, it all just kind of came together. To make it more understandable, at the beginning of the semester I definitely felt like I was trying to put a puzzle together for the first time, but now after three shows under my belt I seem to pick up on things automatically. After putting a puzzle together two or three times, it “clicks” for people that going for the corners and outside pieces first makes the puzzle come together a lot quicker. Writing the script is the same way; ideas and writing are coming more naturally now which is an exciting breakthrough for me!

On my feedback Prof. D. gave me for the script this week, I was missing a lot of small technical errors like back slashes at the end of packages, so I just need to start being more attentive to the small details. I’m frustrated at myself for not picking those up. A producer should be detail-orientated, but these are easy fixes that will come with practice. The writing portion doesn’t necessarily come with time… it’s you either have the gift to be able to write newscast scripts (and do it well) or you don’t. 

The one big victory I had this week was having a near perfect rundown! My timing has been off for the past two newscasts, so this week I made sure I focused a lot of time into the rundown and my leads which paid off. However, I timed everything out on paper correctly but when we got to the studio and started taping we were a full minute and a half over…  

I think it’s important to mention that for taping this week I was as sick as a dog, but I made sure to not act like it. I ate cough drops like they were candy and powered through feeling terrible. As the producer, I need to be leading my team. I can’t be moping around. So, on top of being sick and stressed while trying to tighten the script in every place I could… it was a rough Wednesday for me. While we found numerous sentences that could be taken out to get it down to 14:30, we ultimately had to take out an entire VO. We ended up doing six takes, and finally got the last one to be perfect with only fifteen minutes left in the studio.

Although the script writing came easily to me this week and the taping was a little stressful, I’m still loving this job. I really enjoy the fact that I not only get to write about different stories each newscast, but I’m also getting involved hands-on. The reporters are also coming to me with story ideas and asking for help on how to make their packages more interesting, so I’m really proud of myself for looking more and more like a leader to my classmates. Oh, and I’m officially addicted to coffee.