BILLINGS — It's News Literacy Week across our Scripps Network of stations, and we here at Q2 wanted to give our viewers an inside look at the lifecycle of a news story, from inception to broadcast.
It all starts with our morning editorial meeting at 9:30 a.m. Reporters will pitch ideas to the newsroom. Thursday, a story reporter Alina Hauter had been trying to set up for several weeks was finally a go: a look into a new Billings Clinic program aiming to permanently hire international nurses.
The shoot was scheduled for 11:30 a.m. As an MMJ, or multimedia journalist, Alina does it all. She gathers her own camera gear, loads it into a news car and drives to the shoot site. When inside, Alina sets up and conducts her own interviews.
On this shoot, after the interviews were done, Alina was allowed to go into the Intensive Care Unit to observe her interview subject at work. This step is called getting b-roll, and it’s often what makes broadcast journalism stand out.
Now back outside, Alina shoots what we call a standup - the setup at the beginning of a story that lets you the viewer know what’s coming.
At this point, she has gathered all of her footage, and it’s time to go back to the station to piece it all together. She logs her interviews and writes her script. All reporters must have their scripts approved by supervisors - it’s one of our key checks and balances.
Once the script is approved, Alina records her lines in the audio booth and begins to edit the story together. The final step? Uploading her fully edited piece into our system so it can play out over our airwaves during one of our regularly scheduled newscasts.
Watch the process in the video above. Click here to read Alina's story.
