Scanner Said What?!

Dispatcher: Caller says her neighbor is in his backyard fully nude having sexual relations with a goat.

Obviously this created quite the stir in the newsroom, especially when it was repeated over the scanner a second time.

I've heard a lot of craziness come across the scanner, but that takes the cake hands down.

I bet you want to know the outcome. Well, it didn't turn out to be something we could use. By the time police got there, the guy had on pants and was back inside, definitely not defiling a goat ... if he even had been in the first place.

(Not So) Basic Journalism Skills: The Follow-Up

If you work in the news business, you've probably experienced this feeling at least once in your career: getting beat on a story.

What makes it even worse is knowing that one phone call you didn't make would have prevented it.

I'm talking about the follow-up. I touched on it earlier in this series when we talked about creating context for readers/viewers. The follow-up story is just another step in that process.

There are different kinds of follow-up stories: immediate, periodic and long-term.

The immediate follow-up story is the one you do the very next day. This happens often with elections. Night of you talk to the person who wins; next day you talk to his constituents about the outcome.

The periodic follow-up is seen most often in investigations. For example, right now my station is covering an investigation into alleged voter fraud. This isn't something we run every night. Instead, we run updates when new information comes out.

The long-term follow-up story can happen months or even years after the original story. For instance, we'll do look-back pieces on the anniversaries of big events - i.e. the September 11th terror attacks, mass shootings, deadly tornadoes.

Few stories we cover are one-day stories. Businessjournalism.org says it best: "The well-done follow-up is a critical element of coverage." Unfortunately, though, it's become an all-too-common practice in newsrooms across the country to let a story die after just one pass.

If you cover a story in which someone makes a promise, you have to re-visit that story at some point to see if they made good on that promise. If you don't, you're doing a disservice to your readers/viewers.

Developing ideas for follow-up stories can be tricky, especially when it seems like you've already poured everything imaginable into the story today. Tomorrow is the day you want to start asking questions about your original story. Why did this happen; how did it happen; what are the consequences of it; who will be impacted by it; and anything else you didn't answer in the original story. As long as there are questions lingering about the story, it's still a story.

If you have unanswered questions about a story, chances are your viewers/readers do as well, and that's what we're here for - to keep our audiences informed. If we don't complete the story, was there a reason in us covering it in the first place? As I said earlier in this series, the only times we should leave our viewers/readers hanging is in a tease or continues on page 3.

Closed Captioning: On

Anchor: (making fun of Anchorman) I'm Ron Burgundy? Who put a question mark in the teleprompter?!

Reporter: I haven't even started writing my script yet!

Puppy Parenting 101

Being a puppy parent is a constant adventure.

One night last week we went to dinner. My husband left a roll of paper towels sitting too close to the edge of the counter. When we got home about an hour later, this is what we found...

You know how you hear people say having a puppy is like having a toddler? They're not lying.

Sh*t Crazy Newsroom Callers Say

Caller: Who's directing or producing?
Me: It depends on the show. We have different producers and directors. What's your question?

Caller: I used to be a director there. Can I talk to Jonathan or Katie?

Me: A Katie doesn't work here, and Jonathan is currently directing our 5:00 show which is on the air right now, so I'm not going to transfer you to him.

Caller: Oh, well I wanted to let Jonathan know there was a misspelled CG.

If I could have slapped this guy through the phone, I would have.

Your Guide to Local TV News

For the past several days, my station has been dealing with the fallout from US Open tennis coverage. Somewhere between the first and thousandth phone call I've taken from outraged viewers, I realized not everyone understands the way local television news stations operate. But never fear! I, your resident expert, am here to save the day and educate the masses on the reality of the newsroom.

If you think your local news station is sending crews to cover major national and international events like the Boston Marathon bombing or the crisis in Syria... I have some ocean-front property in Arizona I'll sell you at a great price.

Most local news stations are affiliates of a major network like CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox. That does not mean we work for the network. In fact, we have practically no ties to the network until we do a story they're interested in. Until that point, we might as well not exist to them.

So what does it mean to be an affiliate? In a nutshell, we pay for our time slots and access to the network's video and stories. Even then though, we're not guaranteed that time slot if something better comes up, i.e. the US Open tennis tournament.

We have absolutely no say over which sporting events our network chooses to air, which shows come on at what time, what stories the network decides to include in their newscast, etc. Calling to yell at us because Hawaii Five-0 was an hour late or because you don't like tennis is a waste of our time and a waste of your breath. About the only thing we can do is give you the network's complaint hotline; however, I've found that most viewers would rather rant at me than call CBS to complain.

Affiliates are at the mercy of their respective network. Often we find ourselves in situations where we've had to condense a 30-minute newscast down to five minutes or watched all our time run out and not gone on at all. Like I told an angry tennis caller last week, we're not happy when the show we've worked on for hours just doesn't happen.

So here's my advice for all those people who like to call their local station and complain about what Ellen did today: find something more productive to do. If worse comes to worst, change the channel. No one's forcing you to watch, after all.