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You’re a reporter at a local TV station.  An idea emerges at an editorial meeting, and the eyes around the table turn to you.  “We have you in mind for this,” you hear them say.

“Have fun with it.”

Doug suits up

You like fun.  You much prefer it to the mayhem that fills out much of local news.  You’re a team player.  You smile and salute.  And as you return to your desk, you ask yourself:  What the fizzle am I gonna do with this?

One such stroke of genius sends you to Manuel’s Tavern, a renowned Atlanta watering hole.  You’re sent to stalk a film crew shooting Anchorman 2.  Your boss is somewhat obsessed with Georgia’s emerging filmmaking industry, no doubt reflecting a similar fascination held by the audience, whose American dollars sustain your advertising / ratings-supported news operation.

You arrive at Manuel’s to see production equipment in a parking lot, but no crowds of spectators, no actors standing around waiting to be interviewed by the local news, no invitations to get close to the action.  Your assignment looks to be a bust.

You’re having a “make it work” moment.

In this instance, the TV station has given you two valuable resources:  An agreeable photographer in the person of Steven Boissy, and an even more agreeable co-talent in the person of 11 Alive’s Elle Duncan, who loves this assignment much more than you do.

You alter your approach.  You decide to produce the piece documentary style, a first-person “here’s us trying to cobble together a story with almost no elements” approach.   You try to do stream-of-consciousness narration on scene, woven amongst bits of on-camera schtick.  Thanks largely to Duncan, the story is watchable, somewhat amusing, and accurately reflects what happened outside Manuel’s that day.

You become a victim of your own success.  Another opportunity emerges from another editorial meeting.  This time, the boss is intrigued by a Youtube video shot in Whitesburg, Ga.  It shows a man leaping from a 100 foot bungee platform with a basketball, and sinking a shot in a standard 10-foot-high hoop.

Elle Duncan saves Doug’s story

The agreeable Al Ashe pilots a vehicle to Whitesburg.  Because you are cowardly, you conclude there’s no way in hell you’re jumping from a hundred foot platform to try to replicate the shot.  But there are zip lines available.

You’ve decided to do the piece documentary style, again.  Trace bits of on-scene narrative, flavored with schtick, will tell the story of a Youtube video shot days earlier in the same location.

You interview a guy who eyewitnessed the Youtube shot.   He has placed a basketball goal near the end of a zip line.

You’ve made a comedic decision to keep your suit on as he straps you on, then hands you a basketball.

You squirt out of a tower on a zip line, holding a basketball, wearing a Go-pro.  You spend the first half of the ride trying to manage holding the zip line and the basketball at the same time.  As the hoop comes into sight, you figure it out.

You hoist the ball with one hand, hurl it toward the hoop, and watch it clank off the rim.

Yet the story is watchable, somewhat amusing, and accurately reflects the story, which wouldn’t have been much of a story without your heroic effort.

“The story isn’t about you,” you hear your readers saying.  And they’re right.

Except for when it is.

The voice on the other end of the phone was very irritated with one of my competitors.  The reporter was producing a story about a government worker who had some issues in his personnel file — some citizen complaints, some reprimands.  The caller was a friend of mine and a friend of the worker.

The reporter is trying to trick him into an on-camera interview– claiming the interview would be about his reinstatement.  It’s a set-up to ambush him about all the other stuff in his file.

It’s bullshit!  The reporter is lying in order to get an interview.

Outside the Fulton Co. Courthouse, 5.3.13

I was sympathetic to the argument.  I’m not a fan of smarmy reporter behavior.

But I was torn.  I can understand why folks would expect reporters to be completely up-front about their intentions when approaching subjects for interviews.  Reporters demand the truth from newsmakers.  If we aren’t completely truthful ourselves, then we’re hypocrites.  If we’re willing to shade our own honesty, then we deserve our rankings of distrust among car salesmen and members of Congress.

On the other hand, it’s a really lousy way to get interviews with people who’d prefer to sidestep the truth.

There’s no doubt that subjecting scoundrels to our  questioning is part of our job.  If we don’t do it, then we fail to hold the powerful accountable.  Not to mention, the public expects to see deserving people squirm under uncomfortable questioning. It’s part of the theater of TV news, as perfected by 60 Minutes.

But how do you get them in front of a camera to ask those questions?

You have to be honest.  Put all your cards on the table, I hear you saying.  In a perfect world, sure.   But it’s not realistic.

Pitching interviews with “targets” of stories is an age-old challenge.  You have to phrase your pitch honestly, but you don’t have to include every detail.  Earlier this year at the state capitol, I approached lawmakers about their thoughts on public financing of a new football stadium.  I knew that some of them had taken free Falcons tickets from the Georgia World Congress Center, and asked them about that too.  The latter topic was a legitimate line of inquiry honestly related to the initial pitch.

After they agreed to the interview, I told them I also intended to ask them about the tickets.  It was a way to fully state my intentions without scaring them off, giving them a  moment or two to frame an answer to a potentially uncomfortable question.

Public servants are fair game for such stuff.  For that matter, so is any newsmaker who has some ‘splaining to do.

I had no good answer for my caller.  It sounded like my competitor was playing by the rules — broadly stating the topic of the desired interview, while keeping key details under wraps until the right moment.

It may not help our poll numbers.  But it helps us do our jobs.

Photo not available

One Halloween, I dressed as Marie Antoinette. I looked hideous. The longer the evening went, the worse my French got. It was a linguistic disaster. But mostly, it was a fashion disaster.  My garment was ill-fitting, unnatural and had no pockets.  It was an abject first-hand lesson in the perils of women’s attire.

I know that women have made substantial progress in the business of local TV news, an industry once run by men.  A woman runs our newsroom.  Most of our producers are women.  Our highest-profile news anchor is a woman.

Despite this ascension, women still apparently feel compelled to dress — like women.  Which means they wear garments that are less practical and less substantial than men’s clothing.

Fashion forward: Julie Wolfe, WXIA

Here’s Julie Wolfe, a WXIA reporter.  There’s little doubt that she has the most outstanding haircut in Atlanta TV news.  In this instance, she also shows a certain amount of fashion fearlessness.

Wolfe is doing a live shot about a guy holding himself hostage up the street, a police standoff that eventually involved a SWAT team and tear gas and whatnot.  The story was forgettable.

The eye-opener was Wolfe’s creative use of her coiture to accommodate the demands of TV.

She made an adult decision to wear a garment with a limited amount of square footage.  More importantly, it also lacks a belt and pockets. Almost every item of clothing I own has pockets.

I find belts and pockets to be essential.  In our industry, they host things like microphones and IFB / earpiece boxes.

Wolfe has none of that.  But she does have boots.  And she has an earpiece wire that just happens to stretch from her collar to her right ankle, which is where the IFB box is clipped.  The IFB box is then attached, by audio cable, to a cell phone in a live truck.  Over that phone line, Wolfe hears program audio for WXIA’s noon news and occasional cues from a producer in the control room.

As a man with a closet full of clothing with pockets and belt loops, I never, ever have considered clipping an IFB box to my footwear.  I’ve never had to because I don’t wear women’s clothing.

Except for that one time.  You had to be there.  No, wait.  You didn’t miss anything.

Julie Wolfe writes a blog about her life as a reporter and borderline obsessive marathon / ironwoman-type runner.  Read it here!

Most lines of work have day-to-day routines, which the worker seeks to break.  Mine is no different.

Go do a story about how cold it is outside.  There is no more “routine” story than the cold-weather story. If my employer wants a cold weather story, I’ll cheerfully do it, and make it as awesome as I possibly can.  But to amuse myself, I will strive to avoid using the word “cold” in my copy.

Why?  I like synonyms.  It’s a challenge, albeit a 6th grade level one.  It amuses me.

Looking upward: Jon Samuels, WXIA

Wednesday, I was told to do a story about Clayton County’s interest in providing a site for a new Falcons stadium.  The story had apparently appeared on another news outlet several hours earlier.  I rang up Clayton County’s newly-elected commission chairman, Jeff Turner, and we met and chatted.

(I love me some Jeff Turner.  Aside from being an amusing and accessible guy, I love Turner’s story.  Fired by the Clayton County Board of Commissioners as Clayton County’s police chief, he beat the incumbent chairman in the last election — and now runs the board that fired him.)

Turner directed Jon Samuels and me to a gnarly plot of land along Old Dixie Highway east of I-75, the spot Turner thinks would be ideal for a football stadium.  I knew the area to be in the landing path at Hartsfield-Jackson airport.  “It’d be like Shea Stadium there,” I observed during a two-shot, and Turner concurred with a laugh.

Samuels and I arrived on site to shoot the real estate.  Shooting real estate is almost always a grim task.  The video is static and tends to be dull.

Planes were flying overhead constantly, landing at the airport’s three runways.

“Every shot should have an airplane in it,” I suggested to Jon.

“Every shot?”

“Every shot.”

“That’s gonna take awhile,” he said.

Some time ago, Pete Smith and I produced a story about a church in Avondale Estates.  It was a weekday.  The church was closed.  Video-wise, we had real estate.

The church was alongside a MARTA line.  Pete and I decided each shot of the church should have a MARTA train in it, solely to keep our day interesting.  Turned out, the piece looked interesting too.

As we prowled the undeveloped / abandoned property described by Turner, Jon documented it  with an eye skyward. Fortunately, it was a busy afternoon at Hartsfield-Jackson.

The edited story wasn’t about aircraft, but the planes provided a visual thread that the piece badly needed.

In the copy, I didn’t make any reference to the planes until the middle-to-end of the story.  It underplayed the aircraft element, while providing a potential payoff for anybody who was actually watching the story closely.  Funnily enough, nobody at my station made note of it.

But a competitor — part of our vast 7pm viewing audience — sent me a note on the Facebooks, complimenting “the creativity.”

What creativity?  It was about amusing ourselves.

Off the staircase: Rebecca Lindstrom, WXIA

A new local news set excites producers, anchors and news managers.  It may even intrigue the audience, the hoped-for result.  For the last thirty years, set redesigns have tended toward the shiny and the space-age, and rarely produce anything truly eye-opening.

Last week’s debut of WXIA’s new set was the exception.  It has The Staircase.

The Staircase isn’t exactly the centerpiece of the new set.  The set is a 360 degree ice-blue design that absorbs the entirety of the station’s modest studio, encroaching into the newsroom and making all of us random players in the mise-en-scene of the nightly news.

Over my desk, toward Cleveland: The old set.

The centerpiece is a ginormous TV screen that dwarfs the presenter standing in front of it.  It’s framed in neon and replaces a dozen or so HD sets that almost-but-not-quite delivered the illusion of one giant picture.  We call it “the Wiz wall,” which is more about “-ometer” than it is about “gee.”

The Staircase is the oddity.

The construction started in early January.  Denizens of the newsroom were beseeched to be patient amidst the buzzing of saws and the smell of paint.  More than once, I had to temporarily evacuate my desk — located, it turns out, at a choke point for the ingress construction material and the egress of old-set discards.  (The old set was shipped to a high school in Cleveland, Georgia.)

As the new set took shape, a balcony appeared.  The previous set also had a balcony, but no way to get to it.   For this balcony, a staircase appeared.

The staircase was suspect from the get-go.  The steps stuck out of the wall, with no structure undergirding it.  There was no handrail, giving it an edgy, hint-of-danger look.  The same day, a memo went out:  Do not, under any circumstances, climb on the staircase.  It doesn’t support the weight of a human being.

As a reminder, a large sign was placed at its foot alongside an orange traffic cone.  The sign is now a constant off-air presence.

As a design feature, The Staircase provides the illusion of height and depth and symbolizes our goals as a newsroom.  Editorially, we strive for depth.  Ratings-wise, it’s height. It’s a constant battle, into which our armies of newsfolk — at all TV stations — march each day.

As long as they stay off the stairs.