![]() ![]() Some reporters and photographers are adapting better or more enthusiastically than others, and he tries to take their strengths and motivation into account when making assignments. “We're not necessarily going to say, everyone's going to be a VJ today, but some days a reporter might work with a photographer, other days he might not,” Brown said, and photographers are also being cross trained to report their own stories. But since the fall of 2006, he has been training reporters to operate in VJ mode when it makes sense. Where other local newscasts benefit from having a strong lead-in, such as a popular sitcom or sporting event that viewers have tuned in to watch, the KRON news team is pretty much on its own because of the lack of a network affiliation.Īt KGTV in San Diego [ News Director Gary Brown said he visited with KRON when he was planning his own VJ initiative, but he hasn't chosen to duplicate its wholesale conversion to the VJ model. Where the news channel struggles more is in its day-to-day operations. The station wins strong ratings during those periods of crisis because viewers know KRON will have the most thorough coverage, Pero says. When we have earthquakes, we go wall-to-wall with it – we send our VJs out so they can start picking up different angles.” During the Tahoe fires, we had 8 VJs and two satellite operators working the story, and we were able to have 8 reporters on the air. We had a guy in San Francisco who was driving down the sidewalks, and we had 14 VJs on the story that day. “We've had a couple of examples in the last year or so. “When it comes to breaking news, we can just inundate a scene,” Pero says. In fact, it wanted to make the sale in the first quarter – that is, before the end of March – but so far, no buyer has emerged. But Young Broadcasting, which bought KRON in 2000 and severed the station's affiliation with NBC, announced in January that it was looking for a buyer to take the money-losing station off its hands. They may ask all their reporters and photographers to be able to go into one man band mode in a pinch, yet employ dedicated cameramen for the more important shoots.Īt first glance, the KRON story looks like a cautionary tale because the VJ model was one of the things that was supposed to make the station successful in an format dominated by 9 hours of news coverage. Many more are introducing the concept selectively. The ideal VJ knows how to report, write, shoot, and record good sound, then edit the resulting video on a laptop computer and transmit the story back to the station – typically using a broadband cellular modem rather than a traditional microwave truck.Ī few stations, like KRON 4 in San Francisco, have gone to an all-VJ model.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |