CCJ Tools

From all indications, one of the fastest growing beats in local TV news these days is consumer reporting. It's also one of the broadest. Consumer reporters can be investigators, uncovering scams or scandals. They can be viewer advocates, responding to specific complaints. Or they can focus on product comparisons or other "news you can use."

How can you help your viewers understand the real danger they might face from anthrax or other biological or chemical agents that could be used in a terrorist attack? Reporting on risk is a tricky business, but experts have developed useful guidelines that can shape your coverage. We''ve assembled these tips from a variety of sources.

Gather as many of the staff as possible and watch a newscast or two - looking for one-race stories. As the Tampa Tribune puts it - "it's false and misleading to put African-Americans on the sports page and in the crime log, if general reporting automatically defaults to a backdrop of white voters, white Girl Scouts and white commuters."

"In this society where we evaluate things on the basis of polls, where we determine our revenue in the media on the basis of demographics and mass audiences, we atomize the United States down to a collection of random, almost irrelevant, almost mutually exclusive sets of opinions and motives and agendas. To do so is to basically adopt a strategy that means you will end up covering things that are irrelevant to most people because we are adding them up on the basis of a lot of characteristics that don't relate to how they live and how they depend on each other in their individual communities.

A Handy Ten Minute Checklist

Sometimes TV people are so naive. Can't you just copy a broadcast script straight over to the web?

Uh, no. It's no easy task hiding the (near) illiteracy of TV news
with stuff like verbs and punctuation. For web producers, it's a
nightmare. Ask a reporter to convert her own package script, and you'll
end up with something like:

Said Smith, "the flames we're too hot."
Good grief! It's time to teach reporters how to write for the web, starting with Lost Remote's handy, ten minute checklist:

The rapidly evolving world of multimedia editing requires precision and thinking for a range of different formats. Here are some tips to help you deal with the challenges of editing images, video and sound:

Stories crammed with "official" soundbites often are dull to watch and difficult to understand. But they're fairly quick and easy to produce, so they keep turning up on the news. Beyond being boring, there's another drawback to these stories.

The goal of these accuracy checklists is to remind newsroom journalists, especially on deadline, to verify and re-verify certain information and to help make sure stories, photos and graphics are contextual and work together.

David Yarnold, the executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, developed this accuracy checklist. As they move through the stories, editors have to answer the following questions among others: