Win Television News Awards
Create A System To Produce A Strong Entry
Winning an award in a television news competition takes more than a great
performance. You need a plan. The judges have to understand the accomplishment.
Some very successful executives shared their insights with us. Major award winners
explained how they did it.
"There are those who will say awards don't mean anything. But, when
you get them, you're proud of them, you talk about them, and people take notice of
them," said J. Spencer Kinard, News Director of KSL-TV, Salt Lake City.
"There's often an attitude that awards are meaningless and what
really counts are the ratings," added Reid Johnson, News Director, WCCO-TV,
Minneapolis.
He believed that kind of attitude doesn't inspire people to be proud of their best work,
and in fact, there are many people in a television news department whose efforts are not
graded by the ratings.
"Ratings don't rise and fall on whether or not a reporter does a good job, or on
whether a photographer has gone the extra measure to shoot a piece well," argued
Johnson.
"It is important that management of a station recognize awards for what they really
are --- a salute to people's best work," he said.
There's another benefit, too. There's a certain amount of credibility that
goes along with winning a big prize.
"Despite the fact the judging is often very subjective, people still look at the
cumulative effect of awards as an additional measure of the quality of the station,"
Kinard added.
Present a polished entry
New Orleans had a big news year in 1985. There were four hurricanes, a
Tulane basketball scandal, the indictment of a governor, and a Russian who jumped off a
freighter.
"We did a very good job covering them, and we felt if the station was
ever going to win the Murrow award, 1985 was the year," said News Director Jim Boyer.
Boyer took his 11 p.m. producer off of show producing in December and put
him in charge of awards presentations for RTNDA, AP, UPI Louisiana, duPont, Peabody, and
others.
Another station's win was reviewed, looking to see whether there were
any lessons to be learned.
"We had won the RTNDA regional award the previous year and WCVB, Boston, won the
national award," said Boyer.
The Boston entry was played at the RTNDA convention.
"It was nothing like our entry was," he said.
Boyer got a copy of WCVB's entry to review what won the award, and he set about producing
a slick, high quality entry for WWL.
The station's 11 p.m. producer and the promotion director got together and
wrote a script explaining what WWL had done for the year. The person who did their news
promotional spots --- an announcer with a good, authoritative voice --- cut the audio
track.
"We edited in the various elements and put together what amounted to a 30-minute
commercial for WWL-TV News and what we had done that year," Boyer said.
Awards are based 50 percent on what you've done and 50 percent on how
you assemble the presentation, said the veteran executive.
"You can't do inferior work and put together a great entry and win an award based on
inferior work. You've got to start with a very good product. But, a lot of very good
products don't win an award because the entry wasn't put together well," he said.
"This entry very accurately and attractively got across the message of exactly what
we did do. Not only did we do a good job in covering the news, but we did an excellent job
in telling the judges how well we covered the news," he added.
They invested about 500 hours on that entry. It paid off.
How Much Production Is Too Much?
"It's becoming more important for the major awards, such as RTNDA,
DuPont, or Peabody," said WCCO's Johnson.
"We are in the communications business and they expect you to do a good job of
communicating your work," he explained.
While KSL's Kinard was concerned about over-producing an award entry and
making it look too produced, he believed production could serve a good purpose.
"There is an economy in the judges' time if you can show them your best work as
efficiently as possible (it is helpful) Sometimes you can fill some gaps by having it
produced, explaining what happened next in the story and then showing what the station did
next," he said.
That way the judges have a sense of what you did and can understand the full trail of the
story.
For that, production is useful and it is appropriate," he added.
Setting Up a System
Staffers were assigned to keep track of the various awards and the
deadlines.
At KSL, it was the Special Projects producer who rounded up the entries.
At WCCO, Assistant Public Affairs Director Nancy Mate functioned as the Awards
Coordinator.
"The criteria for the various awards are often very, very detailed,
and every entry is different. There's no way to mass produce them," said Mate.
There are many awards, you need to have the deadlines and requirements
clearly outlined.
"The thing that's kept us in good shape is trying to systematize as much as
possible," she explained.
When the documentary unit or I-Team produced a good story or a major
piece, she asked them to write a one-page description of it as soon as it aired. That way,
important details were not forgotten and the information could be quickly re-written for
the entry.
WCCO's Johnson felt it was important to take the time to work with your
staff in producing award entries.
"Every newsroom is strapped for time. You feel like you've done the best job you can
in a day if you can get your newscast on the air. But it really doesn't take as much time
as you think," he said.
Mate notified everyone when the award deadlines were coming up and they
would take an evening or a weekend morning to get together and look back on their work.
Johnson said the key was keeping awards in mind throughout the year.
"It's not any secret that most award tapes are stories you did in November and
December, because that's as far back as you can remember. It's helpful to encourage a
producer who produced a very successful newscast to put it aside, or a reporter to put a
particular piece aside," he said.
Elements of A Good Entry
WWL's Boyer said, "I believe the entry is very important. I've judged
contests and the ones that look like they are organized and look like they took some care
in putting the reel together, you've got to figure they have their journalistic act
together too," he said.
Here are some suggestions from these successful, longtime news executives:
| 1. Label the tape, as well as the box. 2. Start at the very
head of the tape and put on color bars.
"That way, whoever pops the tape in knows there is something on it," said Boyer.
3. Then, go to a countdown.
"It was very easy for a judge to cue up our tape and not have to struggle finding our
material or figuring out what point we were trying to make," he said.
4. Use new tape stock.
Boyer said, "We used new tape instead of a tape which had been used 30 or 40 times
and we knew we weren't going to have banding problems or dropout problems. Make your entry
look new. It's a commercial. You're selling your product."
"Your product is what you put on the air, so you package it in the most attractive
way you can. That is pure common sense," he said.
5. Send a cover letter.
"A good, but brief, cover page for each award entry is important to explain why we
are entering this particular award, what the story is and how it applies to this
category," said Kinard.
"As a judge, I pick up a tape and it's got a name, call letters, a title of a story.
I put it in the machine and I may have to spend several minutes figuring out what it's all
about," he added.
Sometimes he found the story didn't even belong in the category.
"Had there been a cover letter there to explain what the story was and why they
thought it belonged in that category, I could have concentrated my time on the tape and
looking at the elements of the story," he said.
6. Don't make the tape too long.
Make your entry sufficiently long, but as short as possible, so that the judge has the
opportunity to see the best of the work and can make a fair judgment.
"You can't cut out all the bad parts and put in the good parts. On the other hand,
don't give me three days of material either, because I'm just not going to get around to
making an honest appraisal of it. I'll run out of time before I can do that," said
Kinard.
7. Don't submit so many entries that you're perceived as overloading the
submissions.
"Our staff judged one press club's awards last year and the tapes were almost in
excess of 100. We were a little irritated the stations didn't pre-screen for us,"
Johnson said.
They saw four or five stories from one station in the same category.
"It's a strain on judges to go through four or five pieces in the same category, and
we wish they would have picked one as their best effort," he said.
8. Involve as many of your people as you can.
Johnson felt local and regional contests were good to enter because they were usually
accompanied by a banquet where the best efforts were shown.
"When it's a local occasion, you can have a lot of your people attend and get that
sense of pride in the station and in their work," he said.
9. If you win a big one, let the community know about it.
Johnson said,"We've taken the position that if we've won a major award, we want the
community to know about it because we want them to know the stations in their community
are doing excellent work. We try to say it in a way that we've all won. The community got
to see the good work, and we got it recognized," he added. |
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