In the center of every newsroom across the country lies a large desk, riddled with scanner chatter from the many speakers the lie on it. This is the assignment desk, where the majority of news gathering takes place. The assignment desk can make or break a station. If you have a successful one, where the workers, or assignment editors, are smooth at getting details out of local police stations, are adept in getting all of the details down from a viewers tip, or they catch every important thing that comes across the scanners, your local news station will be top notch at bringing you all of the breaking news of the day.
If the assignment editors are slow, or distracted -even for a moment- your newscast suffers. Take , for example, a recent story where someone jumped from a tall office building in Pittsburgh. While it came across the scanners, it was not an assignment editor who heard it, but rather a reporter sitting next to the assignment desk. Had he not been sitting there to bring that blip to someones attention, the station would have been scooped, and while they would have had the story later, later is the kiss of death in local news.
So the next time you call in a news tip and wonder why the person on the other end of the line sounds like they have a touch of ADD...just understand that that means they are good at running the assignment desk!
Listen to this podcast here!
No comments:
Post a Comment