The guest speaker for the Intro to Journalism class was John McKenna. He is the Executive Producer of CHCH News. McKenna began working in journalism in 1982 as an Editorial Assistant at Global Television in Toronto. He worked his way up to producer at Global. In 1993 he left Global and worked as a Segment Producer for CTV's Canada AM. He stayed there for only a short while before becoming a Producer/Director for the CBC Alberta News in Edmonton and then Producer of the CBC Calgary News. John also taught broadcast journalism at 4 different colleges and was a guest lecturer at 2 Universities. McKenna has is currently in his twelfth year as Executive Producer at CHCH News.
McKenna discussed the process of writing a news story for a television broadcast. He walked the class through how to do a line up for a broadcast. John explained how a line up would differ on local, regional, and national news. Some stories would not be covered depending on the type of broadcast. The stories are not to be taken from other news networks or from online or published articles. The content should be original and researched by us, the prospective journalist. It is important to get interesting and relative visuals. This helps in getting the audiences attention and interest. It is always good to start of with a hard-hitting story, to convince the viewers to continue watching. Having opinions is very crucial to writing for a televised newscast. If you think that a story should be placed in a certain spot, then go with that gut instinct.
The topic of writing a newscast lineup was surprisingly interesting. I had always assumed there was a strict format to be followed when organizing stories, and as shocked when I found out it was just done by personal opinion. The most challenging aspect for writing for news is to be able to pinpoint the most crucial information. A single story should not be longer than 2 minutes. As well, ordering the stories would be a challenge since there is no strict guideline. Something I would have been interested in learning more about is how the news agency picks up on a story so quickly if it is in fact not taken from other agencies. As well it would have been interesting to learn how the viewer demographic is determined, so that the appropriate advertisements, stories, and language is used.
